It happens. Every novel I start begins in a surge of excitement and a sense of infinite possibilities. Then, as I work, those possibilities start to shrink down with every choice I make. Certain plot twists become impossible, certain characters prove to be less than fascinating and are phased out, certain ideas get pushed aside.

Along with those dwindling options in your story you also start to get a sense of whether or not the story is working. As much as writers are often poor judges of their own material and rely on other people’s feedback, we generally do have a handle on whether the book is even working on a fundamental level. There might be some serious denial going on, of course, but deep down you know. And sometimes you get the ominous feeling that this book you’ve been working on for six months, this book that now has tens of thousands of words in it simply isn’t working. You have a thing that looks like a book but is really a shambolic mess.

Or maybe that’s just me. When a novel that I’ve invested time and energy into starts slipping through my fingers like a castle made of sand, I don’t just give up, because I like to finish things—because you publish exactly zero of the projects you don’t finish. Instead, I try to come up with a solution to save the day.

Finish Him

My choice of solution varies depending on how far along I am.

Almost a Novel. If I’m three-fourths through the plot and the work is already or close to book-length, I just push through. Just because a novel is terrible is no reason to just not finish it—as long as you’re close to the end. If I think I just need a few more weeks to polish this turd into a novel-shaped thing, I go on and put that work in, because at least I’ll have a book at the end of it.

Halfway to a Novel. On the other hand, sometimes you realize that you’re writing something awful much earlier. If there’s a lot of work left to make this into a novel-length story, I’ll usually abandon that goal and focus instead on coming up with a resolution to the story that ties everything up in a much shorter time span. Better to have a novella than nothing at all.

A Complete Mess. If I’ve got a lot of words and not much else, I’ll lower my goals to simply extracting something from the pile. Maybe the first chapter—when I was inspired and focused—could work as a standalone short story. Maybe a middle section could work on its own. If there’s nothing worth pulling out then I’ve really screwed the pooch, because that means there’s literally no contiguous set of a few thousand words worth reading in the whole thing and I should reconsider my application to Clown College.

That last scenario almost never happens, though, because there’s almost always something worth saving. A few years ago I started work on a novel that’s been up and down quite a bit. I originally cut it off and Went Novella on it when the story lost steam, but then I went back and thought I had a solution to the book’s many problems. I doubled the word count and yes, it’s a novel now, but it still isn’t a good novel.

Still, I’d rather have a finished novella and novel out of it than a swamp of messy words. I may never publish either version of that story, but at least with finished, somewhat polished work the possibility of publishing it in some form remains.

Whether or not the world benefits from publishing those stories is an issue our future alien overlords will have to determine when they sift through the ashes of our culture.

In a few weeks I’ll finish revising the second novel I’ve completed in 2018 (technically they were both completed in 2017 in terms of first drafts, and now they’re both hitting a “presentable” polished stage, meaning I can inflict them on my long-suffering agent). This isn’t unusual for me; since 1988 or so I’ve completed 44 novels, and it’s not at all strange for me to finish 2-3 in a calendar year. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re good novels; of those 44, after all, I’ve published 10 (one self-published), and at the moment there’s only 3 unpublished novels that have any chance of seeing the light of day (and that number includes the 2 I’m discussing here).

That’s me, that’s my process. I’m a write-it-all-and-figure-it-out-later kind of guy. I draft quickly, pants my way through plot, and as a result I have a high failure rate in terms of having top-notch material ready for my agent. I’m okay with that, because it’s just naturally how I work. By the time I figure out that a novel’s not working out I’m 80% of the way through it and my compulsive need to finish things kicks in.

The two novels I’m finishing up right now are really good, I think. And they’re interesting because they were both born, originally, as short stories written in 1992. Which, if you’re keeping score at home, was 26 fucking years ago.

I am old.

The Glorious Year of Glad

So, 26 years ago I wrote a story called The Hollow Men and a story called The Only Time. One was sci-fi, and one was sort of a dark thriller that wasn’t speculative but felt speculative, is the best way I can describe it.

I never sold either story as a short, but they lingered with me. The Only Time I tried to work into a novel in 1999, and to be honest I really liked that book at the time. A few years ago I was thinking about my journey with The Electric Church (which was originally written in 1993, then revised in 2004 into the version that sold to Orbit Books), so I dusted off that 1999 draft of The Only Time to see if similar magic might be done, but I wasn’t too happy with it in the cold light of middle age, so I started re-working it entirely in 2016, combining it with another concept. I finished that draft in 2017 and, frankly, hated it. The mixture of concepts didn’t work, and the earlier chapters had a different tone and feel because they hued closer to the earlier draft.

The Hollow Men just sat on my hard drive for decades. I always liked the core story, but even shortly after finishing it I realized it was juvenelia—one of those stories you write as a kid because you think it’s “cool” and “edgy” when it’s really just pointlessly nihilistic. But the basic concept stayed with me, and I finally decided in 2015 to try to expand the story into a novel. 60,000 words later, I had a hot stinking mess of a story. There was some great stuff in it, but one of the big reveals in the latter part of the plot turned out a bit more ridiculous than I’d expected.

I worked on it again in 2016, changing the big reveal to something more speculative and out-there. This didn’t work either.

Finally, I started revising again last year. The book had bloated up a bit, so I started cutting out unnecessary stuff, shifted a few parts around, and removed all explicit references to the speculative aspect while leaving it in invisibly—in other words, I know what’s behind everything, but it’s no longer stated in the story, and that works so much better y’all.

So: I wrote two shorts stories in 1992. In 2018, I’m finishing up novel-length versions of each and you would be hard-pressed to see the connections between them. The novels are so different from those original stories you’d never guess in a million years th related in any way.

And that’s writing, sometimes. The evolution of ideas is harsh. You cut ruthlessly. You sand and hone endlessly. Details erode away to reveal new details. Characters and entire subplots get deleted, shifted around, rendered invisible. And sometimes it take more than a quarter-century to take an idea and make it into a book.