Writers on the pain of hindsight in publishing: 'It's like a bad breakup – you have to move on'

How do you let go of a book you’ve written? Viv Groskop, Sathnam Sanghera and others offer their advice for bouncing back from the post-publication blues

My first book came out a year ago. It wasn’t a bestseller, and it wasn’t intended to be one. In Spite of Oceans: Migrant Voices is a quiet book of short stories based on real, everyday family lives. The stories are about how people deal with the messy stuff life throws at them; about relationships coming together, or unfolding, or crumpling under the tension of it all.

Over the course of the last year, I have started to feel out of sorts about the book. Several copies of it lie in my hallway cupboard, next to a box of old doorkeys, unintentionally kept over the years.

They say hindsight is a wonderful thing. As a writer, however, it’s irritating, an itch in an awkward place

Related: Falling short: seven writers reflect on failure

Authors have to leave a work behind. You can't fetishise the writing

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