Writers are told we should never give up, but in a post on Lit Hub, Clare Pooley says that advice might be overrated. “It takes a certain type of dogged determination—some might call it self-delusion—to get up before dawn for days, months, years on end and drag approximately 90,000 words out of your imagination onto a blank computer screen,” she says.
Pooley began to reconsider this advice when she began work on the second novel. While her first had been very successful, writing the second wasn’t easier. Her characters felt flat and refused to come to life. Nevertheless, she tried to remain optimistic. “It was possible I’d just forgotten how hard it was last time,” she says. So she continued writing, forcing her character through her plot until she reached the end of her novel.
“I felt relief at having finished the damn thing, but I didn’t feel elation,” Pooley says. Her editors were also not too thrilled. “I’m not averse to hard work, but the thought of pulling that manuscript back up from the depths of my hard drive where it had been skulking filled me with despair,” she writes. “I understood what needed to be done, and I knew I could do it, but I had a premonition that after another year of work the response, from both my editors and myself, would be little better than meh.”
As she started work on her re-writes, Pooley got an idea for an entirely different novel. This one sparked joy. Writing it required to give up on the work in front of her, but once she started, she knew she made the right choice. “I threw all the manuscripts of the original novel into the recycling, waiting to feel sorrow and regret, but they didn’t come,” she says. Her editors liked the new novel better, too.
“The key to being a successful novelist is, I still believe, perseverance. But you also need to know when to quit,” Pooley says. “You must never give up on writing itself. But sometimes you need to give up on what you’re writing. To paraphrase the serenity prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the stories I cannot change, the courage to change the stories I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.“
