Preemptive Retaliation

So recently I decided to abandon a project, and then today I got yelled at by a podcast for doing so. Ok maybe not yelled at, but heavily chastised. It was like a scene in a movie or a tv show where the main character turns on the television and there’s something strangely relevant being said about their current predicament. Mine was a Writing Excuses podcast on evaluating ideas, I think, and at one point in the discussion they go on a five minute segue where they basically say “Finish your projects, don’t abandon them, finish them” over and over.

But I’ve already done it. I’ve given up on a project.

A few weeks ago I had a weekend in with the family. While Lily was napping I took to the computer – as I have been, a fair amount – to see if I could bash out a few more words of the rewrite for my cyber detective novel. I managed a good amount of words in the brief time I had, but I was preoccupied for the rest of the day. So much so that Anna started asking me about what was wrong. The truth is that I wasn’t enjoying it. It was a slog to write. Every sentence that came out was me bashing my head against a brick wall trying to break through it. I wasn’t happy with the work.

There’s a check list you should go through when you can’t write something. It’s different for a lot of people, but here’s mine: Have I drank too much coffee, have I drank too much alcohol, do I need to pee, am I dehydrated, did I sleep ok last night, do I need to shower, have I finished my responsibilities, have I given myself enough downtime, have I been outside today and so on and so on. It’s nothing complicated, but it’s a solid checklist on whether I’ve been looking after myself enough to legitimately judge what I’m doing. For the past few months I have been going over that checklist over and over, ticking each one as I went, and I still wasn’t liking what I was doing.

When it comes to writing, I have conflicting views dependent on where I am in the process. In the beginning it’s all about discovery and chasing a story that has its own mind and direction. When I got back to it though, it’s more like maths. I’ve got a problem in front of me, an equation that needs solving – and I need to show my working. Everything I write is about solving the problems that cropped up in the initial draft(s). In the end the equation makes sense, and we have a story.

The more I worked on the detective story, the less it made sense. At almost every turn I was having to explain away coincidences, or hope the reader didn’t notice something I left out. This is ok to an extent, but there’s only so many times I can write a version of “this clue made the character think this, because I said so” before even I start rolling my eyes.

I loved the story and world, and still do to a point, but I don’t think I can write it the way it needs to be.

When writing the previous sentence I quarreled with myself whether to include a “yet” on the end. I don’t know if I’ll ever be at that point. I might never come back to it. Or, one day, I might write the mystery story that I’ve always wanted.

All in all, in the end, I wasn’t enjoying myself. I was working on it, taking notes, writing scenes… and I wasn’t liking what was there. So I gave it up.

There’s the understanding that, as a writer, you have to write a good number of crap novels before you get to the good ones. But you have to finish those novels. They have to be done and dusted before you can allocate them to XP and level up. I have two – the terrible yet awesome novel I wrote when I was nineteen, and Things Keep Happening which loses its shine the more I think about it. This detective novel could technically count as my third, fourth and fifth, given the amount of times I’ve rewritten it. I’ll count it as the third. I never finished it, never completely, but I worked on it enough to know.

I’ll finish the next one. I know that sounds like famous last words, but I will finish the next one. I need to.