How to Know When to Shelve Your WIP

It’s a well-known fact that rejection goes hand in hand with writing, and that even the greatest authors—giants like Hemingway, Nabokov and Plath—have had their works rejected. But knowing that is a whole other thing than experiencing it on your own skin. Rejections hurt.

They hurt because they feel personal.

They hurt, because they imply you are not smart enough (“plot holes”), talented enough (“just didn’t care about the characters”), or skilled enough (“the writing didn’t grab me”). It feels like it’s not your book getting rejections; it’s you yourself—the person behind the work, the flesh-and-blood human being—that’s getting turned down.

Going through rejections is probably the hardest part of the writing process—or at least it was for me. In total, I sent out around 100 queries, and got 10 full requests. Apart from one R&R, all others came back a rejection. My writing friends assured me it was actually a good result, given that it was my first book, and written in my second language. But tell that to the perfecionist inside me.

I’m a person who likes to finish what she starts. And finishing this project for me meant getting an agent and getting the book published. When that didn’t happen, I got caught up in what I call the vicious circle of revision.

I hadn’t sent all 100 queries out at once. I’d sent them out in batches. After each batch of 10 or so queries, I went into a revision, trying desperately to fix whatever issue I could glean from agents’ feedback.

In total, my book has undergone a developmental edit, three full manuscript assessments, around a dozen of beta reads, and at least half a dozen critique partners’ reads.

And around just as many revisions.

This behavior—falling into the vicious revision cycle—is fueled by a misbelief: IF I MAKE MY BOOK PERFECT, IT WILL GET PUBLISHED.

This, of course, is a big, fat lie. First, no book is perfect. This is what I’ve learned by running my Writers’ Book Club; even the most accomplished books we’ve read—however critically acclaimed—had flaws, things that could’ve been done differently, or better; and had people in our club who didn’t particularly care for them. And then, there were books that were so bad we couldn’t understand how they got published in the first place. This is what makes everything even more confusing. Bad books get published all the time—which creates a cognitive dissonance when juxtaposed to the said misbelief—that making your book perfect is what will get it published.

Which is why everyone always says that publishing is subjective.

In any event, during my era of endless revisions, I created a techical debt. Technical debt is a concept borrowed from software development, that states that additional rework caused by choosing an easy or limited solution now—instead of using a better approach that would take longer—often creates additional problems. If technical debt is not repaid, it can accumulate ‘interest’, which makes it harder to implement changes. In other words, a technical debt is a set of issues that arise from fixing issues when you don’t have enough knowledge or time, or the right perspective to solve them the right way.

So what happened was—because I was still learning concepts like show vs. tell, character agency, narrative drive—in straightening one problem out, I would create new problems. Those problems slowly piled on top of one another, slowly seeping into the very fabric of my story, until I couldn’t tell one from the other.

Unfortunately, you can’t learn to write theoretically. You have to actually put the pen to the page. You have to write. And in a novel-length project, every mistake is a very expensive one.

Writing is a lot like knitting. Once you’ve weaved a thread in, it’s nearly impossible to pull it out without unravelling the whole thing.

Just to be clear: as a book coach and developmental editor, I fully and wholeheartedly believe in revision process and that it makes books stronger.

But be careful not to fall into the vicious circle of revision: going into a revision after revision that are making your book maybe 5% better (if that); when you change things that are of not much consequence at all (like opening with the character being in a garden instead of in her kitchen); when you rewrite the first chapter for the umpteenth time because you think this new constellation of words will be the magical one that will get you an agent.

The truth is, there are a lot of writers out in the world. There are a lot of works-in-progress. Even if just 1% of everything that’s written is good enough to be published, the marketplace in traditional publishing still wouldn’t be big enough to accomodate ALL those books. A lot of them will inevitably NOT get published, even if they’re great books (while some bad ones will manage to squeeze their way into bookstores).

So, even if you wrote the ‘perfect’ book, it might still not be among the few that get published.

In other words, you have to know when to stop.

Maybe your book is great, but the marketplace climate isn’t right for it. Maybe your book could, in fact, be better, but your current skill as a writer isn’t in a place where you can make it better. Maybe, over time, you’ve created a technological debt that’s become unmanageable, and that’s holding it back.

But how do you know when it’s time to wave a white flag and call it quits?

My Last Attempt At A Developmental Edit

Before I answer that question, I’ll tell you a story about my last attempt at a developmental edit. As a book coach, I’m lucky enough to be surrounded by wonderful book coaching colleagues. When one of them had offered to take a look at my book, I accepted, grateful for another set of (professional) eyes on my text.

We met the following week to discuss some business things and she told me she had read the first ten pages, and asked if I would like to hear what she has to say. I did. Mind you, she didn’t raise any earth-shattering issues. I’m advanced enough a writer to not be making the mistakes from what we call the Pyramid of Editorial concerns, and from what she read, she couldn’t assess if my overall story structure worked or not—so she mostly had issues with some phrasings and wordings. But my body responded like she was hitting me with a baseball bat. I curled around my chest as we talked and I had to fight the urge to put my hands on my ears to stop myself from hearing her speak.

When we ended the call, I cried. It was so hard to get another critique after yet another revision. Then it hit me. I didn’t give my manuscript to her to really get it critiqued. I gave it to her because I needed someone outside myself to tell me: I loved it. This is so good. It’s compulsive and I want to read the whole thing. Someone outside myself to tell me it was finished. Good enough. Done.

When that didn’t happen, I was devastated.

The experience from my Book Club kicked in again. Were there any of the books we had read that I wouldn’t have edited? Even Dear Edward, or Writers & Lovers—the books I admire and love to death; are they perfect? They sure come close, but no.

Then I realized, I could give my manuscript to my colleague and work on her feedback to make my book 2% better—or even just 2% different, because one person’s better can differ from another’s. Then I could give it to another colleague to tweak the following 2%. Point is, it will never be perfect, and at this point I’d just be tossing words around, rearranging them on the page, changing things of little consequence. And by these standards, my manuscript will never be done—simply because done in my vocabulary means agented and published.

There comes a time in a writing process when you are the only person who can say, It’s good enough. Or, It’s as good as I can make it in this moment, with or without an editor’s help.

If you’re finding yourself tweaking and retweaking your book over and over again;

If you find that you’re being asked (by an editor/beta reader/critique partner) to change things you have already changed, or even to switch back to the way the things originally were before you had changed them the first time around;

If you realize that the problems being raised in your writing are something that can be attributed to taste and not skillful writing;

If your abilities as a writer have plateaued at this particular moment and you’re waiting for your next growth spurt…

… It may be time to move on.

Revising is essential—as long as it is making your work qualitatively and substantially stronger. But if you’re just reassembling words, embelishing sentences, you’re running the risk of stagnating as a writer.

It’s also easy to get into the headspace of your work never being good enough—simply because of the fact you KNOW you’ll be a better writer the next day, month year; if you read more blog posts, listen to more podcasts, read more craft books, do more revisions. And since no writing is ever perfect, and we can always be be better writers, so it’s easy to postpone calling the book finished. But, at some point, you have to stand behind your own work. You have to say—this book is finished. It’s good enough. I believe I’ve done a good enough job.

Writers & Lovers isn’t Lily King’s first book. She had published half a dozen books before it came out, and I’d be curious to know how many unpublished novels she’d shelved before getting published in the first place. If, over all these years, she kept improving her first book instead of writing new ones, I bet that book still wouldn’t be as good as Writers & Lovers. It is through the process of writing several books that her skills and abilities for marvelous storytelling grew.

Ultimately, I accepted that, by my own standards, my book is good enough—or better said, the best I can make it in this moment.

Does that mean I’m as good a writer as Lily King or Ann Napolitano? Of course not. But I won’t get better by tweaking one book (with embedded technical debt), 2% at a time. I will get better by starting on a new project. Will that project have technical debt of its own eventually? Probably. I will make some mistakes, and I will try to resolve those mistakes by making some new ones because I won’t know any better—and that’s what writing is all about. It’s circular, not straightforward.

But one thing is for sure—I won’t make the same mistakes as I did the first time around. And by that measure alone, the following book will be a better one.

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I would love to hear your thoughts. Are you struggling to move on from your first WIP? Let me know in the comments!

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