The Sunk-Cost Fallacy
I did the thing again, y’all, the thing where I wrote your article for today and then just now I pushed it back to a later date and wrote a whole new one and if I don’t stop doing this my partner will be disappointed in me, I have been coming to bed very late on Shelf Life Eves recently. This is now the third article in my folder labeled 5/25. Things are getting out of hand.
I don’t know who needs to hear this but today is the sixteenth anniversary of the time I made a terrible mistake that I thought I’d have to live with till I died, so it’s a good day to remind you that no matter how late you think it is or how stuck you are in some rut, you can always change things for the better. As I wrote that (that, right there, the previous run-on sentence), I thought, you know, sunk costs like that really have broad applications for writers and people who want to start writing and—
And now it’s quite late because I did the thing again. One of these days you’re going to get the article that was meant for (checks notes) last Thursday. But today is not that day.
A sunk cost is any cost you have incurred and cannot get back. This is money that has been spent on something nonrefundable, or time or energy spent doing something. Once you’ve spent the resource, it’s gone; you can’t get it back.
Rationally speaking, a sunk cost should not affect one’s future decision making. In practice, we let sunk costs influence our decision making all the time because we subscribe to the sunk-cost fallacy, the belief that a sunk cost justifies further expense. This is the origin of the phrase “to throw good money after bad.”
Let me give you an example: You make a reservation for a hotel stay and pay a nonrefundable $100 deposit. That $100 is a sunk cost. Once you have made the deposit, you cannot get it back. You later decide that your circumstances have changed and you no longer wish to go to the hotel. If you go anyway, you will pay the balance of the hotel cost, related transportation costs, and you will spend your time and energy on the trip.
We tell ourselves, “Well now I have to go, or else I’m out that $100 deposit.” The deposit is already gone whether we go or not. We are already out the deposit. The deposit is not in play. What is in play is the additional money, time, and energy we will use to go on the trip that we no longer want to take. The additional costs of going through with the trip are the “good money” that we throw after the “bad money” (the deposit).
“Good money” isn’t always money. You can get more money. Sometimes “good money” is years of your life. Those are harder to come by.
I’m highly susceptible to the sunk-cost fallacy, which I suspect is largely down to how stubborn I am and how reluctant to admit I have made a mistake. A decision to which you have committed yourself is the same as a sunk cost. If it was a bad decision, the wrong decision, you can stick with it because you don’t want to admit failure and keep throwing “good money” after it, or you can cut your losses and move on.
Writing that you have written is sunk. The energy you have put into writing it is sunk. You can’t put the ink back in the pen. Again, this isn’t good or bad—it’s just sunk. You might add to it or you might abandon it but you’re not getting it back.
Whenever you write you gain experience writing. You level up your writing abilities. The more you write, the better you get and the easier writing becomes. Unfortunately, this means you sometimes have to murder some darlings. I’m going to spend the rest of this article going over some of the ways I see writers including myself fall prey to the sunk-cost fallacy to the detriment of their writing growth and careers.
First of all, know thyself. You have to know why you write and what your goal for writing is. A couple common ones are “I want to write a complete, finished piece,” or “I want to publish a book and see it on a bookstore shelf.” Perhaps you don’t have an intention for your writing to be shared, you only write it to entertain yourself. If that’s so, you probably don’t need any of the advice I have because you already know what entertains you and there is no need to hone your ability further. But if you intend to share your writing one day, if you want to improve the craft to develop publication-worthy finished pieces, then sometimes you’re going to have to scrap some work.
Sometimes you gotta throw the whole manuscript away. I said what I said.
I was reading around Tomi Adeyemi’s website one day (years ago) and I read something that felt like a puzzle piece clicking into place. Tomi Adeyemi, if you don’t know, is the author of Children of Blood and Bone, which she sold as the first in a three-book series in one of the biggest YA deals ever brokered, which she sold film rights to before it even came out, and which debuted at #1 on the NYT Bestseller list.
The thing I read that struck me is that Ms Adeyemi had been working—unsuccessfully—on a manuscript for three years prior to beginning work on Children of Blood and Bone. Then one day she got hit with a new inspiration and she gave up on the thing that wasn’t working. The manuscript she had been working on for three years went into a drawer and she started something new. She made the really smart choice that a lot of writers don’t—she was willing to chuck three years of work in the bin to move on to bigger and better things.
This isn’t unique to Tomi Adeyemi. There’s a lot of advice out there to go ahead and write your first novel and then throw it away (or put it aside somewhere) and start work on the next one, which is more likely to be your first publishable novel. The experience you gain writing your first novel-length manuscript is vast. If you can keep driving a story forward for 40,000 or 60,000 or 80,000 words, even if the manuscript or partial you end up with is garbage, you will have learned indispensable writing and storytelling skills that you can apply to all your work going forward.
The time, the effort, the blood, sweat, and tears that produced the manuscript (or partial) are sunk costs. It’s not easy to write a manuscript. Next step is harder: You have to evaluate critically, dispassionately, and without succumbing to the sunk-cost fallacy, whether to revise the manuscript you created or start again on a new one.
When is it time to evaluate your work-in-progress and see if it’s time to abandon ship and try something else? Every time you sit down to work on it, for starters. In seriousness, though, when you are stuck.
When you’ve lost inspiration and you can’t see where the story goes next.
When you’ve lost motivation because the story no longer interests you.
When you’ve got an unresolvable plot issue and your story falls apart.
Sometimes you can jar these things loose and get moving again by working with a writing coach or participating in a writing group or a critique group, and sometimes you can’t. When you can’t, your options are to keep hammering away at the thing that isn’t working for you, sinking more of your time, energy, and creativity into it; or you can cut your losses and move on to something else.
The important thing is you’ve already made the effort to write as much as you did. You do not lose anything by giving up on the work and going in a new direction. The work has already paid out for you in terms of the experience you gained writing it.
The best medicine being prevention and the second best medicine being Vicodin (obviously), I have a few suggestions for anyone who is preparing to embark on a writing project or who is out there treading water in the middle of a manuscript and wondering if they should keep paddling after the boat or head for shore.
Don’t Start With Your Biggest Idea
I suspect most starting writers have an idea they think of as “their baby.” You’re encouraged to, after all. Everyone gives writers advice to write from the heart, write what matters most to you, write from a deep emotional well, your manuscript will be your baby, et cetera. I don’t advise it. I mean if it’s what you want to do, don’t let me dissuade you. I’m not the boss of you. But if you have a big, complex, challenging idea that you are deeply emotionally attached to, there’s no better way to discourage yourself from writing than to start pounding out your first-ever pages and realize that your baby is not as beautiful as you imagined.
If you’ve got one idea in your mind and that’s what you want to write and you’re excited about it and it won’t let you go, then by all means have at it. I’ve met a lot of folks who come to writing this way, especially memoirists. The other kind of nascent writer is the person with ideas squirreled away all over the place, stuffed in every pocket—some they’re more attached to, some they’re less attached to—this advice is for y’all. Evaluate your ideas critically in terms of qualities like:
Number of characters
Number of different settings
Complexity of plot
I humbly suggest starting with a simpler, smaller idea rather than a complex epic. You’re more likely to get all the way through. Usually, masterpieces come later in the creative career than earlier. Never mind about M. Night Shyamalan.
If you’re the writer who has one idea that’s driving you forward and you can’t imagine writing something else first as practice, consider developing a few short stories from parts of that idea. Plenty of famous novels have started out as short stories, and the practice of writing a shorter piece all the way through with a concrete middle and end will still be good practice for the long novel road ahead.
Don’t Waste Resources on Life Support
When you complete a piece you may be tempted to jump into the revision process right away—tapping your beta readers, rereading the piece, picking out contests to submit to or agents to query. As I discussed in my article on attacking your first revision, the first thing you need to do is put that piece in a drawer for a while and get it out of your mind. My advice is to work on some other creative project for a bit to really get some mental and emotional distance from the manuscript. Leave it in the drawer for a month if you can.
The next step, before you start revising, is to decide if this manuscript represents a project you should put more time and energy into. This is the time to compare what you have accomplished against your overall goal. Was your goal to complete the first draft of a novel? Then you are done; you have achieved your goal. If you want to work on the project more, it’s time to set a new goal. Was the goal to publish a book and see it on a store shelf? Then you have to ask yourself: “Is this a manuscript that can become publishable? Is it not only good but also marketable?” And you have to answer honestly.
Listen, this step sucks. Sometimes the answer is going to be no. I’ve got finished pieces still in the drawer for which the answer was, honestly, no. This is good, but it’s not marketable. This is not marketable, and it’s also not good. At that point you have to weigh what it would take to get that manuscript good and marketable and sometimes—oftentimes—that’s more work than just writing a whole new manuscript.
Be honest with yourself when you evaluate what you have. The experience you earned writing that manuscript won’t be taken away from you if you put it aside and start something new.
Don’t Be Afraid to Quit
Finally, don’t be afraid to quit partway into something. A lot of us were brought up with a mentality that once you commit to something you have to see it through or you fail. That’s just not true of everything. Yes, if you begin cooking dinner and then halfway through cooking you walk away from the stove and go to the Olive Garden but you leave the burner on and your house goes up in flames, then you fail at cooking dinner. But you get breadsticks.
Seriously, if you know something is not working there’s nothing wrong with cutting your losses and moving on to something else. I have done this with jobs—I worked at the LockMart for eight weeks and then I noped right out for greener pastures. I am happier for that decision and never regretted it. I have done this with relationships of all kinds—and I have never regretted ending one, not once in my life. I have only ever been happier for ending them. I have only regretted not ending relationships sooner.
Not every ending is a failure. Moving on to something new isn’t a sign that you failed at the previous thing. Break yourself of the belief that winners never quit and quitters never win. Tying yourself up with something that isn’t working is not ever going to lead to a win.
Winners quit things all the time. Bill Gates quit Harvard and then he started a business and then he quit that business and then he started Microsoft. Evan Williams started two businesses he had to walk away from before he founded Twitter on the third try. Tomi Adeyemi quit working on her manuscript and then started a new one that went on to be a bestseller. Quitting doesn’t mean you’re not a winner. Quitting is how you become a winner.
Jettison whatever isn’t working for you. What you’ve spent already is a sunk cost. You don’t have to keep sinking.
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This is just the thing I needed to hear (read) this week! Thanks!
Definitely easier to let go if something else is calling you. But sometimes that something else won't call unless you let go. Like a cutting loose from a relationship, you might have to be willing to be alone for a while.