Some Projects Need to be Finished

Friends, I am in book hell. I have a novel nemesis. A literary white whale.

It is my third novel.

I have quit this book four thousand times.

It isn’t even the book I put on hold to finish the cozy sci-fi novel Amie and I wrote together. It’s the other book. The book that I was meant to have abandoned.

My first two books were linear things. I wrote the first draft, then the second, and eventually the final. I sent out some queries (not that many because it's the worst), and then I was done.

Things haven’t been so simple this time.

This book has been the bane of my life. It is SO COMPLICATED. A locked room fantasy murder mystery where the protagonist can read minds. Except, whenever she uses her powers, she forgets something about her past.

She could solve the murder whenever she wants as long as she’s willing to give up a piece of her own mind.

Her ex-husband is there, and she knows she hates him but can’t remember why.

Her mother is there and they haven’t spoken in a year… but she can’t remember why.

Oh, and did I mention, the murdered character is the emperor and the main suspects are his three closest rivals. So if she fails, there’s going to be a guaranteed civil war.

It has so many moving parts. The memory loss, the worldbuilding, the relationships.

I’ve written four drafts over three years. It almost works. I can see that it almost works. But I’m over it, and it will need at least three months of solid work.

Then there’s book number five (the joint book was number four). The book I SHOULD be writing.

It’s straightforward. No one has memory loss. The emperor isn’t dead. It’s a fantasy sports book about a world where resources are divided according to which country performs best at their equivalent of the Football World Cup.

It follows all the major plot beats of every sports movie you’ve ever seen. The main character is a plucky boy from the provinces who gets given his ONE SHOT, ONE OPPORTUNITY and takes it. I have the outline. I’ve done all the worldbuilding (they play sport because the gods banned war and they needed a way to compete for a limited resource).

Look at all that planning!

I’ve even written 40,000 words of it. I could probably finish it in the time it took me to fix book three. Sooner maybe. And it would be so clean.

But I can’t quit book three. I don’t know what it is. If it was someone else, I’d tell them to give up on it. I don’t value complexity for its own sake. I don’t necessarily want to write complicated books.

It’s not the “quitters never win” attitude most of us are raised with. That’s never been an issue for me. I quit things all the time. I know quitting is useful and important. I quit my first two novels half way through the querying process, when they were done.

I quit my second novel when it was actually getting good response rates from agents. I simply lost interest in it. I moved on.

I rolled my ankle approximately 8.9 kilometres into a 10km fell race last month and, even though I probably could have pushed through the pain for that last four hundred metres, decided I’d treat myself to a little walk.

I’ve publicly quit book three on our podcast. I’ve promised Amie I was done with it. I’ve written one and a half other books since I first abandoned this one. So why I’m here, on a writing retreat on Lake Como, working on book fucking three?

The answer, I think, is simple: because it’s important. I don’t have faith it will be great. I don’t have faith that I will even be happy with it when I’m done. I don’t faith it will being a bestseller.

But I know it’s important for me as a writer. I know the problems I’m solving now, in this project that should have died two years ago, will be problems I have to solve for the rest of my career. I know if I can finish book three, I will have become a better writer.

A writer I wouldn’t be without finishing this project.

Every creative project has problems. That’s part of being an artist. I know the lessons I will learn from finishing this book will be the making of me as a writer. They will be part of my story.

I will tell people in interviews ten years from now how absolutely horrible it was to grind out my third novel, and those people won’t believe me. They’ll think, oh yeah right, he’s just saying that to be modest. But we will know.

And I’ll be so grateful I did it.

I definitely don’t think you should see every project to the end. But, if you have a project that keeps calling you back even though you’ve quit it a million times, it might be trying to tell you something.

It might be the making of you.

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You can stay up to date with my writing through the Instagram account I share with Amie: @amieandjameswrite