Office Hours

Dear Story, I Break with Thee, I Break with Thee, I Break....

Q.

How do you know when it's time to give up on a thing? I've been chewing on a story & without success for I don't know how many years. (Well, I do know how many years but I'm not going to tell you. It's too embarrassing.) Although I can't get it to go, I keep coming back to it. It's like a tongue to the socket of a missing tooth, or like a bad lover you keep coming back to, or like eating the whole bag of chips when you promised yourself you wouldn't. In the meantime, I have another story project underway whose segments, thus far, have been not only enjoyable to work on but have found success with some publishers. I keep stalling on moving forward with the more enjoyable project & going back to the "bad" story. I don't know if it's because the "bad" story really is something that I should push through on, that it's actually meant to be written & it's a case of my figuring out how to write it, or if I'm just, for some reason, afraid to go back to the more enjoyable project and see that one through. I literally wake up in the middle of the night with lines for the "bad" story, which I jot down, but the thing will neither congeal nor do I seem able to throw it away. Have you ever been stuck like this? And if so, how do you know when it's time to quit, and how do you do it?

A.

Hoo boy, yes, these feelings are very familiar to me.  Until recently, my answer would have been something like: “I assume that I can always finish a story and that, when a story locks up like this, it’s an example of it trying to ascend to its higher level.”  And then I’d invoke our familiar Einstein/not Einstein idea: “No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.”

But I recently wrote and polished and endlessly re-polished a story that I then submitted to The New Yorker, who rejected it and then rejected it again after more rejiggering.  And then I tried putting that story into Liberation Day and my editor at Random House agreed with The New Yorker’s opinion of it.

So, I’m reconsidering this “never give up” line of thought.  That particular story is not destined to be finished, I don’t think.  I may pluck out some of its better bits and graft these into something else but I think there’s something innately flawed about the story or, rather, about the intention with which I began it.  It’s kind of a political story, that attempts to talk about our American conspiracy-mindedness but somehow all of its energy is coming from a too-convinced point-of-view[1] , if you see what I mean.  There’s nothing much to be discovered.  All the big decisions were made before the writer started writing, maybe; it has a slightly sneering quality to it.

But, the thing is, I’m really not sure what’s wrong with it.  If I knew, I’d fix it.  But it feels like it has a taint of badness about it.  I’m kind of scared to even go back to it. 

A critic once said, of my work that I write better from a place of love than from a place of anger.  This was in a largely negative review, that I was trying hard to dismiss, as one does, but that line has stayed with me ever since, because there’s a real truth in it.  And I think this abandoned piece was an example of me writing from a place of anger, or, maybe, annoyance.

But in your case, dear questioner, I also find myself wondering if your “bad” story might be serving a purpose, in that it’s providing a form of cover to the “good” story.  Like, maybe it gives you something to do with the laboring, methodical part of your writing mind while another, deeper part, quietly thinks about (and occasionally comes out to work on) the “better” story (?).

Imagine someone who is writing a difficult, important letter to someone they love, about an essential topic, but this person is also, let’s say, at the same time, messing around with some housework – doing dishes or laying out the stuff for the Christmas tree, or whatever.  She’s expending a lot of labor on those tasks, and a lot of her surface-mind, which somehow ensures that when she dashes back over to the letter that’s sitting on the table, what she has to say will be essential – there’ll be none of that “I’m just writing in order to work” energy.  (That energy has already been expended on the side-tasks.)

This used to happen to me when I was working as a tech writer – because it was quasi-risky, I’d only go to a story when the desire was strong and some notion or development in the story had come to me spontaneously and demanded to be recorded.  So there was no feeling of, you know, “toiling in the vineyard.”  Whatever I wrote was coming out of some genuine feeling of inspiration.  (I’m not sure this is a way to work long-term, as “the muse likes to find us at our desks” and so on.)

So, maybe this “bad” story is a strategic side-task your mind has given you, to keep your more deliberate, rational mind busy while it works down deep on the “good” story?

One way to test this, I suppose, would be to put the “bad” story away and focus all your energy on the “good” project, and see how that goes.  Does the “good” project then become a place for your methodical/rational energy to go?  Are some of the qualities you associate with the “bad” story suddenly appearing in the “good” one?  Or, maybe the “good” story will start to benefit from having all of your attention?

I should also say that, for many years, my “bad” project was Lincoln in the Bardo, in play form.  Back then, I had this tradition of going through all of my in-progress pieces on New Year’s Day, just to see where I was and where I wanted to go, and one year around, let’s say, 2004, I taped this note on to the cover page of the nine millionth draft of “the stupid Lincoln play” as I’d started calling it: “RUN AWAY.  DO NOT WORK ON.  DO NOT!”

Which was an important step - because after that moment I never worked on the play again.  Soon, that feeling you so aptly described as being like a tongue seeking the tooth-socket did come back.  But then, because of that note/resolution (i.e., because the pay was “forbidden”), it occurred to me to work on that material in a new way – in prose. 

And it turned out that all those years of work on the play were worth it – I’d learned a lot about the story by then, just in mechanical terms and, in fact, once I started working in prose, I found that I’d developed a pretty good (simple) outline from all of the slog-work I’d done trying to get that play to come alive.

One last thought, that I find myself wanting to apply to my set-aside and too-political story: sometimes, once I get a little distance, I’ll just disinterestedly scan a story, to see where the heat is.  Any good bits, lively dialogue-swaths, funny jokes, vivid descriptions?  I pluck these out and let them sit there a bit, essentially to see what story congeals around them – the idea is that, freed of that “bad” setting, these lively bits might be happier in that new environment, and start telling you what purpose they want to serve – that is, what story they wanted to be in all along.

---

Sunday, behind the paywall, we’ll be continuing our discussion of Chekhov’s “Lady with the Dog,” which has led us to epic levels of incredibly insightful Commenting.

Somewhere Anton, that hottie, is smiling…