When to Fold Them
Be Prepared to Bench a Project
Every time I sit down in front of this here keyboard to begin a Shelf Life, I think to myself: “This is a topic near to my heart.” It is only by sheer force of will I don’t start every Shelf Life that way. My heart must be the size of North Dakota to have so much coastline that this entire sea of topics can touch it directly. Truthfully not all the topics are near to my heart; most are just near to the front of my mind at this very moment. But giving up on stuff is for sure a topic that is near and dear to my heart because I give up on stuff all the time, it’s one of my favorite things to do in fact.
There’s a big dumb myth in circulation that you should finish things you start. Persevere. See endeavors through to the end. Clean your plate. If you start reading a book, you should finish it. If you start writing a book, you should finish it. If you start watching Atonement (2007), you should watch the whole thing and definitely don’t turn it off after 45 minutes, even if you know it’s been 45 minutes because you’ve been glancing at your watch the whole time because your watch face is more interesting than the movie. And once you’ve finished your book? Don’t give up on it! One agent rejection? A thousand agent rejections? Never give in. Success might be right around the corner.
Personally, I’m a big fan of giving up on things that aren’t working for you. For instance, these might include:
Reading a book you’re not enjoying.
Writing a story that isn’t coming together.
Submitting a story to agents or publishers that hasn’t gotten any nibbles.
A process or habit that isn’t panning out how you’d hoped.
Atonement (2007).
Today’s Shelf Life is about how to decide when to put a project on the bench—or in the trunk—and move on to better things.
There’s no reason to believe everything you start has to be finished. You often can’t know whether something is worth doing, or whether you’ll enjoy something, until you start it. If you learn it’s not worth doing or you don’t enjoy it, you should simply stop doing that thing and move on to something else. Any time you spend on something that’s not working just because you think you should finish it is time not spent finding something that might work better.
I’ve written about the sunk-cost fallacy before so I won’t go into too much detail about it, but that is a mindset that comes into play when deciding whether to give up on something. You’ve already spent so much time on it. Maybe it’s a manuscript partially finished or a book halfway read. Maybe it’s a completed novel or short story with dozens of rejections under its belt. You can’t just give up on something you’ve worked so hard on—can you?
But the time you spent on that project is already gone. It’s used up, lost, and behind you, whether you finish reading, writing, or publishing the story or you give up. Whether you persevere with it or let it go has no effect on the time and effort you already sunk into it. In the present time, you can only control whether you sink more time and effort into the project—you cannot affect the time already spent.
You might believe that if you keep plugging away at, or polishing, this manuscript until it’s good enough, then the time you’ve already spent on it won’t be “wasted.” That time will have paid off. But there’s no promise that continuing to work on something that isn’t working will ever bring it to a completed or publishable state.
It may be that a project is worth continuing to work on; I’m not saying for sure that you should give up on everything at the first sign of hardship or rejection. But I am saying you should make a serious evaluation if something isn’t working out: Do you keep throwing more time and effort at at, or do you fold your hand and move on to something else? There may be a lot of factors that decide the question but “I’ve already spent a lot of time and I don’t want that to go to waste” should not be one of those deciding factors. That time is already gone. Don’t let it factor into the equation.
The truth is that not every story will work. Not every idea you have will become a viable story. Not every story you begin will make its way to a satisfactory end. Not every story you finish will be successful. This is just reality. Many authors write two or three books that never see the light of day before they write a manuscript that secures and agent, an editor, a publication date, a spot on the NYT bestseller list, and so on.
We all hear about how JK Rowling shopped Harry Potter around to so many agents and piled up so many rejections before she finally sold it, and that’s a story about how you should never give up, even in the face of many rejections, because your success is out there waiting if you just keep pushing and pushing for it. You can substitute other authors for “JK Rowling.” This is an oft-repeated (and true) story about Stephen King and Carrie, too.
We rarely hear about authors who wrote multiple novels that got trunked before they secured an agent on their third, fourth, fifth, or subsequent book. That’s a less popular story but still a common one. Tomi Adeyemi wrote a novel, shopped it around, realized it wasn’t going to sell, and gave up on it—then she sat down and started work on Children of Blood and Bone. James Joyce scrapped the manuscript for and threw it Stephen Hero in the fire; he started it over again and it became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
It’s a discouraging thought, right? You finished writing a novel. A whole novel. Now you have to face the possibility that it might never sell? That this manuscript your poured all your creative energy into for weeks or months or maybe years may end up in the trunk, never to see the light of day?
I think a lot of authors turn to self-publishing at this point, not as a carefully considered alternative to trad publishing but as a desperation measure—“I finished this novel and I’m not going to trunk it; I’m going to make it available for sale if I have to do it myself.” If one’s goal in publishing is to have a book available for sale, then this may fulfill that goal. If one’s goal, rather, is to sell units and amass readers then self-publishing as a last ditch effort to save a book from the trunk is not going to satisfy.
This is not a dig at self-publishing as a publication strategy. This is a dig at self-publishing a manuscript that really should have gone to the trunk.
When does it make sense to give up on a story? First of all, only the writer can know this with certainty. If the writer feels like there’s still life in a project, they’re the one whose time and effort goes into trying to push that project ahead and nobody else—no editor, agent, beta reader, or publisher—can decide it’s time to put that project to sleep. On the other hand, the writer may be moved to keep trying with a project that truly has no legs because they have an emotional investment or they’re suffering from sunk-cost delusions. So to help writers evaluate whether it might be time to say so long to a project that isn’t working, I have some guidelines that I follow.
When to Stop Writing
When do you give up on a manuscript in progress? Whether it’s a short story or a novella or a novel, a play, a memoir, or what have you—how can you tell when to retire it?
The good thing about retiring a manuscript in progress is you can always revive it. Nobody will suggest you delete it forever and wipe it from your mind. So, truthfully, there’s very little risk involved in benching a partially complete manuscript.
If you find yourself thinking, “I can’t put this on the bench, because if I do I’ll never come back to it!” then that’s a good sign to bench that project. It tells you the only thing keeping this project alive is your forward momentum. Nothing about the project itself is giving life support. Time to say goodnight.
When working on the project has stopped bringing any kind of satisfaction and feels like a slog. When you’re just going through the motions of working on it because you spent time planning it, but you don’t get any joy or challenge or energy from working on it. Bench it.
When you realize the story won’t work as conceptualized. This one is tough. Sometimes you’re working your way through a story and you realize it just won’t hang together for some specific reason; the logic falls apart, or the middle drags, or you just can’t come up with a good enough motivation to get Character A from Point 1 to Point 2, or the story can’t be correctly told from the point of view you’re telling it in—then you have a choice. Reconceptualize and start again, or bench it. Either way—don’t continue to push on past the point where your realize the story won’t work as planned. Start again or give up.
When to Stop Submitting
So you have a finished manuscript. This could be a short you’re submitting to mags and anthologies or it could be a longer-form work you’re submitting to agents or directly to publishers. How to tell when to throw in the towel?
Consider the quality of rejections. If you’re submitting to magazines, are you getting nothing but form rejections, or are you getting some personalized rejections mixed in? If you’re querying agents, or to editors at publishing companies, are you getting any partial or full requests? Or are you getting rejected just based on the query? Personalized rejections (for short fiction) or partial requests (for long-form writing) are encouraging signs even if they ultimately are still rejections. If you’re consistently failing to receive those encouraging signs, it might be time to give up.
When you’ve hit all your submission targets. When you start out querying you might have a list of a few “dream agents”—the agents who rep your favorite authors and who would be perfect for your work—and then a larger selection of agents who would be a good or great fit for you, and then an even larger selection of agents who would be fine. Likewise, with short fiction, you make a list of the magazines and anthologies you feel would be a good fit for your piece and check all your boxes. Once you’ve exhausted the list, you have a choice to either find more agents/venues to query/submit, or you give up. Ask yourself whether it’s worth it to you to move on to, for instance, agents you’re not enthusiastic about, or non-paying publications.
In all cases, the question is not whether to give up on this manuscript in favor of never doing anything ever again. It’s not this manuscript or nothing. The question is whether to keep putting your creative energy into this manuscript, which isn’t producing for you, or to instead turn that energy to some other manuscript, which might produce.
Not every manuscript is going to be a winner; not every manuscript can be. Every writer is only one person with limited creative resources. Don’t throw good resources after bad into a creative venture that won’t succeed.
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