The Story That Wasn’t

I never thought it was such a bad story.

It began with a hundred-year-old woman who was quitting her cruddy job as a commercial diver in dockside Philly for a slightly less cruddy job leading tourist diving expeditions in Florida. But the Navy intercepts her on her way south, and convinces her to make a second trip into deep space, as she’s the only person on the planet with direct experience in salvaging a Conestoga-class starship.

Said Conestoga-class starship (the USS SUSQUEHANNA, or “Susie Q”) is, we learn, orbiting a mysterious planetoid around Epsilon Eridani, and emitting a curious digital signature called, somewhat un-imaginatively, the “Liverpool Signal,” because it was all Beatles songs at first. Our heroine is placed in a cold-sleep berth aboard the USS SARATOGA, which is making an unscheduled rendezvous with the SUSQUEHANNA to investigate the situation, and, if possible, bring the SUSQUEHANNA back to Triton Station for refit, because you don’t leave trillion-dollar starships lying around.

So there would have been an away team (it probably would have been called “AWAY TEAM”) made up of our (now) hundred-and-fifty-year-old kick-ass heroine (who has been marinating for fifty years in a virtual-reality simulation of the actual mission and is profoundly pissed off), a naive communications officer who was born (printed, really) aboard ship and has no knowledge of Earth, and a shuttlecraft pilot who certainly should have mentioned that her great-grandfather was in cold-sleep aboard the SUSQUEHANNA before she volunteered for deep-space duty.

And there would have been an alien infestation aboard the “Susie Q,” who would have appeared to the away team on a holodeck set up to look like the set of the old “Cheers” TV show, and they would have been nice and friendly up until the point where they were not. And it would have ended…

Well, I don’t know where it would have ended, because I didn’t finish it. I wrote something else instead, in a different genre, and finished that and published it and am trying desperately to have people notice it.

So. Is Chuck Wendig right? Should you finish your shit?

(looks around for Chuck Wendig)

(don’t see him anywhere)

(checks attic, because use he could be hiding in the attic, you never know with Chuck Wendig)

(deep breath)

No. You don’t have to finish your shit if you don’t want to. It’s okay to quit sometimes.

Notice that I said sometimes. And I can say this because I have finished my shit. I have finished two novels that didn’t get published and are sitting in odd corners of my hard drive, rusting away like the SS UNITED STATES. I have finished two novels where I am the author-publisher, which means that traditional publishers didn’t want them, and shut up. That doesn’t count a buttload of flash fiction that’s published here and elsewhere. (Not to mention four law review articles and three or four other articles in scholarly journals.)

Okay? I can finish my shit. I do finish my shit. But, sometimes, I don’t.

YOUR GUIDELINES WITH REGARD TO FINISHING YOUR SHIT

You should finish your shit. It’s a good idea and it’s good for you, like eating kale, and sometimes it’s bitter, like eating kale, but it doesn’t make your poop green and other than that I’ve got nothing. Finishing your shit is better than not finishing your shit.
You do not have to finish every single solitary piece of your shit, just like you don’t have to eat every single one of the fries that your fry-hating kid won’t touch. Moreover, you shouldn’t. Every writer is familiar with “vampires” – story ideas that sound great in the middle of the night but fall to dust in the light of the morning. My favorite vampire of all time was writing something of a sequel to the great MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN, which would have featured a character based on H.F. Saint (who really did retire to the South of France on his novel-writing fortune) who was a time-traveler. I worked way too hard on that one (even pestering the agent who was reading my stuff, which turned out to not be a good idea) and came away with nothing except the thought that using your book’s ISBN as the tracking number for your Swiss bank account is a phenomenally dumb idea. I didn’t finish that story, and the world is better off.
Ask yourself: Are you dealing with Resistance? Wendig mentions Resistance in passing in his piece, but doesn’t dwell on it. Resistance, as Pressfield cautions us, is always lying, always full of shit. Resistance will always tell you to quit, because it tells everyone to quit. But the thing to remember is that Resistance can’t evaluate your story for you. You have to do that. You have to be honest with yourself. And if what you are writing is, based on your honest opinion, simply not working, it’s all right to quit and try something else.
Only YOU can decide to quit. Not your wife, not your critique partner, not your writing group, not your agent, not Amazon, not the market, not the readers. You. Don’t let anyone else make that decision for you.
Don’t quit because you’re tired. Don’t quit because you’re angry. Don’t quit because you’re unhappy, or because sales are a bit off, or because of the RELENTLESS ONSLAUGHT OF WINTER ON SNOWBALL EARTH. Quit because it doesn’t make economic or artistic sense to keep going.
If you quit, quit. Walk away. Don’t keep going back to it, because it will torture you. Make a clean break.
I am not talking here about giving up entirely. If you quit, start writing something else, something better. This is not giving into despair, it’s a rational decision to give up something that isn’t working in favor of something else that will–something that you can finish, and be proud of.

I don’t like quitting. Quitting isn’t attractive, and it isn’t cool. But when you are bogged down in something that simply isn’t worth finishing, don’t. Do something else. It’s okay. Just do it, don’t beat yourself up about it, and move on to the next thing as quickly as may be.