“Quitters never win,” we’re told from the time we’re tots. By the same token, we’re also told that we should avoid “throwing good money after bad.” This seems to be the same sort of contradictory wisdom as “turn the other cheek” vs. “an eye for an eye” and “out of sight, out of mind” vs. “absence makes the heart grow fonder”—not very helpful.
So when it comes to writing, should one plod through a
project to completion no matter how miserably it’s going, or should you
sometimes accept that you’re better off abandoning a work?
The question came up recently in a Goodreads forum, and
while I think it was directed to readers—do you force yourself to finish
reading a book even if you’re not enjoying it?—it’s certainly pertinent for
writers as well.
I would never have started, let alone completed, my novel Beyond Billicombe if I hadn’t abandoned
another book I was writing. At the time my husband and daughter were out of the country for
five weeks, giving me entire evenings and weekends to do nothing but write (and
walk the dog, heat up frozen fish-and-chips dinners from Tesco, and watch James
McAvoy movies on cable). For three weeks I beavered away on a novel, and
while some of the writing was pretty good (if I do say so myself), the story as
a whole wasn’t gelling. I reached the point where I almost dreaded
sitting down to the keyboard (which is where my viewings of James McAvoy movies
came in). By now I had only two solid weeks of solitude left, and here I was
wasting them on a story that was giving me no satisfaction.
As it happens, during this time I was also reading Lowboy by John Wray during my bus rides
to and from work. The story of a schizophrenic teen who escaped from a New
York hospital and the frantic search for him, it combines brilliant, lyrical, impressionistic imagery with a very tight plot. At
its heart it's the story of a quest, and that basic storyline is what makes the book,
despite its sometimes difficult-to-follow marriage of perceptions and reality, such an accessible and gripping read.
And that led me to an epiphany about what was wrong with the
story I’d been working on: There was no quest, no goal that the characters were striving for, no clear linearity.
Granted, many books succeed without that element, but I knew I wasn’t capable
of writing one.
I tried to work a quest into the story, but I couldn’t. And
so, realizing what the work was lacking, and admitting that I couldn’t at that
time provide it, I relegated the chapters I’d written to a folder on my hard
drive.
But while brainstorming for a tidy plotline for that story,
my mind had come up with another fictional quest—or rather, it had returned to a
vague plot I’d conceived years earlier. That plot had involved a different set of characters and took place in Philadelphia in the early 1980s. But a day after calling it quits on
the other novel, I'd transposed the storyline to Devon in the early 2000s, with a new cast of characters, and began work on what became Beyond
Billicombe. I wrote most of the first draft in the two weeks before my
family returned home.
In this case, I was right to stop throwing good writing
after bad. Though that’s not to say I tossed the story and its characters
completely. I’m now thinking of revisiting them.
And this spring I revisited another story that I’d abandoned
a few years ago. Again my reason for quitting was an inability to create a
tight-enough plot for the characters. The protagonist of the story, Steve, is
one of the favorite characters I’ve ever developed; he’s one of the two
narrators of a book I’d written prior to Beyond
Billicombe, and I missed spending time with him. But one morning in April I
woke up at 6 a.m. with Steve’s “quest” precisely detailed in my mind. I
raced to the park (aka my office for writing fiction) to review the chapters I
had previously completed. I salvaged some elements and began integrating them
with the new, focused storyline. I’m hoping to have the manuscript ready to
submit to agents by the beginning of the year.
Maybe this doesn’t count as an example of quitting, but
rather of postponing. Or you could argue that it’s impossible to truly quit a
piece of writing; it already exists, even if not in the form you envisioned.
And whether it remains on your hard drive or in your imagination, it’s still
with you. You may quit the story, but the story hasn’t quit you.
As for whether I ever quit reading books before finishing them, I
do, even though I feel as if I failed the author almost every time. But there
are so many other books out there worthy of being read, not to mention so many
things we’re obliged to do that give us little if any satisfaction, that
forging ahead with a book that’s more work than pleasure seems pointless.
Life’s too short, and the fact that I can’t think of a contradictory maxim for
that piece of wisdom suggests it’s an axiom worth following.
