Killing your darlings...
…or your entire
manuscript?
I recently had an email
from a writer who I very much admire telling me that she had thrown
aside a book she had been working on for too long and started a new
one. My stomach went into
spasms of disbelief. There is, in my opinion, nothing this woman
could write that wouldn’t be superb. How could she throw away a
story? Why would I never get to read it? WHY? WHY???!!!!
And then this horror
happened…
I remembered an entire
manuscript that I had worked on for over six years and then thrown out as
rubbish in a sealed and heavily tied metaphorical bin-bag. Somehow,
escapologist that it is, the story released itself from said metaphorical
bag and knocked on the door of my brain.
‘Hiya,’ it
whispered. ‘You thought I was dead, didn’t you? Well, guess what?
I’m still very much alive and I have a feeling that if you spend
just maybe another six days… months… years on me I will be the
BEST BOOK THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN. Or at least passable.’ (Cue evil
laugh.)
And there it is,
ticking away at the back of my mind again. I run through the plethora
of wonderful fictional works I’ve read and it is in no way as good
as those… but then I’ve also read a few disasters in my time too
and it’s not that bad, is it? IS IT??!!
By the way – it is!The characters had been
yoga-d into positions that are in no way credible. The situations
have been manipulated to the point of snapping. The plot has holes
that could be used to strain pasta if they weren’t so big that the
pasta might fall straight through.
And here I am again,
the Adrian Mole of my own work, marking my submission to the BBC as
Urgent. Thinking again of writing the fictional equivalent of
the Father Ted Eurovision entry ‘My Lovely Horse’. Ready and
willing to squander even more of my life on that last dying breath of
a hollow and pointless manuscript.
How do I stop myself
from taking this route? There is no map to show me the way out. I
have no-one to ask for advice other than my husband who would no
doubt tell me that my writing is brilliant whilst plugging in his
headphones and painting open eyes on the lenses of his spectacles.
Usually I end my blog
pieces with some vague stab at wisdom but not this time I’m afraid.
I don’t know what to
do.
I don’t know how to
stop myself from wasting another six years working on a story that
has flatlined.
I need advice and I
need it ever so quickly.
Maybe before I begin to type…?
By Eloise Williams
5 comments:
Have a symbolic burning of all your notes for it. Find a lonely beach, gather some driftwood, make a bonfire and then place notes on fire with all due ceremony, then dance around fire, drink whisky/tea/hot cocoa, watch the dying embers fade and return home to work on new project...
I completely sympathise as I'm in a v similar position re an adult novel I wrote & submitted as part of an MA in 2005. It was edited by different people after the MA finished and in the end, because I kept anxiously changing it in response to different people's comments, all the life went out of it and it doesn't work. However, I still love and think about the characters, so I am thinking of starting again from scratch - not working on the original manuscript but writing a synopsis based on my memory of the original story, maybe adding some new dimensions - strengthening the sense of place, changing the time period, writing some character sketches and just starting from the beginning again keeping my own voice. I don't know if I will regret it - but I do feel the characters deserve another go and I feel more confident as a writer now. So I am keeping away from the dead, heavily edited and rater mannered and self conscious literary style of the original, getting a new notebook and having another go! I don't know what the best thing is for you - if the story itself, rather than the manuscript haunts you, why not focus on that and start again like me? If it is only that you have a manuscript but you don't actually like it, and you just feel guilty, Becca's advice sounds good - and put your energy into something new which (that? sorry about grammar wobble) entices and enthuses you. Good luck!
'My Lovely Horse' - an inspiration to us all...
Decide you are never going to try to publish it. If you still want to pick away at it, it's because you like doing it and that's no more shameful than a liking for gardening or watching movies. So then you can do it, but just don't count it as work time. I have one I gave up on a year ago after about four years' part-time work. It's quite liberating. Think of it as a relationship. Do you want to stay married to this MS? If you do, it's worth working at it. If you don't, you can either stay friends or you can cut its trousers to shreds. Whichever feels right :-)
I've done the same thing - more than once. It's hard. You've been carrying the damn thing around for so long. You've chiselled at it every which way. You've tried to react pleasingly to all the contradictory feedback. And it still won't fire up. It becomes a curse, like being stalked. Cut it off. Don't answer the calls. Bury it in a tin case in the garden. Let that be a lesson to you. But what lesson. How do I know the next idea won't also be a fateful mismatch?
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