What to do when your story is falling apart

Don’t give up and take that L too soon. A lot of the time your story is salvageable if you go about it the right way.

Pretty early on after I became an editor, I was working with a freelancer on a story about disintegrating familial relationships. We had a general thesis and outline, a plan of action, and a pretty direct route forward. We were both pumped about it!

A few weeks later the freelancer emailed me: sources were disappearing, the background reporting wasn’t al…