Most creative people have a folder of abandoned projects. That’s not failure. That’s research.

Abandoned work is where you found out things that could not be found out any other way. Each stopped project taught you that an approach does not hold, that a form is harder than it looks, that an idea needed a skill you were still missing. None of that is retrievable from a book. The folder is not a graveyard, it is a record of experiments.

Open the folder and read the list rather than avoiding it. For three of them, write one line on what you learned before you stopped. You will usually find two were abandoned for good reasons and one is now within reach.