Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
Ending Relationships with Grace and Kindness
Shelf Life would like to remind you that every relationship ending makes room for a new relationship beginning. Having relationships with the most people isn’t the end goal: At least, it’s not my end goal. Having high-quality, meaningful relationships with the people I care about is my goal. Therefore, although I’m a highly friendly and personable person, I don’t make new friends easily. There is a (figurative) dance card. It can fill up.
Today’s Shelf Life is not about ending personal friendships, although I suppose the thoughts herein could apply to that situation, but about how to know when to end a writing-business relationship, how to end it, and why you might need to end one. Writing feels like a solitary activity but it’s actually brimming with opportunities to collaborate with others. In the course of writing one story or novel, you might work with:
Alpha readers
Beta readers
First readers
Agents
Editorial assistants
Acquisitions editors
Copyeditors
Proofreaders
Indexers
Designers
And plenty more people I’m not thinking of right now. That’s a whole lot of writerly relationships that can spring from just one written work. Not to mention the friends and acquaintances who will ask you to send it to them so they can read it (some of them will read it but many of them won’t).
Not all of these writerly relationships will work out. Just like with dating, you have to embark on that relationship with someone to learn whether you and they are a good fit for one another. Not everyone is going to mesh the same. Not every agent has the right working and communication style for every writer, even if they often represent work that is similar. Not every copyeditor is going to understand and share the author’s vision for their work, even if they are otherwise a solid editor.
In short, sometimes you embark upon a relationship with a creative colleague only to find that you need to end that relationship at a later time.
Further, sometimes a relationship runs its course and ends. Not because of a bad fit or because of anything any party did, but sometimes relationships just expire and die a natural, peaceful death. You might have a creative partner who experiences a life change and, thereafter, doesn’t have the same amount of time, energy, or motivation for the partnership as they did before. This doesn’t mean you fire them as a creative partner or “break up” with them, but it might mean respectfully—and with gratitude—acknowledging that the previous nature of the relationship can’t continue and that the creative partnership should be retired.
One of the biggest paradigm shifts in my understanding of human relationships was when I came to understand that an interpersonal relationship can end without having failed. In other words, that interpersonal relationships can have other success metrics besides “endured forever.” I wish I had come to this understanding earlier in life, honestly.
Needing to end a writerly relationship—or considering whether you may need to do so—is not an uncommon thing for writers and other creative folks. I know I personally have had to gently end some beta reading relationships when one or the other of us in the relationship was not getting fair reciprocity from the relationship. I have friends who have left good agents to seek other representation because their agents were overworked and couldn’t make enough time, or because those agents didn’t have the right editorial connections to sell their manuscripts. In my time as a copyeditor, I had the experience of turning down an author who requested to work with me on a repeat basis because my schedule couldn’t sustain the volume of work they had to send me. My writing coach retired from writing coaching to do something else, and that creative relationship ended.
Sometimes these relationships end through ghosting: One party just stops responding and the relationship evaporates into the ether. This is a terrible way to end a working relationship, especially a creative one, because one party is left wondering what they did, or didn’t do, that caused the end of the relationship. Sometimes your mental health is in the toilet or life is out of control or whatever and ghosting may happen in spite of your best intentions, but generally we should strive to avoid ghosting others.
I’ll get into some better ways to put a relationship to bed but first let’s think through why you might need to end a creative relationship.
Here’s an important reason and a common one: Because you’re not getting what you need out of the relationship. Maybe you are seeking constructive critical feedback from a beta reading partner but all they have to offer you is praise—wow, I loved it, this story is so good! That’s always nice to hear but it doesn’t help you grow your craft.
Or maybe your agent doesn’t seem to have time for you. You request updates on the submission process, ask about which publishers they’ve submitted to, request a call to go through their feedback on your manuscript—but they never seem to have time to respond thoroughly. You might console yourself that this agent is just busy because they’re so good and in high demand—but are you getting what you need from the author/agent relationship?
Or maybe the developmental editor you’re working with to help you revise your novel just isn’t quite getting it. They’re making edits and sending notes about small grammatical items and making tweaks to prose, but not getting at the big-picture items you hired them to help with, like plot, pacing, and characterization.
At some point in any of these situations you might realize—this just isn’t the person for the job. Your expectations for the relationship aren’t being met. You’re not getting what you need.
Now: There’s always the possibility that your expectations are not reasonable. Managing expectations is part of any editor’s job, for one thing. I always introduce myself to an author and let them know what they can expect in terms of the level of editing and feedback, the timeline on which I expect to deliver their edits, and how they can communicate with me if they want to discuss an edit or how to disagree with my edits.
I do this because I don’t have an expectation that an author is a publishing-industry professional or expert. Some authors are, either because they work in the field or they’ve done so many books that they know the drill. But many authors are publishing their first or second book and they may not know what to expect from the relationship.
Sometimes authors have unreasonable expectations. For instance, that, as their editor, I will be available to them for an ongoing conversation about the manuscript as we work on it. Or that I can turn around copyedits to a novel in a week.
But if your expectations are reasonable, and they’re not being met, it’s time to move on. Conversely: If you find you can’t meet the expectations of the other party (whether those expectations are reasonable or not), then it might be time to release yourself from the obligation to do so.
The best way to end any working relationship, in my opinion, is with honesty and forthrightness to the point that you’re not lobbing accusations or assigning blame. It’s fair to state your expectation and to let the other party know how it isn’t being met. This doesn’t have to sound like the blame game.
For example, if your beta swap partner isn’t giving you helpful critical feedback and is just heaping on the praise, you don’t need to say it to them like that. You can say something along the lines of, “I’m looking for a different level of critical feedback on my work.”
If your agent has had your manuscript for six months without providing you actionable feedback or taking the manuscript out on sub, you don’t need to accuse them of not having time for you. You could instead start with, “I had expected that my manuscript would be ready for submission at this point, and I’m concerned that we’re not there yet.”
In my experience, there’s always a stinging feeling of being “broken up with” and, on the other side of it, there’s always a feeling of guilt and regret when “breaking up with” a creative partner or colleague. Emotions and egos tend to get tangled up with creative work and a rejection can feel very personal and painful.
To that end: Before ending a creative relationship, consider asking yourself whether there’s an opportunity to repair it by clearly communicating your needs and expectations so that the other party has an opportunity to amend. Or to clearly communicate with the other party that you can’t meet expectations, and ask whether there’s any wiggle room to dial back the expectation on both sides.
If the answer is no, and there’s no compromise to be reached, then you can end the relationship with kindness and gratitude for the work you’ve done together, and move on to creative partnerships that are more fruitful and fulfilling.
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