abandoning your writing

Confessions from a Weary Writer

August 27, 2018 By Julia Munroe Martin 86 Comments

If my life were a reality show, this would be the part where I’d sit alone in a darkened room—just me and the camera. I’d speak in hushed, urgent tones. This is where I’d spill my guts and tell you my deepest darkest fears.

Confession 1: My writing is at a low point, and I am in a flat panic

I miss the feeling of being lost in my writing, of being in the zone—I haven’t felt like that in a while. I wake up every morning with an empty feeling inside, longing to feel lost in a story like I used to. Some mornings I feel so bad about it, I want to cry. I shuffle downstairs, make coffee, and look at my writing projects, jumping from project to project. I want to write. I do write. But not with excitement or passion. And I want that feeling back.

Confession 2: I feel like a fraud

I have one self-published novel. I’ve written five others, eight if you count the three middle grade novels I wrote in another life, nine if you count the thing I wrote when I was right out of college. “I’m a writer,” I tell people. But the truth is I don’t feel like that myself. I feel like I’m not good enough. Imposter syndrome is alive and well and lives deep within my heart and mind. I fear my ideas are trite and clichéd (I know this is true for at least some of my ideas because an agent told me so at a conference once). I’m afraid I can’t really write anything that anyone would want to read.

Confession 3: I’m afraid I’ll never be (traditionally) published

The query process is long and demoralizing—I’ve queried three novels unsuccessfully—and I’ve just about decided to put the only novel I am querying in the drawer (I’m waiting to hear from one last agent; I’ve queried over one hundred). I was represented once (the novel never sold), I’ve had a near miss with two R&R’s, and I was offered representation another time but turned it down (our visions for my novel were miles apart). The positive in this (if I must find one), is that now it’s a lot easier. I have done what experts suggest: I don’t think about it after I send a query. Still, I’m afraid I’ll never again be offered representation. Worse than that, I’m afraid I’ll never be traditionally published.

Confession 4: Writing this post was damn hard

It was hard laying it out. All my fears. Admitting that not only do I feel like I’m failing at writing but also at the querying process and at getting published. I want to be brave, but I’m not always. I’m rarely honest about how I feel with my writing accountability partners or even with my husband or kids about how worried I am all the time about how much I want this. I’m rarely honest with myself. The truth is I wrote the first version of this post a while ago, but I was afraid to publish it—I’m afraid other writers will realize I really am a fraud. Or maybe I’m afraid I’ll jinx myself.

Confession 5: I’ll never give up

It’s another writing day. Early morning. The time I’d usually be writing. My final confession is that even when I can’t write very much or very well or don’t have the passion I used to, I miss it and can’t stop thinking about it. I’ve tried. I’ve even considered quitting, most recently during this last querying cycle. I thought about giving up completely.

But the truth is I don’t want to.

Instead I turn inwardly for encouragement and solace, for ways to combat my fears and inabilities, and here’s what I’ve come up with: [Read more…]

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Seven Things I Learned From Wrecking My Novel

August 28, 2017 By Julia Munroe Martin

Photo by Francesco Mazzola Maurizio via Flickr’s CC

My most recent novel sits finished in a file on my desktop. It’s the culmination of a couple of years of work. 91,535 words now, at one point over 120,000. Hard work. Yet after honing and rewriting and editing some more, it’s still not ready to be sent out to my critique partners, let alone to agents.

The truth is, I’m reluctant to let anyone read it. My husband read an early draft—he’s always my first reader—he said he liked it. A couple of writer friends have read the first chapter or excerpts of others; they had mixed reactions but looked forward to reading more. But since I finished the last round of edits, the final round, it just doesn’t seem ready for anyone else to read it. And I’m not sure it ever will be.

So, What Went Wrong?

Surprising (to me), I feel okay with letting the file sit, untouched, on the desktop—it’s been about a month since I’ve opened it. I made my final decision to abandon it a few days ago. My main feelings are disappointment and ambivalence. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. Why did this happen? More importantly, what next?

Although I know I won’t be able to (completely) objectively assess what went wrong—I want to. I feel like I need to. This isn’t a decision I came to lightly, and my biggest fear is that it will happen again. What made this project end in abandonment, incompletion? After all the work I put into it I’m not moving on to query or self-publish like I have with the other novels I’ve written, and I want to know why. And what’s to keep the next project from following the same course?

Here are seven things I’ve learned.

1. Don’t ignore early warning signs. The idea for this story came to me after hearing a podcast about a rare medical condition. Granted, it’s a fascinating condition with many repercussions that could drive a storyline, but I’m wondering now if it was too thin an idea that I didn’t develop well enough into a whole-story idea. As I wrote, I found myself grasping at straws as I wondered how to infuse the idea into a whole character (not just a syndrome) and expand the idea into a whole story.

2. Think things through. When I started this novel, it was for adults, then I switched to YA, then back to adult. At one point I described it as The Wizard of Oz meets The Breakfast Club, but toward the end I realized I’d started it as a literary novel which became a romance… then a thriller… then a muddle. I waffled back and forth about audience and number of main characters and voice and setting.

3. Be true to who you are. I wrote this novel without too much forward planning (obviously, see above). Usually a plotter or a “hybrid” writer, this is the first novel I’ve written completely as a “pantser.” Late in the project, on a push to finish, I wrote a scene-by-scene plan, but it felt forced, and I rarely looked at it. Although in retrospect I see reasons why I plunged headfirst into writing without planning, I learned the hard way I’m a plotter at heart.

4. Don’t be impatient. It took longer to write the first draft of this novel (than it’s taken for me to write any other). This was due to life events that by necessity took me away from writing, but once I felt freer to write, I found myself rushing and pushing myself harder to finish faster. I think it would have been better to allow myself to take the time I needed, to think things through. I realize now that sometimes things take longer than I expect them to. It’s okay and not necessary to rush or push when there’s a lot of other things going on. Take as much time as it takes.

5. Listen to yourself. Trust yourself. I shared (and over-shared at times) my story with writer friends, trolling for advice and input. I was looking outside for the motivation I should have felt inside. I needed the support and push, but it backfired. It did motivate me to write, but I think it also made the story feel less my own, less special to me, and it made me question my judgment and ideas at a time I should’ve felt confident. A few times I decided to make changes based on others’ suggestions, even when I wasn’t sure of those changes, and I also let “market considerations” get into my head.

6. Follow your passion. This is the first project I’ve worked on that I questioned almost constantly. Almost every day when I sat down to write I wondered why? Why was I writing this? What was I writing? There were parts I really liked, but I felt little enthusiasm for the project as a whole. Most days I felt like I was plodding through. I certainly didn’t feel passion like with the other novels I’ve written—they were like love affairs. I couldn’t stop thinking about them no matter how hard I tried. With this novel, I felt none of that passion.

7. It’s never too late to jump ship. I’ve abandoned novels after a few chapters, even half way through; I’ve also put novels in the drawer after querying for a while, but I’ve never finished an entire novel and decided to walk away. I suppose I could’ve continued to work on this one, but (at least right now) I can’t see how to fix it. I also don’t want the frustration of querying a novel I’m not one-hundred percent proud of. And I’d rather spend my time working on something I feel completely invested in.

So, What’s Next? [Read more…]

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The Heartfelt, Unpublishable, Captivating, Shallow, Sound, Abandoned, Reclaimed, Worthless, Most Excellent Potential Novel

July 28, 2015 By Tom Bentley

*Image courtesy of jeltovski via morguefile.com*

Eight years ago I sat down to write a novel, because my knees are lousy, so I couldn’t do it standing. The book’s setting is San Francisco, and its inciting incident is the earthquake of 1989, which flings together—in often unseemly ways—three characters who otherwise would have remained on the periphery of each others’ lives. The work proceeded at my standard brisk pace: I started it, stopped, muddled about, felt guilty it wasn’t going anywhere, took it up again, outlined and pretended that was actual writing, blamed the characters for not fully investing in their fates, paused, dribbled and paused.

Before I’d gotten very deep (well, the deepest part of the shallow end of the scribbling pool), I’d decided I wanted a multiple point-of-view perspective from the three central characters: one first person, and two in close third person. That felt like the best way to tell the tale, and had a writing challenge in it for me. Thus, I perspectivized thusly. Doing the math: I added up the characters, setting, murky-but-sketched-out story arc, two substantive subplots and the opportunity to write. The sum of the figures: Zero, because I kept pausing in the work. Long pauses.

For a couple of years, I fiddled with correcting the first six or seven chapters, outlined some more, thought about it and then not, and called that all writing. (And when I’ve had enough bourbon, I call a rosebush a horse too.) After about two and half years, because I am slow on the uptake, I shamed myself into writing a mere half-hour a day, on weekdays, and was able to finish the damn thing in a few months. I’d read several bushels of novels (even self-pubbed an earlier one) and I thought this resembled one. Four beta readers agreed, and after revising from their considered comments, I sent it out to agents. This is a good way to get some yard work done.

A Chorus of Nos
There are a lot of ways to say “no”: many are gracious, some blunt, some are merely the answer of no answer at all. Even the maybes (a fair number of partials, a few full manuscript requests) ended with the shade drawn slowly down. Notwithstanding that 50 or 60 agents could be plumb crazy or boorish philistines, there seemed to be a clue that perhaps the work was wanting in some way. The work needed more work. I attacked this challenge vigorously: I put the novel on my hard drive’s shelf, to breathe.

So the thing slumbered for another long while, while I blandly pondered self-pubbing. Having spent a couple of years here at WriterUnboxed, where the tutelage of eagle-eyed savants like Don Maass, David Corbett, and Lisa Cron can’t help but inflict one with exquisite writerly pain, I began to see that there might be a couple of rips in the novel’s fabric that might necessitate some sewing. With a whaling harpoon. [Read more…]

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