Letting Go When the Book isn’t Working
By Barbara O'Neal | May 24, 2017 |
In a corner of my garden, I keep a compost bin. Next to it is a bunch of things I might reuse at some point—stakes for tall plants, a few cinderblocks, pots of various sizes, some tools I don’t use all the time. It’s a workaday little spot, not glamorous but useful.
Much like a certain corner of my imagination, where I store intriguing facts and that documentary about child hunger, and all the episodes of a BBC show I like and the names of all the Winsor and Newton watercolors and anything else I might need. It’s messy, but it’s invisible. No one knows it’s there but me.
Here’s the thing. I just had to throw a solid chunk of a novel into that compost heap. It was not easy. For two years, I’ve been working on this thing. It was something I loved in about seven incarnations, and loved the last one quite a lot when I sent it to my agent, hoping she’d like it.
She wanted to.
She did not.
I finally had to admit that as much as I loved one of the characters, a character as vivid to me as anyone in my own family, the story was just not going to jell. Maybe ever. It was time to let it go.
I do not do this, just toss things aside. I am a commercial fiction writer with dozens and dozens of books under my belt and I can make anything work. I understand that my readers want women they can root for and perhaps aspire to be. They want escape from their daily life and a chance to be someone else for a day or a week. They want a book they can safely read on an airplane, or at the bedside of a dying loved one, or on the beach. If I weave a little life in there, and make some observations on the nature of being a woman in this modern world, that’s good, too.
I know how to do this. I’m not being arrogant, just factual. The pages contained good solid stuff about friendship and organic farming and community…all the things.
And yet…..after 6 or 7 or 10 rewrites of the first 200 pages, trying to find the story over two solid years, I finally had to admit that my agent was right. The book was fatally flawed in some way I couldn’t locate. My instincts, usually very reliable, were just wrong.
My agent broke the news that she didn’t like it while I was attending the Writer Unboxed conference, where we were also undergoing the agony of the elections. I was very depressed about all of it—not in a clinical kind of way, but in a very specific, situational way. Dear agent offered to send said novel on to an editor, and I was about to agree…maybe a second opinion?
I woke up the next morning (this was the day after the election) and emailed her urgently, telling her not to send it. I had a new idea. One sentence, that was all I had, but she and I both knew it had heft. I told her I’d have something for her after the new year, and immediately started working.
During those dark days when it seemed like Darth Vader was taking over the earth, I spent much of my time escaping into a world where I didn’t have to mention politics, where a mystery needed to be solved and a house had to be taken care of and a woman has had her life upended. By February, I had a substantial proposal ready to send my agent, and while I was in New Zealand, she sold it to Lake Union. I am happily spending my days writing it. (Actually, more than happily. I love this book with a craziness I haven’t felt for quite awhile. It must have been lurking, backstage somewhere, waiting for me to get over my infatuation with the other one.)
Such a big switch! How could I have been so wrong about that other idea? Even in one sentence, I knew I had a better idea on the new book. How could I have missed how off the other one was?
If I’m honest with myself, I was aware that the book was not working, that parts of it were beautiful and strong (that one character) and the rest was either banal or unpleasant. I had the idea that it would be interesting to write about a character who always made the wrong choice, but that particular character never did become likable in any way. Not all characters have to be likable, but in the books I write, the protaganists need to be relatable on some level. This character never was. She took seven or eight incarnations, and never did find her footing.
And I knew it. I knew it every time. I knew it in the first incarnation, and the second. All the way to the last one.
If I’d been willing to pay attention, I would have noticed that it was taking an preternaturally long time to write (for me). I didn’t spring out of bed and rush to the computer to discover what was happening. I labored over outlines and storyboards and sound tracks, all of which are necessary for me in the process, but in this instance, I was using them to procrastinate, hoping to find that magic, living spark to bring it all to life.
It could have happened, I suppose, if I’d been willing to stick with it, keep changing, juggling, whatever.
Except that that’s not how I work. Ever. A book comes to me pretty much whole and my job is to draw it over into this realm as clearly and cleanly as possible. When I fished on the other side for the failed book, I kept pulling over discarded boots and bottles.
If my gut knew the book was a mess, why did I keep going? I was just being…stubborn, maybe? I’d spent all that time, after all, trying to find the center of a story that was stillborn. If I gave up, I’d have wasted all that time.
A foolish economy.
But here is something else—sometimes, as artists, as creative beings, we fail. It’s hard to face that. We really want something to work, and it just doesn’t. From a commercial fiction point of view, that’s unfortunate, but from an artistic one, it’s just how things roll. It doesn’t mean I’m a lousy writer. It doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m doing. It just means that this time, with this project, I couldn’t find the story.
The failed book is now on the compost heap of my imagination, where the girls in the basement go for inspiration and mulch. I have a feeling the character I love will show up elsewhere, probably some other re-visioned bits, too.
In the meantime, the new book is very much a living, breathing entity. It started breathing on its own the very first day, and has only grown more vigorous these past months. I’m about to roll over into full-on, lost-in-the-book mode, where I wish to do nothing but write, and I’ve cleared my summer schedule to do just that.
Learning to let go of a project is a very difficult part of the writing life. Have you had to face the fact that a book wasn’t working? How did you know?
[coffee]
Barbara O’Neal is the author of more than a dozen award-winning, bestselling novels, including the runaway bestseller, When We Believed in Mermaids, which has been published in more than 20 countries and spent many months on the Amazon Charts, as well as the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Washington Post bestseller lists. Barbara lives on the beach in rugged Oregon with her husband, a British endurance athlete who vows he’ll never lose his accent and their zoo of cats and dogs. You can find more information on her newsletter and where to find her on social media at barbaraoneal.com.
Thank You for your post Barbara.
I worked on a story for over two years. I loved the characters, the setting, the conflicts, the world-building, and I thought the plot was fast paced and enjoyable.
The issue was that I had written a story that had no chance of surprising a reader. The choices my main character made were too predictable and that sucked all the tension out of the story.
I shelved the story and wrote a new one that I’m proud of.
It’s great that you know where you went wrong with the book you set aside. That shows a lot of growth as a writer . Glad you found a new book you are proud of. Onward!
Barbara, what you wrote about is so similar to my own experience with writing the past few months. In February and March, I received beta-feedback on a manuscript I’d been working on for 4+ years (and in 3 drafts) – a story that I loved with all my heart – and realized it still had several issues. Some would be fairly easy fixes… but others would altogether require an extensive reworking of the plot. The big picture of what needed to be done overwhelmed to the point that I could no see how I could fix the story in Draft #4 to make it work.
So I’ve let that story go, like you did with yours, and working on something new. It’s been hard, because part of me feels as though I’ve wasted my time with the failed book, and I’m still having echoes of low confidence in the meantime. But at the same time, the new story has been therapeutic on creative and personal levels, and I wonder if sharing it after Draft #1 with one or two readers might help me recognize major flaws much sooner.
Thank you for writing this. :)
You haven’t wasted time, of course. You’ve been learning all sorts of things, even if you can’t exactly pinpoint what they are. We get better by writing, and it sounds as if you learned a lot and are incorporating those things in the new book. That’s a lot!
Do take care on showing early drafts only to people you trust to understand your voice and direction. It can be helpful to hear what might be working and not working, but sometimes the wrong criticism so early can damage the emerging vision.
It’s a relief to hear this from an author with your experience. If it can happen to you, then there’s no shame in it for any of us.
I have had to shelve pet projects too. I prefer to think that I’m just not ready. The project needs or lacks something that I haven’t yet figured out.
But what is wrong with that? A carpenter does not have the solution to every woodworking problem. Brain surgeons don’t always have the answers. They are smart enough not to attempt that of which they are not confident.
“I need to find out more about that,” is fine. No one thinks less of us when we say that. A step away from a project creates space. It may fill quickly or take years. No harm.
The good thing is that there is an endless supply of new story ideas. Thanks, Barbara.
I love that approach. Yes, I’m just setting this project aside for now. Maybe I need some other technique or bit of information or…something…and it will all click into place.
Thanks, Benjamin.
Hi Barbara. The hard struggle you experienced in coming to finally accept that your novel was not meant to be has the ring of truth. It convinces me that I’m right in thinking most writers are hoarders. Not of things but of experiences, images, formed and half-formed lives fighting to survive. These things are ours, and we don’t want to give them up. It’s one thing to toss off a catch phrase like “kill your darlings,” quite another to do it when those darlings have struggled to live for 200 pages.
In my view, the only reliable solution is not to compost a project, but sequester it. Lock it away for–ideally–years. That way, when or if I come back to it, the thing will no longer be my darling, but an object I can examine dispassionately. This has happened with me several times.
But I can get away with this because novel-writing for me is an avocation, not a vocation. As a pro, you don’t have this time-insensitive luxury. You must get on with it, and so you have. Thanks for a clear, engaging look at a near-universal challenge facing writers.
Love that image of writers as hoarders! So true. And yes, the idea of a sequester is a more appealing one. That one character….
Barbara, your post sounds familiar, yes, I’ve had several stories that just didn’t really grow up and I kept pushing only to give up on them in great disappointment. I usually put these stories still in childhood “to bed” for a while (like years) and go back to rediscover them and play around with rewrites as a test. Just writing for-the- fun-of-it approach. This happened twice and both stories went on to publication. I still have some stories sleeping.
This is an important message, Barbara: sometimes we fail. The best athletes do. The best actors and directors do. The best surgeons do. So why not writers?
Because we devote so much time and energy to a single work, it’s hard as hell to let go. But sometimes that’s the right thing to do. Thanks for reinforcing that.
And wow, now I can’t wait to read the new book you’re writing!
I have to admit I’m madly in love with this book, Keith. I love writing it every day.
Thank you, Barbara. I needed that. And now I’m going to devolve into an unabashed fangirl. (Forgive me, Writer Unboxed community.) I read WU posts in my email, where the author’s name appears not at the top, but at the bottom. Every time one of your posts appears–every time–I read it thinking, “Yes! YES! Who is this writing?” So, thank you not only for your generosity, but also for making me fall a little more in love with the process every time you write.
How lovely, Sally! Thank you. :)
Such wise insight, Barbara. A children’s book author I greatly admire once said, “I am every bit a writer for the stories that worked — and for the stories that didn’t work.”
It makes me think of
a wonderful craft book with a similar message:
Art & Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orland.
Thanks for sharing this. I am in a start-over novel mode and your post fuels me on….
Barbara, I’m curious: what do you think would have happened had your agent said “yes”? Could that in itself propelled you to have invested what the book needed to bring it to full life? You did say you loved it in several incarnations—could it have flourished in the “accepted agent incarnation” and become one of your fully developed works?
I’m asking both to know how you interpret that possibility, and for the personal reason of having a book of my own that has been rejected many times by agents, but I still sense its coursing life.
Thanks for your consistently good stuff here!
That’s a great question. In this pursuit, as with many others, we have to decide who to trust, and because my agent is so very good at story–understanding it, loving it, even helping to shape it–I have chosen to trust her. If she’d said she loved it, I would have believed I’d found the answer to the problems, and probably been able to work on it some more. But she would also have had suggestions, ways to make the work better, and that alone might have illuminated the flaws.
In this case, I was fairly certain she wouldn’t love it.
As for the book you still feel is coursing with life, trust that gut instinct. Without that single person in your corner to trust implicitly, you have to trust yourself and keep going until you find your champion.
It’s a great post. Do you feel as if the election itself had anything to do with the way the story wouldn’t work? I know I was able to write through those particularly awful months–it was for once the escape our detractors say it is–but questioned nearly every word of what I wrote. My own compost heap got a lot of fuel simply because I figured if I waffled over it that much, it had to suck. :-)
Barbara, I spent two years writing revising, tweaking, rewriting, etc. my first novel attempt. I knew it was time to add it to the compost when I got a lot of really nice rejections from agents who liked my writing but just didn’t connect with the protagonist. I shelved it in 2012 or 2013 and started working on the next thing. That next thing is the manuscript that got me my agent in 2015. If I hadn’t moved on, I could have endlessly tinkered with the first one and not gotten anywhere with it.
The fun part is that yes, it did kind of decompose into something I could use later. My current WIP (my fourth novel MS) is set in #1’s setting–same part of the country, same lake, same cabin. It has some of the same characters. The part of the backstory of #1 informs the backstory of #4. But the protagonist is different and the story itself is different. There are new characters and problems and motivations and setbacks. And it touches on themes and events that are really close to the bone for me, whereas attempt #1 was just me making stuff up as it came into my head, but that never really touched my heart.
The compost heap works!
Hi, Barbara:
I’m actually in something of a similar place as I begin a new book. I have no clue if it’s going to take off, I’m worried and uncertain, and yet something about it beguiles me. It’s utterly unlike what I’ve tried before, and that alone could spell disaster — who will possibly want to read this thing? Will my own belief and in it be enough? I have no idea. I’m going to have to keep writing for a while to see. I’ve had to chuck an entire novel aside before, and I’m sure I can do it again.
Thanks for the sage advice. And congratulations on the new novel.
The last time that I kick-started my writing, it was by revisiting all the ideas I’d started working on but eventually abandoned 20+ years earlier. Sometimes we try too soon.
As for the other ideas I abandoned 20+ years ago but don’t remember, they deserve to remain abandoned. That happens too. But I bet writing them was good practice.
Thank you so much, Barbara! I let go of a book with four years of work on it….it was a historical novel and I just could not love the main character for some of the choices she made nor could I write them out or write around them. Sadly it was a book that would have found a publisher without difficulty if I had been able to do it…but I could not. Also into a new one which is just rushing along on the page. Joy!