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Knowing When to Walk Away

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Please welcome Marisa de los Santos, New York Times bestselling author of four novels for adults, including (most recently) The Precious One, Love Walked In and Belong to Me; and one for middle grade readers, Saving Lucas Biggs, which she co-wrote with her husband, David Teague. She lives in Wilmington, Delaware, with David, their children, Charles and Annabel, and their Yorkies, Huxley and Finn. Connect with Marisa on Facebook and on Twitter.

I’d never been a person to walk away from a commitment, and every novel I’d ever started writing, I’d finished and delivered when it was due. But eighty pages into my fourth novel, I walked away and tried something completely different. I’m not a risk-taker, and this was a huge risk and hard, wrenchingly hard, but it was exactly what I needed to do.

Knowing When to Walk Away

About eighty pages into writing my fourth novel The Precious One, I found myself in a state I’d never been in before. I wasn’t blocked, if being blocked is the complete inability to write. At eighty pages, I had faith my story, and I was already in the mode of experiencing my characters as real people. Not only did I have the two, very different narrative voices down cold, but also I loved my protagonists, Taisy and Willow.

And I could write, eking out a few paragraphs a day. The problem was that I didn’t want to. I confess that I have always enjoyed the act of writing. Sometimes, of course, I’ve hated it, but on a pretty regular basis, it makes me happy, and there are occasional whole stretches of time when it is sheer exhilaration. And even on the most desperate days, it has always felt like home.

Except that eighty pages into The Precious One, it stopped being home. I was slogging, dragging out and slapping down one sentence, then another. When I didn’t feel abject fear of the process, an icy dread, I felt numb. I had lost my joy.

About this time, my husband David Teague, a picture book author, and I started talking casually about what it might be like to write a book together. It was all a series of what-ifs: what if we wrote a book together; what if our narrators were thirteen years old; what if the book were for readers who were around our kids’ ages; what if we put history in it, and time travel, and Quakers, and a cool grandpa . . .. We began to text each other ideas at odd hours and to come tearing into the house blurting out plot twists or historical tidbits we’d dug up. We began to think in the voices of our characters. But it was all a game. How could we write it when I had another book to write, one under contract and with a deadline? We looked at each other, told each other we could not do it, it made no sense, the book would have to wait for another time, another year.

And then I walked away from The Precious One.

PreciousOneCoverDavid and I got a contract (with a headspinningly quick turnaround time) for a middle grade book called Saving Lucas Biggs, and we threw ourselves into it. The first thing we did was create an outline, a chapter-by-chapter, exquisitely detailed one. I’d never written an outline for a book before, had actually been adamantly anti-outline, but I’d also never written a novel with another person before. This was a complicated time-travel mystery and we were telling it in alternating chapters, with two separate narrators. We could not possibly fly by the seat of our pants and expect the story to hold together.

When we actually started to write, the surprise was this: I loved writing with an outline. With my other three books, before I wrote the first word, I always knew my characters very, very well, but knew only a tiny handful of facts about the plot. Mostly, I listened hard to my story and my characters, took my cues from them, learned my story as I went. On good days, this was exciting; on bad ones, it was scary, like I was starting every day standing on the cliff of my last sentence, with one foot dangling over the abyss.

[pullquote]But now the outline was a godsend. I suspect it was because the rest of my life, with my kids now in middle school and high school, had become more complicated. I don’t know. All I know is that I loved having my day’s work spelled out for me. I loved standing on the edge of the cliff with a bridge in front of me instead of nothingness. [/pullquote]But now the outline was a godsend. I suspect it was because the rest of my life, with my kids now in middle school and high school, had become more complicated. I don’t know. All I know is that I loved having my day’s work spelled out for me. I loved standing on the edge of the cliff with a bridge in front of me instead of nothingness. Of course, I still had to listen to my characters, still had to let the plot grow organically. David and I made major changes to our outline as we went along, but there was something there to change. I loved it, all of it. I hadn’t had so much fun writing a book since I wrote my first novel, back when everything was new.

When we were finished, I returned to The Precious One. It was mid-summer, and I had to deliver on December first, which meant I had to write faster than I’d ever written in my life. The first thing I did was outline the rest of the book. And then I wrote like a woman on fire. Full-tilt, full-body, living-and-breathing immersion. I wrote almost four hundred pages in four months. In my entire writing life, I’d never been more exhausted or more grateful. I had risked a lot in walking away. Sometimes, I still can’t believe I did it. But while I was gone, I learned vital new things about myself as writer and remembered why I loved being one. I’d walked away, but I ran back, and every day that I sat down at my desk was a homecoming.

Have you ever walked away? What did you learn from the experience? Do you use outlines?

 

 

About Marisa de los Santos

A New York Times bestselling author and award-winning poet with a PhD in literature and creative writing, Marisa de los Santos lives in Wilmington, Delaware, with her family.

Comments

  1. Ah, it’s a good day when one of my favorite authors appears on WU! So nice to see you here, Marisa!

    As you know, I have *loved* your novels, starting some years ago when I picked up Love Walked In, after judging it (favorably) for its cover.

    In fact, only last night, someone talked about “The Origin of THE Species” and I thought, “There’s no ‘THE’ before species”–something I’ve always remembered your terrific character Dev saying. :)

    I’m an outliner, and I agree that having some direction each day can be a comfort. I’m still relatively new at this, so haven’t had a lot of opportunities to walk away from a ms. But, I did write a book very quickly two summers ago–so quickly it made me suspicious. When I reread it, I realized why it had come so fast: it was a 250-page cliche. I then walked away from it, deciding it wasn’t really worth revising. I loved one of the characters and her daughter, though, so have recently decided to extract them from the rest of the mess and give them a home in my WIP. So, what I learned was that sometimes projects should be abandoned, but maybe not until after you sift through to see if some parts of them can be dusted off and used in another project.

    Again, happy to see you here today!

    • Julie–I’m so honored to be here. I’ve been a fan of Writer Unboxed for forever. I love that you found something you could use from your scrapped book–but how hard it must’ve been to set aside something you’d worked on. 200 pages is a lot of pages! xoxoMarisa

  2. Marisa–
    I think it may be that the essence of your very readable post can be summarized like this: a natural-born outliner dressed in pantser’s you-know-what for three books finally listens to her inner self as she’s struggling with her fourth novel. Stop already with The Precious One, the inner self says. Here, I’ll help you, by making it harder and harder for you to write–and go talk to your husband. With his help, you’ll be able to come out of the pantser closet, slip into something more comfortable for outliners, and take it from there. Then go back to TPO.
    Which is my way of congratulating you on listening to and heeding the Voice Within. Great post, and thank you.

  3. I haven’t walked away before. I have taken short breaks to work on fun short stories. My mind had a chance to turn over ideas for my novel while I practiced new skills. I’m about four months from publishing my debut contemporary romance novel. I started out with a basic idea, and a list of characters. I didn’t outline. By the time this book is finished, it will have undergone five major revisions to the plot! Because of that, it’s taken a lot longer to finish than I imagined. I’ve learned a lot through the process of writing this book. I can’t wait to plan, outline, and write book two.

    Congrats on finishing two books in one year. It sounds like a dream that I hope one day I can achieve. Good luck with your next project.

  4. It’s a wonderful post, Marisa, and congrats on the success of both projects. As Barry rightfully points out, it’s all about heeding that inner voice, or as some call it, trusting your gut.

    I’ve recently walked away, so this is heartening. I left off on a project I still believe in (a completed epic fantasy trilogy). It needs yet another rewrite, but once I faced the fact that it truly needed more work, I just couldn’t find the heart for the undertaking. While waiting for feedback on it, I’d started on another project, and I stuck with that manuscript. It was wonderfully freeing. And I think, in part, I’d been able to tell myself I could just “play” with what I’d been learning on the “side-project.” It felt like there wasn’t so much at stake. And yet, now that the so-called side-project is out to betas, I better understand that I’m fully committed to it, as well. But a bit of temporary self-delusion never hurts, right?

    The best part of it all is that it’s led me back to my joy. I know that when the time comes, I can tackle the trilogy with the same ardor, plus the experience gained since. Thanks for showing me that this is more than simple self-delusion. It’s staying true to your gut. An honest-to-goodness strategy. Best wishes for the new novel!

  5. “I’d walked away, but I ran back…”

    Thankfully you did, because you penned (well, typed) one of my favorite books so far this year in The Precious One.

    I’ve recently finished a 10k synopsis of what I hope will become my third book. As someone who’d previously only used rough scenes (and a clear end) to guide a draft, this is a huge change, but I’ve found it…invigorating. Despite what I feared would happen, the characters have been able to come live and even surprise me through this synopsis. I’m more excited about writing than I’ve been in years.

    My long-winded way of saying that I think it’s good to mix things up–and maybe each book has a unique best path in.

    Congratulations on The Precious One and Saving Lucas Biggs, Marisa, and thanks for being with us today!

  6. Great post. I have walked away from many things never to return (so far). And I have walked away from the first thing I actually finished after querying with a little interest but no lightning bolt moments for any of the agents. I chalked it up to a learning experience, and so it was. But in the intervening couple of years, as I’ve written short stories and two other novel manuscripts, I’ve had fairly regular epiphanies about that first novel manuscript, and now I know I will go back and rewrite it, keeping the setting and some of the characters, but changing the plot entirely and adding new characters. And now I’m excited about it again.

  7. Besides the 6 books sitting in my “never to see the light of day” folder, I recently walked away from a draft that I just didn’t feel was working. This is unusual for me now, having embraced outlining a few years ago. And this is the third book of my YA series, so it shouldn’t have been so troublesome. But it was. And I walked. After two months of working on other projects, I came back to it, stripped it of everything but the protagonist, and started over. I’m happy to say that I’m thrilled with the new outline and can’t wait to begin drafting (I do try to use extreme disipline and get that outline done first, it saves me oh so much pain further down the line).

    While I’m a firm believe in write-publish-repeat, it does pay to take a step back and allow the brain to reset, especially after an insane writing binge like I had last year.

    Thanks for posting!

  8. I loved this post!!! Everything about it … Congratulations on BOTH Lucas and Precious!!!! Yes, I have also walked away from projects and returned and sometimes the time away was exactly what I needed to complete them. And sometimes, I dive into something else. Nothing’s ever lost though … there’s a time and a season for everything.

  9. Thank you for writing this post. Even reading that you made the decision to walk away made me nervous. Like you, I’m a committed finisher. Also, like you, I made the very difficult choice this past autumn to walk away from a novel. I chose not to go back at all. It was hard to contemplate – it sounded too much like fear. But once I did it, it was one of the healthiest things I’ve ever done. My creativity was unleashed.
    Best wishes with The Precious One!

  10. Great post! And like the others, I’d like to express my congrats on your dual accomplishments. Way to go, Marisa!

    How timely a post as well. In just the past week I have set aside (perhaps for good) a manuscript I conceived with great enthusiasm some months ago. It simply wasn’t working, no matter how I tried. My heart wasn’t in it, or wouldn’t stay within it.

    Though I kept telling myself it was everything a story should have – close to my heart, issues I want to explore, characters I could feel in my bones (at times anyhow) – I kept resisting on some level. I finally concluded that perhaps it was too close to home, hitting nerves still a bit too tender.

    So far the shift feels great. A little thread that I’d begun toying with – light to the point of being nearly frothy – has begun coursing through my veins. Then the kicker! Though conceptually a contemporary romantic comedy, I grew teary-eyed pondering the backstory of the new characters. I never reached that point in all the time spent on the set-aside draft; feelings more in line with the consistent pull I experienced while writing my first novel.

    The lesson for me so far is to recognize the signs early in the process. Don’t keep beating up yourself trying to force a peg that won’t fit. Sometimes things click, and sometimes they don’t. No shame in recognizing that, no matter how good the initial concept may seem. You have to follow your muse.

  11. I walked away from my latest WIP just a few weeks ago. It was a novel I abandoned five years ago and decided to pick up again because I loved the characters and the setting and EVERYTHING so, so much. But it was a thriller with lots of twists and turns. So, I plotted everything out. And I was going great for awhile until, like you, it turned into an absolute slog. I actually dreaded opening the laptop and working on it. I still tried to keep at it, but something was wrong.

    So I let it go. Again. Maybe I’m not meant to write thrillers, or maybe I’m not meant to write this particular story yet. But I’ve started a new novel and it feels good to write again. So, so good.

  12. I walked away from a novel I spent six years polishing (I’m a part-time writer). However, I had to write something fresh or I wouldn’t write at all. I’m happy I did. The joy of writing has returned with a new novel in a different genre.

    I know I can go back to the other one, but I’m not sure I will. It was a great learning experience.

  13. I walked away from a novel I worked on for five years. I even decided to scrap it and start over, which I’ve done twice. I’ve only recently decided to go back to that manuscript, of which I’ve posted a couple excerpts online here and there and have always received so much praise. You’ve really inspired me to want to finish it, again.

    Thank you for your wise and reassuring words.

 

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