According to my DMs, the thing that most seemed to leap out at people from my last post was the fact that I wrote an entire 80,000 word book and then just…set it aside and wrote a different one. People want to know if it’s painful to shelve a book, and my answer is: at first, yes, very, excruciating. It sucks so much and you feel incapacitated and demoralized and depressed but then…you get over it. You move on.
I remember listening to a podcast years ago, right after writing my very first book, hearing an author talk about how many books she’d shelved in her career. I remember thinking to myself, How is that woman still living? I will never. I could never. I would die.
Because writing a book is hard; I had just learned this firsthand. 80,000 words is a lot—a lot of research, a lot of mental exertion, a lot of time. Writing a book is like catching a wild animal.
No. No, I need a more violent metaphor. Okay, this:
Writing a book is like catching a wild animal, but the wild animal is in pieces, and that thing is elusive. And you have to attempt to put the pieces together while the in-pieces animal attempts to eat you and claw your eyeballs out. And there are 80,000 pieces and they are mostly nails and teeth.
(At least, it’s like that for me. Maybe other authors, like Nick Hornby or Rainbow Rowell who have written an inordinate number of novels and seem to breathe them out in their sleep, would compare writing a book to laying on a couch or falling down stairs made of cotton candy and landing on a giant pillow full of marshmallows. Or maybe they’re just really good with wild animals! Who knows?)
Anyway, when I heard that podcast episode I was really skeptical of the idea that a person could invest that kind of metaphorical blood, sweat, and [not metaphorical] tears into a project before realizing it wasn’t going to work/sell/be something into which they wanted to invest more. Surely you’d know a few chapters in? Surely you’d only let a wild animal take one or two bites out of you before you realize this specific one’s not worth the pain?
But now I get it.
My shelved book, which I once affectionately referred to as The TFLC but which now I don’t generally refer to much at all, was one I started writing in 2019. Valencia and Valentine had just come out and I was in the middle of copy edits on Sorry I Missed You. I wrote this post around that time, to give you some emotional context. I was tired. I had been unpleasantly surprised by how hard it actually was to send a book into the world and receive feedback from so many people all at once—feedback on the book, feedback on ME. This wild animal, which I had painstakingly pieced together and set free, turned right around and tore me to pieces. It was weird. I was sad.
But something I know about myself (and always, always forget) is that I have some serious emotional range. I’m like Celine Dion, but with feelings. I can hit all the notes. Where I differ from Celine is that I don’t tend to travel as quickly from one end of my range to the other. When I’m hitting the emotional high notes, I tend to forget that I’ve ever spent time in the lower end of my range. I sing entire songs in falsetto, entire albums in bass. This metaphor is weird and probably you can tell that it’s 10:05 at night and I’ve had too much coffee today but the point is that in October 2019 I was moping around my house like Eeyore, ears dragging on the ground, being all, I’ll never write another book and I hate the thing I once loved and what even am I if I’m not this and why do the fine people of Goodreads hate me so much…
So within just a few short weeks, I was singing high notes again (you can tell when you read this), and with this shift in the atmosphere of my head came a new book. I could picture the cover art. I could vividly imagine the characters milling around in my brain like actors backstage before the curtains open. I felt grateful and happy, I was living my dream life once again.
I started writing. I wrote fast. I felt like I had gotten a bit better at taming and assembling wild animals. I sent chapters to friends for feedback, and they were nice to me.
And then…welp. March 2020 happened. You already know what this means. The kids came home from school, the world shut down, everyone started fighting with each other (honestly, I think this was the thing that affected me the most). I was set to launch my second book in just three short months and instead of prepping for a book tour I was obsessively watching the news and attending Zoom birthday parties and not ever leaving my house.
I finished the book, but I did it in a fog. I sent it to my agent, but when she called me to discuss edits I found that I just couldn’t do it. Every time I opened the document I felt ill and the thought of spending more time in that world felt inexplicably bad. Maybe it was the pandemic, the uncertainty, the animosity, the isolation. Maybe the lingering stress of V&V’s launch was looming behind me or maybe the thought of SIMY’s impending launch was looming up ahead. Maybe it was all of these things and some other things too. Whatever it was, that book had bad vibes and I couldn’t get rid of them.
So finally, I set it aside and I’ve never picked it up again.
I think there are lots of reasons people abandon their books. For me, it was the bad vibes. For others it might be that the book was too hard to tame, or not worth taming, or not tameable, period. I’ve known people who have shelved really sweet books because the publishing industry just couldn’t see how sweet they were. I’ve known people who have shelved books because, simply put, they were tired of them. There are, I see now, no invalid reasons. My only advice to my past self would be to abandon an unviable book a little sooner. You can always come back to it, I’d say to me, but sitting here trying to wrangle this thing into submission is just wearing you out, and you’re starting to put the pieces together in ways that make zero sense. This book is all claws.
But, alas, knowing me I’d reply, Just let me try one more thing…
I can be so annoyingly stubborn sometimes.
Okay, where am I… Right, so I shelved that book. The TFLC. It felt like, if you don’t mind one more metaphor, setting a house on fire. Do you save stuff on your way out? Do you copy and paste your favorite lines into a fireproof document to come back to later? Do you take the best characters with you?
Probably the most pressing question: do you have the energy to build another house, knowing that burning it down is a thing that is, apparently, on the table? For a while, I thought the answer to this was no. You can tell not by a sad-sounding blog post or an upbeat-sounding blog post I wrote in that time, but by the fact that there were no blog posts at all. (Yikes, this blog makes me very easy to analyze.)
But the launch of SIMY was healing. I was ready, this time, for the public-facing elements of releasing a book, and for the weird personal elements too. I was ready for the buildup and the comedown and, honestly, I think a big part of it being better the second time around was that I finally understood how not a big deal the whole thing was. People send books out into the world all the time. Good books, bad books, mediocre ones. Some people love the terrible ones, some loathe the beautiful ones. It is, as they say, what it is, and I learned that you just have to do the best you can at capturing and assembling your weird book animal thing and then you have to take it out to an open field and set it free and run as fast as you can in the opposite direction so it doesn’t turn on you and tear you to pieces.
:)
After SIMY came out, I waited for another book idea to come along, because they are out there, roaming around, nonstop, and it did, and I wrote it. It was not easy; it had claws and teeth and chainsaws. This was fine, because it also had very good vibes.
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