Iterate. Try Again.
What is it you need to quit?
Whenever writers exhort one another, “Don’t quit! Don’t give up! The only way to fail is to stop trying!”—I’ve always given it a bit of inner side-eye. First of all because I’m a contrarian, and I just don’t like being told what to do. I’ll give up if I damn well want to, thank you very much. But more because I’ve always thought, if you can quit, if you want to quit, then go ahead. Why should I tell you not to? Any artistic pursuit is done with little hope of remuneration or prestige, so why the fuck do it if you really just want to quit? It doesn’t pay the bills. Doesn’t provide health insurance. Doesn’t ingratiate you with your family. Is an expenditure of energy and time that is nearly impossible to explain to almost anyone who hasn’t drunk the Kool-Aid themselves. You want to quit? Go ahead. Maybe it isn’t your thing. Maybe there’s another art form that calls to you, or you want to through-hike the Appalachian Trail or go to law school instead.
But in the last couple of years, I have come to understand what “don’t quit” means for me, and it’s something I want to hang on to. I’m going to try to pin down something ephemeral here, so please bear with me if it wanders.
After I finished the final manuscript of my second book (in April 2022) and sent it off to my editor, I thought I had this novelist thing figured out (haha). I had a character and a sort of a vibe idea for the next book, and I was high on the buzz of my debut release. So off I went into the first draft of book three. I won’t drag you through the whole agonizing process. Suffice to say, over two years I wrote more than 300,000 words of draft and notes. I wrote at least a dozen different story ideas for this character and her world. I tried, and tried, and tried again. I’d get 50,000 words in and the story would grind to a halt. I hired two book coaches and got good advice from them. I talked it through with my husband and my sister and best critique partner—all excellent creative sounding boards. I ran through at least half a dozen pitches with my agent (No. No. No. Still no. No… She was very patient.) But I didn’t give up. I wouldn’t give up. I even wrote a break-up letter to my character, trying to let go and move on to something else, but we got back together. I literally banged my forehead on my desk. I wrote in withering self-hatred, knowing it wasn’t working. Yet I couldn’t give up.
Until I had to. My publisher declined to sign me to a new publishing contract, and—not exactly as a result, but simultaneously—I finally accepted that this thing I was trying to write had failed.
It was crushing.
It was also absolutely necessary.
Then I wrote something new in six months. At last! I won! I broke out the champagne… only to discover the manuscript had a fatal flaw that was not recoverable (which I may or may not write about someday) and I had to start over and entirely rewrite about three quarters of it. More months more elapsed.
I know there are authors—many of them literary giants—who take years or decades to write a book and then it goes out and wins the Pulitzer Prize and is talked about everywhere. But I’m not one of those people. I’m a cancer survivor with a keen sense of my own mortality and an impatient streak. I was pushing three years, and I wanted a book out of it for fuck sake.
And now I have a book.
I have a completed, revised, feedbacked, line-edited final draft of my third book—an entirely different story in a different style and genre from anything I have tried to write before. I’m getting ready to send it to my agent. I don’t know if she’ll like it or if it will sell. I know it’s not perfect. In fact, sometimes I look at it and wonder what it even is. But I know it’s a book and that it works. And that is a triumph, after having fought myself to a draw for so long.
If you must write, if it keeps burning in your consciousness, a struggling but stubborn ember searching for oxygen and fuel, then know this: not-quitting will eventually work. If you just keep trying, whatever that means, you will eventually break through. But this doesn’t mean you should gnaw on the same idea until it’s nothing but a meatless bone, licked clean under the dining room table. There are ideas and projects and whole manuscripts that you might need to small-Q quit in order to get to the thing that works. But if you just keep fucking trying, with humility and intelligence, stamina and tolerance for pain, then you will move forward. It will happen. You will eventually win the fight. And not by producing some glittering work of genius that opens the doors to all your shiniest dreams, but by stepping up to the next stair. Your skills will improve, your vision will clear, and you will write something better than you have written before. Something viable .
Dan Blank, whose book marketing newsletter The Creative Shift I highly recommend, wrote a post entitled, “No one knows what works, but doing stuff works.”
What does that mean? This: keep going. Explore the idea. Launch the thing. Take the risk. Put something out there. Learn from it. Then iterate and try again.
—Dan Blank
I have a book in a file ready to send my agent, ready to be read, possibly submitted to editors, possibly to sell. I have a book that is a book, and I can say to myself that I actually can write a book, and the first two were not a fluke. It’s partly because I didn’t quit, but crucially because I iterated and tried again.
When you’re struggling and demoralized—or at least when I am—“don’t quit” is not enough. If you’re anything like me, capital-Q quitting is not going to happen. So when you’re trying and trying and things aren’t working, you might do better to ask yourself, What is it you need to quit? What are you currently doing that isn’t growthful? Where are you just chewing over the same bit of bone? Then—and this is the hardest part for me—listen to the answer, and let it go.
Come write with me!
If you’re looking for some moral support in doing this very difficult thing, join me and my friend Tes for No Time to Write Club (also here on Substack). We’re doing regular, real-time writing sprints on Zoom and on the chat where we get together, say hi, check in, then quietly write together, using the collective focus and writing energy to goose our progress. We’re also doing Ask-me-anything sessions, a creative-process podcast, and more. Basically, we are showing up week in and week out, helping you (and ourselves) hold onto the thread and make your WIP a habit.
Yes!! Fab, well done Sara - for this post, and for your latest manuscript. I love "stepping up to the next stair".
I like your small q quit vs big Q quit explanation. Over the years with my writing I’ve small q quit several times but I kept writing. After several years of writing and 60 plus rejections from literary agents I quit working on my first novel and wrote a second novel. I’m now working on finalizing my third novel, though nothing published yet, and feel like this one is publishable. The difference now is that I’m no longer focused on a traditional publishing route via a literary agent. You could say that I small q quit going after a literary agent. For me these small acts of quitting are based on reality checks for what I write, military political techno-thrillers. While there’s an audience for my work, my books don’t align with literary agent big five press publishing route and that’s OK with me. I’m now looking for a small press or possibly self publishing.
I’m stubborn and never big Q quit writing, I just regroup after every hard lesson and keep going. I probably won’t make money or have massive sales but I’ll get my books out into the world and find my readers who will love my stories as much as I do.
Thanks for the encouragement to keep writing!