“Writing a novel is like paddling from Boston to London in a bathtub. Sometime the damn tub sinks. It’s a wonder most of them don’t.” Stephen King
I saw an article in the New York Times on the weekend about why writers such as Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Stephenie Myers and Harper Lee abandon novels after investing substantial research, angst and years of work on them. The article got me thinking – why (and how) do novels get shipwrecked?
Now I am not talking about novels that fail to achieve lift off. God knows, I am sure we have lots of them…the idea that never quite got off the ground, the first few chapters abandoned…no, I am more interested in those books that are nearly done, or completed, which get abandoned despite the work that went into them.
Michael Chabon abandoned his novel Fountain City after 5 and a half years because it was “erasing me, breaking me down, burying me alive, drowning me, kicking me down the stairs” – clearly despair at a novel not working plays a large role in its abandonment! But there are also other forces at play – Stephenie Myers did it out of sadness after the first 12 Chapters of her Twilight spin off, Midnight Sun, were leaked on the internet. Harper Lee was stymied by her very success (” when you’re at the top there is only one way to go”).
So what has caused you to abandon a novel? Has despair every forced you to shipwreck a project despite the months or years invested? Do you think those lost novels will stay dead forever, or will you be able to rewrite them in the future a la Stephen King who turned a 30 year old abandoned book into the bestseller “Under the Dome”?
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
You’re reading my mind, Clare. I also read the NYT article about manuscript abandonment. I think it’s happened to all of us in some form or another.
I started a novel back in 1998 and later abandoned it—at the time, for good reason.
It was called THORPE’S CANDLE and was about terrorism, a rare mineral called thodium that could be used to produce cold fusion and WMD, Cuba, an albino mercenary named Rizben Mace, using a Soviet-era submarine to smuggle drugs, and digging up a WWII transport plane from under 200 feet of frozen Greenland ice. There was lots of action, adventure, technology, and other cool stuff. Everything I love to read in a thriller. I felt like I had come up with a unique, original method of threatening the U.S. by foreign terrorists. And I had about 60k words already written.
Then along came 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden. As terrorist plots go, his was not only pretty good, but much better than mine. So I reluctantly abandoned THORPE’S CANDLE. At the time, Bin Laden took all the oxygen out of the room in regards to my story. Abandoned, but not forgotten.
Over the course of the next 4 novels, ones co-written and published with Lynn Sholes, I cannibalized THORPE’S CANDLE. Names from that book showed up in our Cotton Stone thriller series. Rizben Mace and thodium were key ingredients in THE HADES PROJECT. And there are other instances of cannibalization. To the point that even if I tried to resurrect THORPE’S CANDLE, it would need a huge amount of work just to fill in the gaping holes carved out and placed into other books. But you never know. Anything’s possible.
As I have only one manuscript to my name at present, I do not have an abandoned novel, but I worry about it one day being abandoned (you know, life is so peachy & I have nothing else to worry about. LOL!)
I set it aside for a full year (will come back to it later this summer) while I begin work on another ‘script.
But I can easily see how perfection can lead to abandonment. You want so desperately for this story you’ve concocted in your head to come out in grand scale on the page but it just doesn’t. I’m passionate about all my story ideas (otherwise why write them) but the levels of passion do vary. And I’m very passionate about my first manuscript. It has to be just right.
And while it’s sad that the Harper Lees of the world don’t continue on, I understand that too.
It’s so easy to sabotage ourselves in this business.
I abandoned a novel once because of a hard drive crash. I was about 60,000 words into it. I had enough of it saved off in various places that I could have pieced most of it back together, but my heart wasn’t in it. I suppose now, if I decided to continue that story, I would start fresh because there is so much I do differently in my writing process now than I did then.
I sometimes wonder if I should go back and rework my first book into the series I hoped it would be. Now that I’m more skilled I wonder if it would be worth it? Any of you done that with book number one?
I believe it can be worth it to go back and finish or rewrite a past novel. Perhaps the idea was good, but at the time your skills were not quite equal to the task, or you had too much else going on in your life.
If the idea for a novel still haunts you, I’d say it’s worth it to at least read what you have and consider a fresh effort.
I am actually struggling right now with the WIP I am in. I had never planned to do a series. With so many original ideas running amok in my head I never saw a need. But readers of my first three military/action-thrillers all wanted to see more of certain characters so I decided I would put several into a final episode that brings together the other three loosely connected stories into a climactic ending of sorts. Well, it is turning into a bear. I don’t know if it is just that I didn’t plan on it initially, or because there are other stories pushing at the edges of my mind, or if it is just a symptom of depression after many readers saying how good they are but still being unable to get the first three sold traditionally and ending up self-pubbing them.
It’s been nearly two years on this one mss now, and while I want to finish it I find myself increasingly thinking that maybe I should just drop it and move on to the next story, a totally unrelated historical fiction piece set in Pre-Celtic Ireland.
And so I waver…two years is a long time to be at something just to drop it.
I too believe an abandoned novel can be salvageable sometimes – I don’t have any as yet more because Consequences of Sin was the first full length novel I had actually written. Most of my abandoned bits are those books that failed to achieve lift off! Joe, I think it’s great that you got to cannibalize at least but it was understandable that 9/11 would change things so considerably. I winder how many novelists burnt perfectly good manuscripts in the past in fits of despair…I think Evelyn Waugh may have…but aside from hard drive crashes (yikes, Timothy!) I wonder now if most of us ever can totally erase or abandon a novel. With computers they kind of live on whether we like them too or not!
I abandoned a novel because I loved it too much! I would rather spend time visiting with the characters than force them into a plot. I had good intentions, but ended up continuing to write out their developing, oddball, inter-dependant relationship. So I abandoned that insane love for the time being, and I’m working on stories that, while I love the main characters, I can make them dance through a plot. I plan to go back to that story wiser and better disciplined, maybe in a couple of years.
I have started several novels I have dropped because they didn’t feel right. And there are those my agent or editor probably thought I should have dropped.
I have several novels that fit that description. One is currently undergoing a total rewrite after several previous false starts, and I’m about halfway through for the first time ever. I’m terrified it won’t work this time either, but hoping it will.
Two or three others are currently high and dry. One of those has had a lot of work poured into it, includes lots of elements I love, but just isn’t gelling. That one may never see the high seas again. The others are just first drafts; they have a better chance of being revisited once I’m done with my current projects.
Basil, it must be hard knowing whether to keep with the mss or not. I always recommend taking a break and doing another project as maybe things will be clearer after that. Vee, I have had the same experience whereby I had to discard large chunks of a mss because they didn’t progress the story, they just satisfied my love of the characters! I also love the image of waiting until the novel might be ready to launch on the high seas. It can be stormy out there but at least we give them a proper send off! Some abandoned stories may then have a chance.
I have one finished novel and a number of abandoned ones.
There were a number of reasons I abandoned the ones I abandoned.
These largely had to do with the plots getting all snarled up in one way or another.
I am not “precious” about my work. I am a craftsman, not an artiste. Now, I am better at my craft, and when I come to a sticking point I just power through it.
But I have enough output per day that it sometimes seems smarter to just start fresh.
In a couple of cases I ended up revisiting my old work and it wasn’t as bad as I thought. Maybe I will do that with the rest of the manuscripts.
My goal is 12 finished novels this year.