Should you abandon that novel you’ve been working on?

A post at Kill Zone Blog, again by James Scott Bell — I know I linked to another of his posts recently, but this one also caught my eye: Should You Abandon Your Novel?

There’s a longish lead-in, and then this:

[H]ow long should you labor over a book before saying, “This isn’t getting me any further. Maybe I should start another one.”

That’s the fundamental question the rest of the post is trying to answer. Here is the first guideline that Bell offers:

Spending a year on one book is long enough. … A page a day is a book a year. A Ficus tree can write a page a day. Don’t be shown up by a Ficus tree.

I laughed and decided sure, this is a post worth sharing. That’s true even though I actually know a writer who just barely manages a page a day. She has young children. For those who have a life, frequently a page a day is a dandy goal, and not always achievable. But the line about the Ficus tree still made me laugh. Bell also says

Don’t workshop it over and over.

I agree, and that reminds me of some post or other about the way over-workshopped novels can loose their individuality and turn to bland mush. What post is that? I know I’m thinking of a specific post. Oh, it’s this one.

Workshop-trained writers are often, not always, but often, intrinsically defensive. This single fact explains almost all defining features of contemporary literature. What you’re looking at on the shelf are not so much books as battlements. … Oh, the prose is always well-polished, with the occasional pleasing turn of phrase, but never distinctive, never flowery nor reaching. This defensiveness extends even to the ontology of their fictional worlds. A lot of today’s literary fiction could be set on some twin earth where everything about history, science, philosophy, the universe, even what humans evolved to look like, could all be totally different. Yet the novel is so situated in the writer’s low-attack-surface manifest image of the world that the reader would never know. 

The above is Erik Hoel, and he’s specifically addressing modern literary novels, not all fiction. I don’t know much and care less about most literary fiction; nevertheless, the above indictment has stuck with me ever since I read the linked post.

The broader idea, that workshopping a novel can lead to a defensive posture that attempts to hide everything important about the novel, is not quite the same thing Bell is getting at. Bell is saying: Stop endlessly polishing! It’s good! Stop workshopping and get it out there! Hoel is saying: Stop trying to defend your novel against imagined attack! Stop being so defensive! Write the novel you want and then get it out there!

Both are saying: When your novel is ready, stop dithering and throw it into the world.

But Bell is also saying: Or else decide it’s never going to be ready and move on to some other novel. His post is really about that, about deciding whether it’s good and should fly, or not-good and you should quit trying to make it good enough because it’s not going to get there.

Bell asks: So what about a “seasoned” writer? Should they ever abandon a book? I’ve got the answer: It depends.

Actually, he doesn’t really have an answer, except that sometimes you should quit with a specific book and sometimes you shouldn’t. He’s also noting that abandonment is pretty common at about 30,000 words in, which is about 100 pages if you think in pages. That’s probably true. The early middle is often difficult for me; if I re-write a chapter from scratch, more often than not, it’s going to be chapter 5, and guess where that is? Yep, it’s usually about 30,000 words in. Regardless, Bell really doesn’t have an answer.

So, let’s try to come up with an answer!

When should you abandon a novel? Also, what do you mean by “abandon?”

A) When you outline it and get stuck on some plot element. This isn’t relevant if you don’t outline. But if you do, then you probably haven’t invested much time in the project when you’re out the outlining stage, so ditch it if it’s not working. The intuitive writer version is writing one chapter and then getting stuck. You haven’t invested much yet, so dropping the project has a low cost.

B) When you have the novel less than, say, 80% finished, and you get stuck or lose interest and can’t get interested again. There’s a high cost to abandoning a novel when you’re more than halfway into it, but if you’re really stuck, it may help to set the project aside for a year or two. Or ten. You can go on to something else while you wait. Maybe the abandoned project will sort itself out if you wait a while. It’s not like you have a deadline.

B part ii) UNLESS YOU DO HAVE A DEADLINE, and that can be either a deadline from a publisher OR a deadline that exists in the unspoken contract between authors and readers.

What I mean is, when an author is writing a series, then when the first book comes out and that book ends with a cliffhanger, they have implicitly promised their readers that they will finish the story.

If there is an interim resolution and the book is self-contained, that’s one thing, but if there isn’t a interim resolution, if there is some kind of cliffhanger, then the author owes it to the readers to finish the series, and the only really acceptable excuse for failing to do so is the death of the author. I’ve read a furious diatribe about that somewhere. Oh, it’s here, and the weird thing is, Correia is saying there’s no such thing as a contract between authors and readers and then he does this long, furious post.

While he’s right that readers refusing to buy unfinished epic fantasy series destroys the ability of authors to write epic fantasy, I’m here to say: Yes, there is too an unwritten contract between author and readers. Yes. There is. The author who starts a series and does not wind up each book at a decent resolution DOES TOO have an obligation to finish that series and reach the resolution. Not to write a resolution that makes every reader, or most readers, happy. But to write a resolution OF SOME KIND, a conclusion that does the job of concluding the series, and bonus points if the resolution DOES make most readers happy.

I do think so. Yes, I do. You do not get to say, Well, I got bored with the series, or Oh, I have writer’s block, and then leave your readers with a permanent cliffhanger and no resolution at all. It’s up to you to find a way to deal with your issues and write the ending of the project you started. Taking an extra year or so to finish something is fine. Just never finishing it is much, much less fine. Here is the best post I know of about finishing a story when the author got very stuck, but felt strongly that she owed the book to their readers. This is an author dealing with the problem and moving ahead to finish the novel. This is KJ Charles, and she was dealing with ordinary writer’s block at the time, not clinical depression. But if writer’s block arises from depression, then yes, that can happen, and why not get treated for that so you can finish the project and incidentally also improve your life immeasurably because you have treated the depression.

Well, that was a digression. What was the topic? Oh, right: When should you abandon a novel?

C) When you have decided the novel is unsalvageably bad. Your judgment may not be correct, but the decision of whether a novel is good enough to send into the world is, in the end, the author’s decision. Nobody else can really make that call. If you’ve decided the novel just cannot be made good, then it makes sense to drop it in a drawer.

Don’t delete it. In ten years, maybe you’ll suddenly realize how you can totally revise it and make it great.

Also, I do know of aspiring authors who just can’t believe the novel is fine when it is in fact fine. That’s why I said “your judgment may not be correct.” If people with good critical judgment are all telling you your novel is great and you should pursue publication / self-publish, then they’re probably right and you should probably take a stab at nudging your novel toward the edge of the nest and the wide sky beyond.

So … I guess my conclusion here is: You should abandon a novel under three conditions:

You’re barely started and get stuck, so abandoning the project has a low cost, or

You’re well into the novel, but you’re stuck and can’t get unstuck, and also there’s no deadline, and also being stuck isn’t a sign there’s actually something wrong, or

You’ve finished the project, but you decide the book is just unpublishably bad and you’re going to drop it in a drawer and forget about it for a few years.

I guess those are just about the only three reasons I can think of abandoning a novel partway through. How about you all, have I missed something? Where do you stand on the idea that an unresolved ending constitutes an obligation?

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