Advice On When To Move On

The topic of finishing, knowing when you're done, is something I've obviously been thinking about and wrote about last time. So to help me consider the issue, I've been reflecting on advice I've received from teachers over the years.

I've studied under some good writers who have given different types of instruction and advice. Perhaps my favorite writer I took a class with had a process very different from mine. He spent months thinking about his stories. He would jot down notes, but basically do draft after draft in his head until he had figured the whole thing out and even polished the language. Then he would write it down, and essentially the first written draft was the final draft. I could never work that way. I simply couldn't keep it all in my head. Also, this professor was a great short story writer and not a novelist. I doubt his process would work on a novel due to the larger scope and the difficulty of keeping so much in one's head. Basically the way he ran his workshop classes was to examine the pieces students submitted, to look at the structure, the techniques, and analyze them. We often got into abstract discussion of about how literature works and why, but often that came at the expense of specific critique of the pieces themselves. Although I feel I learned some things in that class, those things were larger theoretical concepts, and I'm not sure the stories I submitted benefited a whole lot. Probably my professor didn't have much to suggest for how to change a story because once his were written, they were done, so he wasn't much for changing them after that point.

Another professor I studied under was an accomplished novelist. She had published five or six novels and many short stories over the years. One of the specific pieces of advice I remember from her was directly in response to the question of knowing when you're done. She said that is, of course, one of the toughest questions to answer and her best take on that issue was to quit rewriting when she felt like she was starting to make the piece worse. It's been a few years since she mentioned that, and I still reflect back on it as I rewrite, and the tricky thing is that when I approach a piece I haven't looked at for a while, I usually spot things to improve. I have one story I've been working on for over four years, and I revised it again as recently as a month ago, and I think I was still improving it. So on the one hand I think I should continue to work on it since I haven't started completely messing it up yet, but on the other hand I think at some point I have to move on, retire it, and work on future pieces. I don't know that I've reached that point yet with this particular story. Most of the stories I've written over the years ultimately were nothing more than learning exercises, but I still feel this one is good and will be published eventually.

I asked another professor about his thoughts on the issue of when do you know you're done. I suggested that maybe you can tell you're finished when somebody finally publishes something. And he said that even then, it's not that clear. He was at that time editing a short story collection. The stories had previously been published in magazines, and the collection had been accepted for publication. Even so, as he went back through it, he found some stories he still wanted to rework beyond simple edits. I recently read an interview with Tobias Wolff about his new story collection, which includes revised versions of stories he published years ago. And he's certainly not the only writer to keep returning to the past and revising it. So I don't know. I guess the difficulty is to avoid winding up like the writer in Albert Camus's The Plague: he keeps rewriting the opening passage of his novel, trying to get it perfect, and since he never moves on from the beginning, he never completes anything.

I guess I'd rather move forward and accept that some of my past work isn't as good as it ultimately could be, but in the end produce more. If I wind up writing a great novel, but it's my seventh novel and the first six were learning experiences, I still think I'd be happier with that than if I spent twenty years to produce one novel that was ultimately great.

In part my desire to move forward comes from some other piece of advice whose source I don't remember. I think it's important to move on when the passion dies. This is a difficult continuum, however. There are writers who write a passion-fueled rough draft, can't stand to rewrite and so they quit there. That doesn't seem like a good way to go. But if I write, rewrite, revise, rewrite, revise, edit, polish, rewrite, edit, etc., etc. and I've gotten the piece far, but I've reached the point where, despite liking it as a story and feeling it's good, I'm getting sick of it, well I think that's the time to move on. If I'm at that stage with one piece and another piece is taking over my mind more and more, I think it's best to move on to that next piece. Now it's certainly possible that the earlier piece will force it's way back into the passion part of my brain and I'll return to it down the line, but still, it's not necessarily the most productive to rehash the same thing forever.

One final thought on this issue is closely related to that previous idea: as I improve as a writer, I think my ideas get better. I wrote my first novel between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-six. I have no regrets about writing it. I learned a lot from the experience of drafting, rewriting, submitting it to workshops and a writers' group, and ultimately defending it as my MA thesis. But the basic story was not necessarily the most interesting thing in the world. As with many first novels, it drew heavily on my own experiences, and it had the kind of plot that might simply be too minimal to ever be of much appeal to most readers. If I were to continue working on that novel until it reached the level of being a great novel, I suspect it would have to change so much that it would barely resemble the original. So if the final version is going to be so different, why not actually do something different? Rather than being burdened with that history, it's better to start fresh. My second novel moved further from my own experiences, but still has some limited scope. I think this book is good, and I hope to see it published, but I know the story is limited and will not appeal to many readers. But I have other ideas for future novels that have the kind of premises that I think have much more potential to bloom into something great. And I think it's because as I head into my thirties, my views of the world are larger and more interesting than they were when I was in my early and mid twenties. So that's one more reason to keep moving forward, to progress to the next piece instead of rehashing the old ones forever.

Finishing: Yeah Right

So I set a deadline for myself to have an additional revision done in time to enter a contest. I need to have my manuscript finished and in the mail by November first. I've been doing revisions on the computer, printing out the new pages and then going over them once more with a red pen in an effort to catch all the little issues. Last night I got all the way to the end of my book, and so I'm ready to print out the remaining pages and do the final read through and then input the additional edits. I still have a week before the contest deadline, and it definitely looks like I'll make it in time. And the timing couldn't be better.

Unfortunately, my life is squeezing me so I'll soon have even less time to work on my writing. I'm being promoted at the book store, which is great in that I'll make an extra twenty-five cents per hour (Hooray! My income this year might even hit five figures!) and will even soon be eligible for some minimal health care benefits, but I'll also be working more. Rather than being at the book store twenty to thirty hours, I'll be there thirty hours a week minimum. On weeks when I don't have student papers to grade, I'll still be working about fifty hours a week. When I do have papers to grade, it'll be sixty plus hours. This coming week I'm working seven days. And that means the little time I currently find to write will be even scarcer.

Anyway, the sound of violins behind me is distracting. Where was I going? Oh, yeah. Finishing yet another revision. I don't know if I'm actually done. Is it ever possible to be done? I'm sure there are improvements I could make. My newest draft is the tightest, and shortest, version of my book. The length concerns me a little bit. Although it's still a three hundred page novel, double the minimum length for what would be called a novel as opposed to a novella, it's still not a long book. And I have had a few of my early readers who felt like they wanted more, that they would like to spend additional time with the characters. That, of course, is one of the greatest compliments I could hope for, but it also makes me wonder if it should be longer. Basically I have three separate story lines following three major characters, so although the book is one cohesive piece, it's in a way three linked novellas. So I can understand that a reader might want more of each. I have a few ideas for additional chapters I could include, but I'm reluctant to keep writing more. For one thing, I've been working on this for years already and just want to move on. But, more importantly, I feel like the book is tight. Even though it's not a plot-driven book, the major plot points work together pretty succinctly without major digressions and insignificant details. I'd like to think I've got on my hands the type of novel somebody might pick up and feel compelled to keep reading and finish in a couple sittings.

But anyway, I think I might have begun writing this post with some sort of point in mind, though I'm not entirely sure what that point was. It might have had something to do with the old issue of having trouble finishing. I'm pretty sure it was something like that. And the final thought for the moment is this: although I'm sure I could keep working on this book, keep writing new bits and pieces, keep editing for the clearest, most engaging prose, reconsider and evaluate every decision I made along the way, I'm not going to. I'll enter this new version in that contest, look for other such contests, check into small presses who might be interested in a first literary novel, query agents who probably won't be interested in a first literary novel, and move forward with the next novel.

Many times over the years I've had students approach me asking if they could revise a paper an additional time after the final draft in order to improve their grade. For my own sake, I can't keep grading draft after draft; I obviously don't have the time for that. But for their sake as well, I recommend moving on. Instead of trying to juggle one more revision while also writing the first draft of their next paper, it's better to learn from the previous essay and apply those lessons to the next one. And that's what I need to do as well. It might be that my book still isn't where it needs to be, isn't tight enough or long enough or whatever enough to get published. But rather than spending another year on it, I'd rather move forward. I'm a better writer now than I was when I started this book, and the next thing I write should be better than this one. It's possible (although depressing to dwell on) that I'll have four or five novels written before one makes it out into the world. But that's how it is.

Finishing

It's always a bit tough when I'm not absorbed in something. I find that my typical response when I reach a finishing point, whether it's completing a draft of a novel, a major revision, final polish, or graduating, my next mood tends toward the depressed. I work hard, put in a ton of effort, and then there's such a strong anti-climax at the end. I've felt this when I did theatre and would direct a play: weeks were spent rehearsing, and then opening night arrived and I had nothing more to do with it. But probably the greatest example of this is with a long writing project. After all, at least when one graduates from school, there's a level of social understanding that something worthwhile has been accomplished (okay, maybe nobody thinks that about getting an MFA). But if I've spent two years working on a novel, and now I've finally completed the absolute polish, what has truly changed? I went from doing something by myself at my computer to not doing that. I'm not suggesting I want sympathy, I'm just tossing this out there as a sort of odd experience. For me although it's exciting to know I've done something, it's also a bit depressing.

A large factor in this anti-climax is due to how much I like writing. When I'm really caught up in it, it's absolutely the most fun thing to do. Even when it's more of a struggle, it's an exciting struggle, like trying to figure out a complex puzzle. Personally, I don't really get Sudoku, but I appreciate why other people would enjoy it because I like that aspect of creating a story where I have to be precise and get everything to work in the exact correct way or it won't hold together. So going from actively being absorbed in something I love to not having that in my life sends me into a bit of a funk for a while. So I find the best solution to this is to dig into the next thing.

Between finishing my first novel and beginning my second, I was busy with other things, so after the inital blues of not having my first novel constantly in my thoughts I noticed the absence of writing a bit less than I sometimes would. I packed up my life in Maine and traveled across the country, spent weeks visiting my family in California, including my then two year old nephew and newborn niece, and then I drove north to Alaska to begin an MFA program. These things worked as distractions fairly well. But Also during this time, I was thinking about the next book, which at the time I envisioned as a collection of inter-related short stories. And before I began working on the new novel as a novel, I had begun some of those stories and I tried to figure out how the others would work together. Then I also tried to do some other stories, hoping to compose something that I could publish in a literary journal, boost my resume and start getting a name for myself.

My experience in recent months has been a bit different. I finished my MFA with the novel as my thesis, but I knew I had more work to do with it. Whereas my first novel was a great learning experience, I have no plans to attempt to publish it, but this new one is different. It's a better book, and I felt that with a few more months work, I could get it to the polished stage it needs to be in order for somebody in the publishing world to be interested. So I was out of school, and decided to take a few months to work full time on the book without the distraction of a job or basic life responsibilities (A gigantic thanks to my parents for letting me stay at their cabin, which made this option possible). This worked amazingly well, and I think I probably managed to get more time in additional revisions than I could have if I spent another year working on it while also working full time. But this left the problem of having nothing else on my plate when I finished. The anti-climax came big because I had no other major distractions, and so I went from many hours a day spent on this novel to nothing. From the perspective of an outside observer I'm sure it doesn't seem that different. I was an unemployed guy who sat at a computer fiddling around, and now I spent less time at the computer. But for me, it's a tough transition to make. The driving force in my life is one day no longer there, and I have to figure out what to do with myself.

So the logical solution is, of course, to start something new. But, alas, that isn't always so easy. But since I see this post is getting a bit long, I'll let something new wait for next time.