How Easy it is to Quit

As someone who has started many projects and not finished them, I feel uniquely qualified to talk about how easy it is to quit something.

I have three sourdoughs in the refrigerator downstairs that, if I don’t feed them soon, will expire. I was supposed to feed them yesterday, but said “I don’t want to go through the trouble.” But if I say that day after day, the culture will die out.

I have to push myself to keep the momentum.

This relates to my writing as well. If I don’t write this blog every day, it will probably expire. If I don’t work on polishing or writing or rewriting daily, I will probably abandon writing.

The things that are easy to quit have no immediate rewards to keep me going. It’s human nature to seek immediate reward, and it’s human nature to conserve effort. Doing the things that are easy to quit, then, requires a longer view and an ability to find reward in the process rather than the result.

So I write this blog daily, even though it’s easy to quit. The rewards are nebulous (I average 40 readers a day right now, but hope for more) and I find value in the experience of writing itself.

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.