Knowing When to Quit
And a new secret project
Hello Friend,
It’s been a lovely, quiet week here in Idaho, and at first when I sat down to start writing my letter for the week I thought I didn’t have anything to say. These chilly, slow days have a way of blending into each other and covering the events we go through under a blanket of silence, don’t you think? Of course, it isn’t true that nothing has happened in the past week. Maybe nothing noteworthy in terms of major life updates, but my mind has been busily chugging along as always.
For one thing, my writing has made a huge, but invisible to most, pivot this week. I’m shifting my attention from one hopelessly stalled project to another, invigorating, exciting one. I have always been a notably monogamous writer, devoted fully to one project until it’s completion. I can’t bear to have two things going at once in my writing life. My attention is already fragmented enough between my writing life and my mothering life without having multiple writing projects up in the air too. This creates a big problem when a project I’m working on reveals itself to be...uninspired. I find myself completely stuck, sitting at my desk for hours at a time unable to work. And since I have no other project in the works, this roadblock holds me back from writing completely. I fall out of practice. I grow resentful. It gets harder by the day to return to the desk.
Letting go of a project that isn’t working is difficult for a monogamous writer like me because I have no recourse to “putting it on the back burner” while I direct my attention elsewhere. There is no back burner. It’s on the scrap heap, and I don’t know if I will ever pick it up again. There’s a grieving process involved. Of course, I throw nothing away. The project has been filed safely, whether it ever gets looked at again or not. Perhaps one day I will look at it again and decide I was being overly dramatic that week in November 2022. I can pick it up again and nothing will have been lost. But for now? The project no longer exists.
So, this week began in a pretty serious hole. Feelings of failure and embarrassment tainted the first few truly cold days of the season and made the transition from fall to winter feel harsher and darker than I had hoped for.
Happily for me, creative energy—just like power—abhors a vacuum. An idea I’d been toying with in my mind for a while rushed in to fill the space the failed WIP had vacated, and by midweek I felt as free as the wind. The past few days have been some of the most creatively productive days of recent memory. I don’t want to spill the beans yet on what I’m cooking up, but suffice it to say that my writing life feels a million times more active and alive this week than it did last week.
I don’t want to make a habit of abandoning writing projects. I know I’m standing at the top of a slippery slope here, all too familiar with the vital importance of finishing what you begin in your writing life. To have anything to show for the work you put in, you must finish things. You must let them go into the world like children. There are no awards for poking about at various projects for months and years on end.
But not making a habit of quitting and stubbornly refusing to see the writing on the wall when a project is bad are two different things, I think. Learning exactly what that difference is has been my job for the week and, right now, I feel like I’m in a good place with my decision.
How was your week? Have you ever had to give up on a creative project before? What made you decide to pull the plug? I’d love to chat in the comments.
As promised in my last Friday letter, here is a collection of links to things that have made me stop and think this week:
These were my ways of tethering all of the little pieces of my soul left behind; of remembering what it felt like to love and be loved, to be safe. These impermanent pieces of art reminded me of times when I was not lonely. They whispered in my ear, “Everything will be alright. You too will persevere.”
And that’s what makes it tricky. My best thoughts come to me when I’m just writing for fun, when I’m not thinking about what other people will think when they read it. And yet, it’s difficult to combat the urge to capitalize off of these good ideas. To turn the story into a novel, or share it with a friend so they can tell me how good it is.
When I turn to Ovid, I do so to find hope or perspective in moments of crisis and despair. Ovid continually reminds his readers that, no matter how voiceless they feel, humans will always strive toward expression and agency. Tereus can render Philomela voiceless, but he does not silence her. Apollo may torture the satyr Marsyas for his artistic defiance, but he cannot stop the nymphs and woodland gods from weeping for him. Power can only extend so far. As Ovid tells us in the epic’s closing lines, not even Jupiter himself could destroy Ovid’s poetic achievement. Vivam, “I will live,” is the last, defiant word of this epic song.
Reading Ovid Today
And, finally, I discovered a great, new (to me) youtube channel this week. I think you’ll really like him.
Throughout college, I started writing on one or two novels. The overwhelming amount of writing my business courses required knocked me out of continuing them. My creative writing started with poetry so I always revert to it when I feel like I don’t have time to write. As of now, to counteract any sort of laziness or bouts of boredom with one project, I’ve devoted myself to either: writing on my novel, writing on my short story collection, or writing a poem. Whether it’s a sentence or a whole chapter, a line or a stanza, something will be written.