When Giving Up is a Good Thing

I have given up writing my latest Kringle Christmas romance. I don’t like giving things up, but the premise of the book became untenable upon writing.

I had given up writing it once before, feeling that the timing was all wrong. Then I got an idea to expand the time period of the book so that I had more time to develop the relationship. It turns out it wasn’t enough; I don’t have enough time left in the story to develop the downturn of the relationship, where the couple starts second-guessing the relationship and their own fitness for it.

Let me explain: My Christmas romances generally run from a few days before Thanksgiving through mid-December. The relationship develops fast, but I have about three weeks of plot-time to develop the relationship. That’s enough to take them from developing relationship to devolving relationship and through the reconciliation. With Kringle All the Way (the book I just abandoned), the couple had from the 17th through the 25th to get through all those stages. Try as I may, I didn’t have enough time in which to develop the relationship. In a Christmas romance, the happy ending has to happen by Christmas. What’s more depressing than a breakup over Christmas? That’s why the timing is so important.

This is the first story I’ve given up! I have a story that I’ve set aside for a while with a promise to get back to it eventually, but that’s not the same. I don’t enjoy giving up, but this story is fatally flawed. To spend any more time on it is to waste that time. That’s why giving up is sometimes a good thing.

This Too

Every now and then I get to a point where I’m convinced I’ve reached the end of my writing career, that I’m ready to put the whole thing down.

This is one of those times.

I just don’t feel as much like a writer when I’m writing short stories. I’m not as focused (obsessed?), I have to come up with many, many more ideas rapidly (which I don’t know if I’m good at), and I don’t have the attachment to my characters.

Years ago, you wouldn’t have caught me writing a novel, and I never imagined I’d prefer novels to short stories.

Yet now is the time for short stories and sending them off to magazines and waiting. I’ve gotten a lot of rejections, but I keep trying.

I feel like quitting sometimes. I’ve felt like quitting many times before.

This too shall pass.

Ready to Quit?

My tarot reading for today (Deck: The Good Tarot, a positive psychology/affirmations deck) says it’s time to decide whether I want to continue writing or not.

For all my threats of giving up, I’m not sure I’m ready. The problem is that when I want to quit, I’m running on feelings and moods, which in my case can run rather intense. What’s worse, I’m running on that primordial soup of past hurts that it’s easy to fixate on:

I thrive on recognition.Recognition is the positive attention that kept me going through a rather negative childhood.

I don’t deal well with rejection. (Who does?) As an overweight, highly intelligent, awkward child, I received a lot of rejection so I tend to overreact to it.

I don’t like being made a fool of, having been the butt of jokes much of my life. I’m afraid I’m being a fool by continuing to hope.

On the other hand:

I see myself as a hopeful person

I highly admire perseverance

I like the image of being a writer (although I wrestle with whether I need traditional publishing to feel like a writer)

I like writing. A lot. Editing, not so much. Querying — I love the optimism I feel when I send out a new query. I hate rejections.

I love to have people discover my writing.

The key, though, is that if I quit only to find that someone picks up Prodigies, I would un-quit in a second. If I had readers, especially ones I could communicate with, I would write with and for a community.

Quitting won’t get me what I need. So, how do I get what I need out of writing?

Playing Devil’s Advocate to my Writing Career

Well, we survived the power outage yesterday, and the windchill now is only -18 F (-28 C). We spent about 2 1/2 hours in candlelight and bundled up with hot tea (the stove still worked) in hand. We still had charge on our computers and internet from a backup power system for our modem and router.

So I’m still here, despite the cold, despite the fact that I got another rejection yesterday.

I’m still here, but I don’t know what that means.

I think about giving up writing at times. I’ve slowed down considerably on the writing front to edit the backlog of what I’ve written, so it’s harder to remember the thrill of writing new things. It’s easier to examine my writing, find the places where I fell into mediocrity, and wonder if my work deserves to get published.

It’s harder to remember the reasons I started writing — because I felt I had something important to say — and easier to consider the work, the hard work of writing and editing and querying — with no guaranteed rewards.

It’s harder to call myself a writer and easier to let it fade away and find another hobby.

I’ve given up things before — I used to write songs. I used to be a singer-songwriter until I divorced my guitarist twenty-some years ago and couldn’t perform my songs anymore. Those songs, almost twenty in number, still exist; I don’t sing them anymore. I wrote a song a couple years ago with my friend Mary Shepherd — it’s a Christmas carol. I don’t know what to do with it.

Giving up is not necessarily a bad thing. If the practice isn’t worth the pain, if the resources put in do not yield rewards, the logical thing is not to continue putting time into something that’s not working. To put more time or money into a fruitless pursuit or a junker car is called the sunk-cost fallacy, and like all fallacies, it is illogical.

I don’t know that I’m going to give up writing, but I have to look at it as a viable option, and ask myself if it’s still worth the time to me if I can’t get traditionally published.

My feelings about self-publishing are worth their own essay.

Life without writing

About querying time, I wonder what it would be like to quit writing and quit pursuing representation and publication. Querying is brutal — you prepare excerpts of your prized manuscripts to people who will go by their first impressions, and nobody will tell why they rejected you except “It’s not you, it’s me” or “I’m very picky about who I represent”. I would love some real feedback like: “Could you rewrite your query letter and tell me more about x”.

What would my life be like without writing? I think it would feel like having a lobotomy — I would know something important was missing, but have no idea what. It would be like waking up and finding out a loved one was gone — not dead, just gone. In other words, there would be a hole and I can’t imagine filling it up. No other hobbies I’ve had have been this fulfilling, and for my gardening to be close to this fulfilling I would need a working greenhouse with enough room to actually handle my plants. (We do not have the space or money for that.) My moulage (casualty simulation) might become more fulfilling if I could go professional with it, but the outfits that need moulage for training purposes can’t afford a professional.

As for giving up dreams of being published, that’s a little more complex. There are certain things built into my psyche for better or worse. I love to accomplish new things, and everything else in my life lately has been things I’ve done for the last N years, where N is probably around 30. I’ve hit a stagnation point in my job with 8 years until retirement (I’ve tried hard, coworkers, but I’m chronically burnt out and in need of a break). I need challenge, and I need recognition. I need people liking my work, and to do so they have to see it. Esteem and accomplishment are nothing to be afraid of.

What would it feel like to give up trying to get published? I’d be exactly where I am now, except that the challenge would be gone and I would feel like I had given up on an adventure to stay in my stagnation. I don’t know if I can find another opportunity to break the stagnation.

So I do the same thing I’ve been doing every four months for the past two years, wondering if I will ever make escape velocity.

If anyone has ideas of challenges I could try (I’ve already lost 70 lbs, I have some health problems that keep me from running, I don’t want to run for public office, and I have profound hand-eye coordination problems), let me know.