Question Week Day 3: Keeping the Joy

Before we start answering questions today, I thought we might give a little love to Justin Long. Isn’t he the cutest! I swear, I’m a total sucker for the cute and dorky ones. Watch out, Sailor Boy…actually, nevermind. You’ve got cute and dorky in spades, my darling. (Did I ever tell you guys how he flirted with me using obscure comic book references?)

I’m so happy that Accepted is doing well. I saw it on Friday Night, and it’s hilarious. Very old school college comedy. Like Animal House. The only downside is that I don’t know what Long’s character, Bartleby, saw in the blonde chick. She was boring. He should have gone for the peppy redheaded girl, Rory. Of course, I couldn’t stop laughing at “Rory’s” obsession with Yale. Was that supposed to be a Gilmore Girls shout out?

Anyway, back to Justin. I can’t tell you how happy I am that he’s finally getting the recognition I think he’s deserved since Ed. Nay, before that. He rocked the house in Galaxy Quest. And of course, since I don’t have TV, I might be the last Long fan to discover the ‘I’m a Mac’ commercials. Love. Love Love.

Okay, on to questions… Today’s question comes from the person who asked about getting back to writing after a break. Methinks she’s having some motivational issues:

Thanks for answering my earlier question – I hope you don’t mind if I ask another. As you can probably guess I’m trying to work a few things out here 🙂 So what do you do when you’re not “feeling it” with a WIP. For example, when do you scrap an idea, when do you push through or re-evaluate? I guess I’m just wondering what you do when you’ve lost that loving feeling over a WIP (sorry for the cheesy song reference, it’s been in my head all day). Can’t wait to hear what your working on next…

To be perfectly honest, at some point in the writing of every book, I decide that it’s a) complete and utter crap, b) that there is no way I’m capable of writing a book of this type/magnitude/tone/scope/etc., or c) that I just can’t write, full stop. Well, except for the first book. There, ignorance was bliss. I had different feelings while writing the first book. (See below.)

But with every other book I’ve written (we’re at six, now), I’ve always had at least one long, dark night of the soul about it. Or week of the soul, or month, or even season. Ask Marley. She’s probably lost count of the number of times I’ve emailed or IMed or even called her and said, “the plot, she’s broken.” Even with Secret Society Girl, which remains the easiest process of book writing I’ve ever had (including the first book, because I didn’t have that whole “can I actually write a book?” fear to accompany me with SSG). Since I always go through this, and I always finish the book anyway, I’ve decided that the fear is just part of my deal. It’s like the whole “stages of grief” thing? Denial and anger and etc.? I have stages of book writing.

Also, I was once given the advice that if I’m not on some level scared to write what I’m writing, then I’m not challenging myself. I’m just spinning my wheels. But that’s a blog post for another time.

The trick here seems to be deciding whether or not this is normal fear and trembling or if you really do need to scrap the idea and go back to the drawing board. As I said earlier, I’ve written six books. However, I’ve started more like a dozen. Some of these I’ve scrapped early on, after a chapter or two, when I realized that, as my friend Shanna Swendson says, there’s no there there. Usually I throw out an idea at this level because I realize that it’s not going to make a whole book. Not enough conflict, or story, or character, or what have you.

Sometimes, I’ve thrown away a book when I’ve gotten more than a hundred pages in. Actually, this only happened once, and if you’re an RWA member and received the August RWR with New York Times bestselling author Betina Krahn’s article about “Breaking Up With A Bad Idea,” then you can read about the same thing happening to her. (In passing, I have just finished the book she wrote after the break-up, The Book of True Desires, and it’s wonderful. Run out and buy it right away!) Like Krahn, I’d come up with the perfect title, and was trying to fit a book around it. The resulting manuscript was clunky and ham-fisted, and I knew it. (But it was a good learning experience, and I ended up making a secondary character from that book the heroine of my fourth completed manuscript, Night Visions, which won a Molly Award and got me some agent attention, so that’s cool.)

Again with the digressions! Forgive me, it was a long night last night, and it included Korean karaoke, so it was that kind of long night.

So, to get back to the topic at hand, it’s really tough to tell when you are not feeling it and when something really and truly is “broken” or not worth the time it takes to pursue. Since selling my first book, I’ve gone back and looked at other complete manuscript or story ideas and decided that they, also, needed to find a place under my bed.

Marley and I often discuss a phenomenon we’ve come to call “vampire eyes” after a scene in Interview with a Vampire, and one day, I may do a workshop on it. The short version means that after we sold, we found ourselves looking at our work through a completely different set of criteria and comparing the thing that sold to the things that didn’t. It suddenly became much clearer to me why the works that didn’t sell didn’t sell (which ties into that “move on” advice I was giving the other day) and I went to my idea file and basically cleaned it out. Some things may be manuscripts, but they weren’t going to be books, and as a commercial fiction writer trying to make a living, I have to choose to write the things I love that WILL be marketable (cf. Julie Leto’s “Ditching the Book of Your Heart…” essay for more in-depth analysis on why this is neither crass nor money-grubbing — and in passing, I feel like I should sticky-link this essay for the number of times I recommend it. Julie should definitely be giving me kickbacks of some kind).

So I think that as you get more experience in the industry, you have a much better idea of when you’re just whingeing about the birthing pains and when something actually sucks. So, what does that mean for a beginning writer?

It means suck it up and finish the damn book.

I only recommend ditching books if you’ve written one before. If this is your first book, and you’re more than, say, 50 pages into it (i.e., you know there’s there there) then you need to finish it. Period. Broken or not, sucky or not, unmarketable or not. And I know that the reason you’re not feeling the love could be any of those reasons — the book isn’t working, or you realize how much better you can be, or chick lit/cozies/revolutionary war historicals/what have you are dead — but I don’t care. Sorry to break it to you. You’ve got to write a whole book. It’s like bootcamp.

You know that first book I was talking about, way up near the top of the post? I was in the middle of it when I realized that it wasn’t exactly the best I was capable of. I realized it wasn’t going to sell. But I finished it anyway. (And maybe that’s easier to do when one’s first book is a 60k category romance than when it’s a thousand-page big fat fantasy quadrilogy, but hey, lucky me.) I told myself that if I was going to be a writer I had to see books through all the way to the end, and I forced mysself to finish that manuscript and revise it and query it and I kept the next manuscript — the Maggie winner, by the way — as a carrot. As soon as I finished the first book, albatross though it might be, I could start on something with real potential.

I’ve written before on how important I think it is to write a whole book when you are just starting out. It’s the thing that separates you from people who aren’t book writers. You get a different kind of vampire eyes when you finish a manuscript, no matter how sucky that manuscript is. I go to RWA meetings, and I go to writing conferences, and you can see it. The people who have written books and the people who haven’t.

So, if you haven’t written a book before, then you have to just gird your loins and do it. It’s good for you. Like apples.

If you HAVE written a book before, then you totally have the right to evaluate whether or not it’s working for you. I don’t know if there can be a checklist or flow chart that determines whether or not you should ditch. That’s a highly personal decision. Which is why you need the knowledge gained by experience of actually finishing a book to understand whether or not you are capable of finishing this one.