In another Q&A on his blog, George Saunders answers a letter from a writer who wants to know when it’s time to abandon a project.
“I’ve been chewing on a story & without success for I don’t know how many years,” the writer says. “Although I can’t get it to go, I keep coming back to it. 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?”
Saunders acknowledges that at one point, he would have kept working on a nonfunctional story. However, he recently had a story rejected by the New Yorker twice and then again by the editor of his new story collection Liberation Day. (Ed. note: Ouch.) “That particular story is not destined to be finished,” Saunders says. “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.”
Sometimes, working on a bad story can provide an important distraction while our minds mull something better. “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,” Saunders suggests. In this manner, belaboring over the uncooperative story works like a long walk or hot shower. It gives us something to do with our energy while the better work emerges.
And remember, no writing is wasted. The ideas in that bad story might reemerge elsewhere. What you learned writing it can be applied to your next project. When Saunders abandons a story, he’ll come back later to see where “the heat” is. “Any good bits, lively dialogue-swaths, funny jokes, vivid descriptions?” he writes. “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.”
