Ten years ago I wrote a novel, for which I had positive feedback both from my reader-commentator locally and from the publisher who rejected it.
Eighteen months after that I spent another eighteen months rewriting the story, to the extent that it was a different novel with mostly different characters, settings and events. This was also rejected, again in a kindly manner, by the same publisher and by the agent whom I shopped it to thereafter.
A little under six years ago I got an assessment for the manuscript, along with some excellent advice, and began rewriting, again with extensive points of difference, perhaps a year after that. The voyage to that point was accounted for in this article in New Zealand Books.
For the next four years I worked on another complete revision, very slowly and very part-time, until around a year ago I was within perhaps three or four thousand words of completion. And there I stopped, and spent a year not finishing the thing on which I had spent so long working. The ending, plotted, simply didn’t come into print. As the year passed, I felt myself move further and further away from my material. Following miscarriage and marriage, it was as if I were looking at something that someone else had written, about experiences and people that were no longer my inventions, and in which I no longer felt the same emotional investment.
Now I’ve decided to stop trying to finish the manuscript, at which I feel a slightly pathetic sense of relief and liberation. My ambition to tell the story has eroded and my imaginative interests moved on. Furthermore, my sense that some part of my self-esteem rests in finishing the material for publication has dissipated completely, even as other projects have arisen to hold rather more effectively my attention.
I need to make some plans for the other writing I’ve been doing alongside not-writing the manuscript, and I have an academic commission to finish over the next six months too. The fact of continually working away on these pages has given me an ease in the essay form that I never quite achieved with fiction. I am tempted to focus on and exploit that rather more — or not. I understand that what I wanted, all along, was to achieve formal elegance, and that this need not be focused in one form alone. (Exit, pursued by a bear.)
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
I have a related problem – I want to write a novel, but I feel too self-conscious to do it, which is a little dickish given the unliklihood that anyone would actually watch me as I type. Good on you for getting a great deal further down the road. The whole project might rework itself in light of
Well, that ended abruptly, thanks to my gammy computer. I was about to say … might rework itself in light of the experiences you've had recently. And if it doesn't, you'll do something else. I tend to think these labours aren't wasted, even when the benefits aren't obvious. But then, I sometimes make up illogical maxims so I can feel better about life.
As a writer myself I read this with enormous interest, and your NZ Books article with fascination, especially as you came at fiction from a very different angle than mine. It’s a huge thing to come to a decision to put the manuscript aside after such a lengthy history with it, but your reaction to the decision shows it’s clearly the right one for you. No effort is ever wasted, of course, and I hope that your overall sense will not be of time squandered but of a worthy endeavour no less useful for its lack of completion.
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I owe belated thanks to you for your kind words, which I digested with pleasure at the time of their writing. I have been struck during the last week or so by how pleased I remain with the decision. Editorial problems cross my mind, and I think how I don’t have to deal with them any more!
(Exit, pursued by a bear.)
How can I put this…? You’ll always have us.
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Sometimes the bear gets us; sometimes we get the bear!
Just for you then, my favourite bear. (Picture taken with a cellphone, but hey.)
The last post by Giovanni was This Is Our Land!
He (for I assume it is a he) is a kinetic wonder. What noise does a Milanese polar bear make? Is it rowwrrr?
It makes the sound of overconfident kids falling off it. THUD followed by WHAAAAA, in other words.
The last post by Giovanni was This Is Our Land!
Ah, the universal sound of grizzling, crying, affronted children!
I wouldn’t mention grizzling around a polar bear though.
The last post by Giovanni was This Is Our Land!