How to Know When to Give Up

 

Can't believe it's already time! But the Coastal Magic Convention is only a few weeks away and January 15 is the last day to register. I love this convention and there's going to be tons of great authors, bloggers and readers there - so if you can wrangle it, you should totally join us. Great panels, terrific interactions and it's right on the beach. SO fun!

So, this week's topic is: It's dead, Jim - how to know when a project isn't working vs when its fixable.

I want to tell you a couple of stories.

Back in the mists of time, when I was a baby aspiring writer who focused mainly on creative nonfiction, I helped organize this annual writers' retreat. We brought in some great speakers and one year I drove to Denver International Airport to pick up a guy who was the Editor in Chief of a prominent creative nonfiction literary journal. On the two-hour drive up to Wyoming, we talked a lot about writing, publishing, the industry in general and my fledgling career in particular.

(BTW, this is a great way for newbie writers to begin building industry contacts. Volunteering to pick up or escort visiting agents, editors and established writers gives you time to have longer, more intensive conversations.)

At any rate, one thing this guy said to me was that he felt strongly that some aspiring writers should just give up. It was his opinion that not everyone possessed the native talent to be a writer. He said he struggled as an editor not to simply tell some writers submitting to the magazine that they should give up already and go do something else.

Of course, I obsessed over this, wondering if *I* was one of those people. He'd rejected many of my essays, after all.

The second story happened many years later, after my first book of creative nonfiction was published by a university press. I'd switched to fiction and had written the book that became ROGUE'S PAWN. I shopped that one for a *long* time. Years. I had two friends who were in the same place, shopping their first novels in the genre. One of them hit it - won a contest, got an agent and a three-book deal. The other two of us kept slogging along. One day, the other unpublished gal asked me how long I was giving myself. At first I didn't know what she meant. "I'm giving myself a year," she clarified, "then I'm giving up."

I told her I had no deadline, that I'd keep trying until I succeeded. That response totally mystified her. I think she regarded me as quite foolish.

You know what? She gave up on being a writer. ROGUE'S PAWN ended up being the first of the Covenant of Thorns trilogy and I have in the neighborhood of twenty published fiction works out there.

I realize this is all somewhat sideways of the question - which is when to give up on a project. A lot of authors I know have "under-the-bed" books that they say will never see the light of day.They call them learning books and are happy to let them go.

This is just not who I am. "Stubborn" is one of my defining characteristics, and yes, more than one person has cited it as a character flaw. Including my PhD adviser. He also told me he didn't think I could make it as a writer, when I said I wanted to be a writer instead of a research scientist.

So, all of this is byway of saying that this division doesn't exist in my world. Nora Roberts rather famously says she can fix anything but a blank page. I agree.

Never give up. Never surrender.

The Horrors of the Trunked Novels

I like to remind people that getting to the point where I am, with two novels coming out next year with a major publisher, was a journey.  Before I even wrote the first draft of Thorn of Dentonhill, I wrote two other novels.  Two novels which should never see the light of day.

So let's talk about them.

The Fifty Year War was a very bad attempt to emulate something akin to Isaac Asimov's Foundation, where the key events of a multi-generational war is told through a series of novelette-length vignettes.  Because nine 10k-ish novelettes equals one novel, right?

Except not so much.  Let alone that there isn't so much a "plot" as there is "stuff that happens".  There isn't anything for readers to hook into.  The closest to a "main" character is an officer named Benton who has a key role in three or four of the sections, and then a minor cameo later.  The only other bit of recurring involves the various generations of a soldier family who keep getting killed in key battles.  That was my way of highlighting the toll on the 'average' man in this war: killing off pikemen named Weaver.

When it comes down to it, Fifty Year War is essentially a chunk of Druth history that I had already worked out, setting the stage for the "real" time I wanted to write in.  So in a lot of ways, it comes off as a prequel to something that didn't exist, filled with the obvious piece-setting that prequels have, but making zero sense to anyone but myself.

So I would fix those mistakes with Crown of Druthal.  There I had a set cast of characters, so the readers would have main people to grab onto.  And I would have them... do... plot-like things?

Yeah, not quite.

First problem with Crown comes down to the same challenge a lot of fantasy-worldbuilders face: I've made this whole world, and now I'm going to show it ALL TO YOU.  ALL OF IT.  It was literally a travelogue with absolutely no McGuffin to chase from country to country.  The characters were the crew of a diplomatic ship more or less assigned to go on a world tour.  They were to go to each country so I could show you each country.  I totally had a whole multi-book series planned, and by "planned" that meant I knew which countries they would go to.  Which was a huge part of the problem, especially with Crown, the book I actually wrote.  I had to jam a series of events from "stuff that happens in country A" and "stuff that happens in country B" into something that looked like a plot for a single book.  But since I was far more interested in just touring both countries, the plot takes a good long while to get going.

The other problem is the story is loaded with characters who are essentially there to be set decoration.  I had a ship full of people, with different specialties and jobs, and most of them served absolutely no purpose in the story.  I did some logistical contortions to give most of them a toehold in the climax-- so a combination of telepathy, magic and celestial navigation is used to determine where my main character was being held captive, so then the guys with swords could mount a rescue.

There are bits in Crown that I'm fond of, but it's mired in long sections where characters are more or less hanging out, taking at least half the book before the plot proper actually gets going.  And the plot itself?  Kind of a long way to drive to get a gallon of milk.

But in the process of writing these two trunked novels, I learned plenty about how to write a novel, how to structure character arcs and plots.  So: they're bad, they'll stay in the archives for all time, but they were vital to the process of eventually writing Thorn of Dentonhill and A Murder of Mages. 

The Travesty of a Romance Novel

The first big ass, horribly written, should never have gone on submission, I'm so sorry agents novel was... a paranormal romance with roughly thirteen points of view.  Any shifter race one could imagine made an appearance. The protagonists didn't meet until chapter eight. When they finally had a chapter or two alone how they ended up there was highly improbable (which, for paranormal takes some doing).  There might maybe have been a scene or two that danced too close to the lines of bestiality (ew). Oh, and the word count? 150k.

I know. I know. I know.

I'm not proud.

The root concept I still like. The protagonists I still like. Heck, even a few of the shenanigans scenes are redeemable. The story... erm... When "It's too complicated" was the nicest bit of feedback CPs could muster, it finally penetrated my thick skull that it was time to bury that puppy and never allow it to be bazombified again.

Contrary to popular perception, a good romance is pretty freakin' hard to write.

Pretty much every romance novel I've ever penned (all of ten or so) languishes in the dark ether of a digital file cabinet backed up to a thumb drive hanging from a lanyard in my office. Will any part(s) of them ever be resurrected?  Ehhhhmmmm, mebbe.

Dr. Frankenstein's Novel - Why I Have No Buried Books

Last week, just as the sun set and a rainstorm passed through, a perfect rainbow formed to the east of our house. I stood barefoot on our front porch and took this with the panorama function on my phone. It makes it clear how the rainbow is the rim of a big lens, focusing light. So unearthly, too. Perfect for our blog of assorted spec fic types.

This week's topic in the Bordello is The Book You Buried: The Terrifying Tale of Your Horribly Written Novel.

You have to give KAK props for her Halloween slant.

So, you all know the old saw this references. How all writers have a book or ten or twenty "under the bed" lurking like the formless monsters of our youths, muttering darkly to themselves and destined never to see the light of day.

Except me.

I don't really have a book that's buried and I've been thinking about why that is. I think some of it has to do with this story.

Way back, Oh Best Beloved, when I was first struck with the awesome, glitteringly huge, transporting and terrifying dream of becoming a writer, I entered a writing contest. As you do. Now, I have never been one to put in my bio that I've "been writing stories since I first picked up a crayon." I wrote stories as a kid, yes. I tend to think all kids do. I also drew pictures and made embroidered silk saddle blankets for my model horses. Which says a lot about childhood hobbies and future occupations right there, I think. I won a poetry contest when I was 12 and contributed angsty anonymous poems to the high school literary magazine. My AP English teacher taught me I didn't know how to write my senior year and I became much better at it but, though I got a 5 on the exam - a high score that let me test out of Freshman Comp in colleg e and put me in a special lit course - it never really occurred to me to be a writer. I was going to be doctor, then a scientist.

Only later, in my mid-twenties and while I was buried in getting my PhD in Neurophysiology, did I have the epiphany that being a writer would be my perfect life. I cut bait on the PhD, took my Masters, got a job as an editor/writer with a petroleum research group and starting playing with what the hell I wanted to write. One morning in my office, NPR told me over the airwaves about a contest sponsored by the Wyoming Arts Council. There were two and I don't recall which this was. They had a Fellowship for Literature that rotated each year between Fiction, Nonfiction and Poetry, and the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award for an outstanding woman writer in any genre.

You must understand that, not only did I not have a book written at this point, I barely had a concept. However - and this is an enormous caveat - I had fragments and a vague idea along with this shiny newly formed ambition. Though I should have been reasonably mature at that point, especially carrying the battle scars of grad school with a bipolar Hungarian for an adviser, my enthusiasm and hopeful faith in myself so exceeded the strictures of reality that I submitted a page and a half to this contest.

I know.

Do I need mention they asked for 25 pages? Yeah.

You're all wincing for me, I hope. I'm so embarrassed for myself that it took me YEARS to tell anyone this story.

What was I thinking? That's the worst part. I had this idea, this utter hubris, that my page and a half was SO FUCKING BRILLIANT that any judge would see in one glance that my talent was one to be nurtured. And yes, I still have that page and a half from so long ago. Needless to say, brilliant it ain't.

But I learned. I learned to write more and longer. To stick with and refine an idea. I went on in later years to win both the Fellowship and the Doubleday award, along with a Fellowship to the Ucross Foundation and other, really wonderful nods that told me, yes, mine was a talent they believed should be nurtured. Once I'd applied enough discipline to actually exercise it.

Thus, one point of this whole story is that, when newbie writers ask for advice and I say that you have to get disciplined, write every day, write a lot and finish the damn book, I know whereof I speak. I know how damn hard that simple advice is to take and implement. It's also the only way it happens. No one wins awards with a page and a half, brilliant or not.

I feel like I should note at this point, the debt I owe to the Wyoming Arts Council. Those contests did exactly what they were designed to do in encouraging aspiring writers. Not by awarding me accolades in recognition of my incipient, as-yet-unrecognized, as-yet-nonexistent ability, but by denying me and making me understand I had to work for it.

The other point, the one that applies to the topic at hand, is that I have no under-the-bed books because I took those early fragments and constantly cannibalized, reworked, recast and revised until I had a book that deserved to see the light of day. That page and a half? Much transformed and revised - perhaps unrecognizably so - is one of the core elements of my Covenant of Thorns trilogy.

Perhaps this makes me more of a Dr. Frankenstein, stitching together and reanimating what seems to be dead or dying. I have no buried novels because I tore them apart before they were done. I do have a lot of fragments in cold storage, waiting for that bolt of lightning and a bit of attention to be brought back to life.