When to Give Up

We’re all gonna die someday. I know, I was pretty shocked when the reality of this hit me around age 28 or so; before then on some level I’d assumed I’d live forever through some fortunate combination of science!, the preservative qualities of alcohol, and my own specialness. Realizing that literally none of those things was going to apply was sobering, in the sense that it was the exact opposite of sobering in that I immediately launched a three-year bender.

But I digress: You’re going to die. And before you die, there’s a chance of a lengthy period of dotage. Which means you only have so many useful creative years in you, and there’s no way to know how many—which in turn means you only have so many books and stories in you. That means the biggest decision you have to make every day is what to work on, because your creative energies are a limited resource. And that leads to the big question: When should you give up on a book?

The answer is, you’re asking the wrong question.

Change the Conversation

We’ve all been there: You’re six months and tens of thousands of words into a new project, and it isn’t working. Or you’ve finished a draft, and no one likes it. The question looms: Should you spend another year trying to make it work? Or cut your losses and move on to something new?

There’s no need to be so final. A rough draft will remain just as rough if you let it sit in a drawer for five years, and it will have the same potential to be great and marketable a few years later. A draft that gives you the fits because it’s 60% awesome and 40% confusion and failure will still have that 60% awesome part if you come back to it. And a book that everyone likes but no one wants to buy might surprise you with a sale before you know it.

So the question should never be “Is it time to give up on this book.” Instead, ask if your time would be better spent on something else right now. Leave yourself open to going back to a book. It might seem silly, but the psychological impact can be huge. Tell yourself a book is dead and on some level your brain stops working over the problems. Tell yourself you’re just switching focus for a while allows the invisible hand that controls you (otherwise known as your muse) to keep sweating over that problematic story while you do other, less-frustrating things.

In other words, go full Winston Churchill and never surrender. Also, drink heavily and smoke cigars, and cultivate a speaking voice that is 50% lava and 50% sneering disdain, also like Churchill.