I’ve written before (albeit not very well) about novels that I’ve started writing and given up on. It’s something that’s a bit of a hobby of mine, from the looks of things—I never seem to be able to finish plowing through the pain and suffering of the first draft and come out with a complete, if terrible, manuscript.
I’ve thought about this a lot recently, in part because I’m looking National Novel Writing Month dead in the face, but also because I take my writing pretty seriously—it’s something I love doing—and would sincerely like to fix whatever it is about my writing habits that leads me to 10,000- and 15,000-word drafts that never go anywhere. This is a problem, one that, for lack of a better word, I’ll call “novel-draft paralysis.”
Novel-Draft Paralysis
It’s a very distinctive disorder, N.D.P. You (addressing anyone who’s done the same thing I have) get way, way into a draft, and suddenly you realize that you have no idea where any of the story is going, you don’t understand your characters and/or their motivations, you can’t possibly conceive of a way to keep your forward momentum going, and there simply isn’t a single word that is appearing in your head that you can put down on the page next. You’re absolutely, completely frozen, unable to continue from this point.
Generally what happens next is this: the writer gives up for the moment, goes and gets a cup of coffee or has a cigarette or, I don’t know, shoots up some heroin or something ridiculous (looking at you, William Burroughs) and takes a break. He or she sits around, wondering what to do next, wondering what is wrong with him or her, wondering why there isn’t any of the inspiration that has been pushing the story forward, that vast untapped reservoir of ideas, of story, of language suddenly seemingly bone-dry or, worse, hypersaline and inhospitable like Mono Lake. This is not a good feeling.
The next step is for the writer to sit back down at the desk/computer/table/wherever-it-is-they’re-writing, and try to plod through the current narrative thread, end it as quickly and as tidily and as abruptly as is possible, and get on to something else—some new character, another subplot, another work, even. Anything but the current idea, the current conversation—a complete and overwhelming desire to get away from the current situation. This is the “fight-or-flight” instinct, and when Novel-Draft Paralysis sets in, “fight” simply isn’t an option anymore—the whole problem is that the writer has been in “fight” mode for a while now, maybe without realizing it, and simply can’t keep that momentum up anymore. Continuing to fight leads to this, an actual quote from one of my actual (yep, abandoned) novel drafts—not in the notes but actually in the draft of the novel:
This narrative thread, as you can tell, has rapidly run out of steam, and there is nothing interesting left to write about here—obviously her father and mother aren’t going to have a clue what’s going to happen when they get upstairs. Of course it’s going to piss them off, and of course they don’t understand their daughter. Why did you think this would be interesting? It’s not.
This is a visible manifestation of what I’m talking about here—and surely I’m not the only person it’s happened to.
Now What?
Once everything has gone to hell in a hand-basket, there aren’t a whole lot of remaining options for the writer. You can:
- Keep slogging through the draft.
- Give up and watch television for several hours, all the while beating yourself up about not being able to finish the story you’re working on.
- Jump from the top of the Empire State Building (Editor’s Note: This option is highly discouraged.)
- Regroup and try to think about where you’re headed, not where you’ve been, and start work on another part of the story.
I’ve already established that sometimes 1., which is the conventional wisdom you read in all kinds of writing books, good ones and bad ones—even excellent ones, and even terrible ones, simply isn’t an option. If you keep going in the draft, you’re only going to end up writing another section of your self-abusive diatribe, a long work in progress anyway if you’re a writer, and things are only going to get worse. There may, eventually, be some kind of light at the end of the tunnel, but you’re still going to be frustrated at the failure of your current narrative thread, and it’ll eat away at you.
Option 2. is not exclusive—you can follow option 2. and still choose later to take another option. Just don’t let 2. be your permanent choice, and try not to watch too much Cops, and everything will be okay. Maybe. The third option, of course, has already been addressed by the editor.
Option 4. seems to be the reasonable one, right? The one that will make everything turn out all sunshine and smiley faces and Lucky Charms in a big cauldron at the end of a rainbow? Well—here’s the thing. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t; it’s really a crapshoot. Sometimes it really is what you need to do, and when you come back, all calm, cool, and collected, you’ll be able to continue where you left off and everything will start to make sense, layers peeling off of the onion that is your concept of the narrative. Sometimes that little regrouping session is a live-saver, and allows you to steer the heretofore rudderless ship of your novel back into the shipping lanes.
Sometimes, however, it makes things worse.
Face to Face With Collapse
There comes a point, in an abandoned novel project, where you realize that everything is falling in on itself. For me, on, oh for instance Visions of Johanna, that 103-page disaster, I realized that when I suddenly, out of nowhere, in a novel about God talking to people and a fundamentalist group trying to track those people down, had an ex-Soviet military type trying to drag a nuclear warhead down a muddy road in Belarus with a Yugo. In 1994. Ten years before the other 98 pages of story had taken place. I looked up from the draft and realized that I’d been adding characters and adding plots and adding subplots and insinuations, and adding and adding and adding them, and had nowhere else to go—I’d painted myself into a corner, being that I’m not Pynchon and can’t keep all of that in my head at once.
When you’re staring into the Abyss of having to give up on a work that you’ve poured that much effort, that much of yourself into, there are a lot of lessons you can take from it, but here’s what I would say is the primary one: You don’t have to finish it if you can’t. If it’s going to kill you, or at least leave you clinically depressed and/or insane, just let it go and start working on other things. Maybe someday the kernel of the story will come through in a different way. You may never get back to it—but you wrote. And that’s a win, isn’t it?
I’ve given up on a lot of ideas for novels, but they’re all, in some way, better than the one that preceded them. Every time I’ve wiped the slate clean and started over on another project, I’ve felt better about my writing and myself. I’ve even carved as many as four short stories and novellas from the big stinking carcass of a failed, awful novel. Any writing is productive writing.
Starting Anew
In sum, it’s a part of the writing process. I guarantee that every major, important, good writer has given up on projects, and those abandoned projects are just as important to that writer as the ones that got published—they’re fertile ground. They can be looked at as object lessons, and they may even have sections that are very good and can stand on their own.
It’s not the end of the world. Don’t delete those Word documents. You may have planted a seed, and when you return to that file, that stack of typewritten paper, that legal pad ten years from now, it may have grown into a tree. On ne saît jamais.
