I want to tell you, because maybe it’s four in the morning and you’re googling “how to know when to give up on a novel.” How you are supposed to know? I’ve wondered this many times myself over twenty-three months, through a hundred and fifty thousand words, dozens of chapters, three false starts, and too many conversations to count. Then—in a moment—I came to the answer and I gave up on the book.
I’ve written three books that came easily. The novel I walked away from was not one of those. The others had developed at their own rate, like a pregnancy. The first of these, a financial nonfiction book I ghostwrote in 2011, I carried rapidly and easily, like a litter of puppies. The second two are novels (one was published last year and the other will be next). These books, because they were my own, were more like human babies: at one point, each had merely been a twinkle in my eye, and then, after some careless afternoon of going at it on the page, I felt suddenly committed to the long haul of labor. I was subsequently responsible for them and, in retrospect, it feels feel like I didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. I never thought about quitting those books—not once, not even at four in the morning, the time when my self-confidence has usually gone AWOL.
Yet, a defining feature of my personality is how much I love not only to choose, but to quit. I relish quitting. I love it. I like to quit, usually, in the early stages of an endeavor. I’ve quit piano, voice lessons, ballet, jazz, robotics as an art medium (I know, I know), a softball team, a kickball team, a basketball team, a bocce team, many jobs, five zillion book clubs, friendships, relationships, watercolor lessons, and so on. But I’ve also stuck with so many pursuits that it’s hard now to know whether it was the love of the endeavor that kept me at it, or whether my love for these things came as a result of some incidental stick-to-itiveness. I love (in a real, committed way) even things that may sound patently boring: pottery, drawing, French, marriage, writing, skiing, swimming, driving, therapy, smoking cigarettes, meditation. (This paragraph: is this the sum of my life? Sometimes I think I’m an edgy, modern woman. Few acts can dispel you of your self-mythology like listing your hobbies.)
Of course, it’s one thing to quit after three or four weeks of effort. It’s another to walk away after twenty-three months.
Reasons Not to Quit:
It, the thing I quit, technically titled Maniacs, was a sequel to my first novel, I’ll Eat When I’m Dead. At the end of that book, the main character a) suffers from a full-blown eating disorder; b) moves in with her mom; and c) decides to work for a four-year old software company run by a group of teenagers. Maniacs would pick up where IEWID left off, but on the other side, with the teens. Teens running a software company is hilarious and tragic, I thought. The commodification of youth! The labor politics of the digital sphere! Making fun of children! It seemed like a natural extension of that first novel, which is . . . a long complex joke about clothing and capitalism, written so glibly, and with such speed, that reading it is akin to, I hope, being slapped repeatedly in the face.
Initially, IEWID was almost two-thirds longer than the published version, so it felt possible to write about those characters until the end of time. From the business side, sequels to anything are an easy sell because sales departments don’t have to pitch a new premise, even (or maybe especially?) something as funhouse-mirror-laughing-gas accident as IEWID. Sometimes, opportunity is as good reason as any to write a book.
Before I wrote anything, though, I indulged in the fantasy of the sequel. I photoshopped a cover and chose a title. Then I wrote up a multi-page synopsis that had my main character getting kidnapped in South Africa and falling in love with an alcoholic photographer in Morocco, whose wife is conveniently and tragically dead. These plot points don’t have anything to do with anything except I once spent a night in Fez drinking with a group of raucous prostitutes, and I wanted to write about that bar where we ate peanuts and threw the shells on the floor. (One of their johns politely guarded the door for me when I went to expel gallons of Gazelle beer into the hole that was the toilet. We smoked hookah and sang karaoke, and I thought, Good God, if I lived here I would become Florida Keys-era Hemingway or Baltimore-era Fitzgerald. If I Lived in Fez. A thing to repeat to yourself about all those lives left unlived.)
The original pitch for the sequel was not, in point of fact, something that anyone would compare to any famous work of literature, even the worst ones written when the authors were dying in Key West or Baltimore of cirrhosis or what have you. (It also did not contain any of the ideas italicized three graphs ago.) None of my editors, here or abroad, decided that initial synopsis was worth cutting me a check.
“But write it,” they said, since the publication of IEWID was nearly two years away. “We’ll figure it out when it’s done.”
“Okay!” I said, earnestly. I know what kind of writer I am: a baby writer who gets checks when the work is done. Time for work, I thought. “I’ll do that,” I told my editors.
And I did! I wrote circles of it. I wrote about Baltimore then Los Angeles then Somewhere Between Fez and Casablanca (why, why do I keep trying to write about Fez? Somebody stop me), then a private island in the Aegean Sea. And none of it went anywhere. After seven months of circles, I backed away and wrote a completely different book, though that’s not where this story ends.
At first, that book was called Pine City; it’s now called Fake Like Me. It’s about a young, no-name painter who spends a summer in upstate New York in an abandoned resort turned gigantic art studio, remaking paintings lost in a fire. She falls in love and becomes obsessed with a dead woman. That’s the whole plot, which I realize sounds thin. But who cares? I’m into it. It’s about death; it’s about creative labor; it’s about the anxiety of making something twice. I wrote it in the summer and fall of 2016, and the first draft poured out of my body like the first book had. Then I sent it to my editors, a cat throwing up on the bedspread: Here you go.
At the time—and I’m being retroactively self-reflexive here—at the time I secretly thought that if I handed in a different book, my editors would be so razzle-dazzled by my fresh new pile of cat barf that they would forget about the one I had insisted I was writing instead. Of course, they did not.
They did like it, though! The first offer on Fake Like Me came in shortly after Donald Trump was elected, but also, everyone was confused.
Where’s the sequel?” one of my editors asked, quite reasonably. “It should come second.”
“Oh, I’m working on it,” I replied, sincerely. “I just had to work this out.”
“Let’s get that sequel,” she said. “We’ll put this upstate art-sex-death book out third.” Everyone agreed this made sense.
“Great!” I said. “I’m on it.”
Thus, our gentlewoman’s agreement was born. The name of the sequel, Maniacs, was printed on the jacket of the first book, and Fake Like Me was announced as the third. (Various discussions of timelines and due dates and contractual amendments were to follow.)
Selling another novel should have been cause for celebration, especially since I’d drafted it in a five-month fever. Instead, I felt terrible—and not just because of the election.
“Back to Maniacs,” I chirped to myself. “You’re a professional. This is your job. Do your job. Not everything gets to feel great all the time.”
Some version of this chiding pep talk came in the mirror every day. For months I listened to it and sat down at my desk and typed dutifully away. I set the book back in New York; I changed the timeline; I altered some characters. I went back and forth and back and forth and up and down. I filled a lot of pages planning out the intricacies of how the teen business model operated, and also, writing about New York, because I lived there for twelve years and talking trash about various blocks feels like work—a business that used to be there, or a weird interaction I had there, or sometimes a good memory. I wasted a lot of time doing this, writing a fake nonfiction book about a pretend business and, also, moving my characters around New York like they were little Ms. Pac Men, to the eventual tune of a hundred and fifty thousand words that made very little sense.
I longed to quit, but I also wanted it to exist. (It was a book I wanted to read, which, I now know, is different, as an experience, from trying to create a book I wanted to write.) I worked on it every day, even when IEWID was coming out, and I was a mess because, wow, is it hard to make things and put them out into the world. (I don’t mean to complain because there are all kind of great things that happened—interesting, weird, memorable, special things—and eventually, those great things will be the only things I remember—but for me, the experience itself, of my first novel going into stores and people actually reading it, caused me immense anxiety. I felt constantly afraid and vulnerable and easily bruised.) Still, I kept working away because that’s what I thought I was supposed to do, and because doing the work also happens to be the best part of being a writer.
Is there anything more fun that sitting down and making stuff up and being surprised and weirded out and delighted and saddened by the things that you cough out before the day ends? Of course, it can be agony, too, but self-inflicted suffering is something I know how to handle. I’m used to it. It’s a bucket of sand I’ve stuck my head into many times; I know how that dirt tastes. I was frustrated with Maniacs—but I was also certain that, eventually, I’d come to enjoy writing it. So, I wrote in the mornings and swam laps in the afternoons, and then I read books with the dog curled up at my feet. Then I did the same thing the next day. It was the most obvious kind of routine, the kind of routine that, in my life, had almost always worked.
Regardless, June, July, and August were the saddest hour on a Sunday. It was falling asleep in the car and waking up in the garage to discover that everyone else has gone inside. It was the wrong Christmas present when you are five and those things matter—because every day I got up and ate a bowlful of nails even while I kept telling myself that, no, it was a delicious bowl of nails, a bowl of nails I was supposed to enjoy eating. My husband was gone three weeks out of every month, on fellowships and at conferences and on a research trip, so I was alone with my labor, which I thought would make it better. I believed I would be less distracted and more focused, more able to choke down that nail-cereal. But the writing—and the nascent Maniacs—did not get any better. It had only gotten worse.
I was alone; the book was terrible; and I’m still—one year later—kicking myself for being so . . . Protestant about the whole thing.
Reasons to Quit:
I began to do the same thing I’d done with Fake Like Me: to write yet another book, one I’d been dreaming about since my friend Julia and I made a series of jokes the summer before while standing in a gallery in Paris. I tried not to work on this new book but kept going back to it anyway. Then it felt like I was doing something irresponsible, so I stopped. “I’m not going to do this again,” I told myself firmly, sometime in July, putting it into an archive folder. “Goddammit, I’m going to finish Maniacs. I’m supposed to.” I chalked up the new book’s appeal to “new project with no problems” always being more interesting than “old project with old problems,” and tried to forget about it.
Summer ended. I turned 33. I got on a plane and went to London for work. I did a bunch of promo, then went out with my editor. Somewhere inside an actual underground cave in Soho, as I attempted to describe where the book was going and what was happening with it, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to write Maniacs if I didn’t want to.
This was the first time I’d considered this. I thought that since I’d made my bed—I handcrafted it in a wood shop and wove the linens on my loom—that I was going to sleep in it until I died. Is that how that metaphor works?
Still, I didn’t quit in that moment. That would have been too easy. Instead I declared, “I’m going to work on it until December first, and then I’ll decide if you should read it, or if it should be burned.” My editor nodded. So, though I was still unwilling to admit that I was ready to quit, something had nonetheless changed, and suddenly, I felt good.
The following two or three weeks were spent partying my face off. I partied so hard, and slept so little, and laughed so much, and ate so much rich food that I began to refer to my lifestyle as my “[Chris] Farley Year.” I ran around. I went to Dublin and Spain and Portugal and saw castles and cathedrals and beautiful towns and amazing sunsets; I stayed up until 4:oo a.m. every night; I cried when it was over. It was the absolute best.
And during that time, whenever anyone asked me about what I was working on, I said, “A book I hate.” I said it out loud, first kind of timidly, and then: I talked so much trash about that book you’d think Maniacs wasn’t a novel at all but was some girl who stole my high school boyfriend. I talked long and hard with my friends about how unhappy the book made me, and when I got home and looked at it one more time, I realized that I despised the project. I wasn’t unhappy.
Twelve days later, my editor emailed and asked how Maniacs was going; did I want to have a catch-up? I did, and over the phone, I quit.
She was gracious about it. I gave my reasons for why I felt the text itself wasn’t working, which, I realized, aside from its being bad, was because, in a world where the Russian military can convince rural Michigan voters that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta are running a child sex ring out of a pizza place by buying highly targeted Facebook ads, I didn’t want to make jokes about technology, or young people, or digital labor. I didn’t want to lampoon a world that had grown suddenly sinister and terrifying.
What’s happening in the world is far more terrifying than anything I could make up. Consider this: we treat our social media companies not like media companies—we hold Facebook to zero journalistic standards, even though it is the primary means by which most Americans receive the news. It is as if Facebook is the contemporary commons, but it’s a commons free from all oversight and regulation. And it’s not a public square; it’s a for-profit corporation. Our relative indifference to the ethical responsibility of large internet conglomerates is why Donald Trump is in the White House. While I am certainly capable of thinking about that problem in the long-term, today, this year, right now, I’m completely unable to reconcile that observation with the existence of the transatlantic party nerd Catherine Ono, the heroine of IEWID. In Catherine’s world, the world of my first novel, the ramifications of technological abuse are personal. In our world, they’re civic, they’re global, and they’re insidious.
So, that’s the story of why Maniacs doesn’t work. (This feels obvious now in a way that it didn’t before the election, in those women-laughing-at-salad-days of 2015.) But the manuscript doesn’t work for another reason: it’s bad. And I know it’s bad. This isn’t garden-variety insecurity, the kind of insecurity born of unnecessary doubt or worry. I know it’s bad because the characters fade uncontrollably in and out of depth; because the tone is inconsistent, the rhythm discordant, and not in a charming way; and because the a, b, and c plots don’t intersect with the kind of rhizomatic root structure that a good book requires, and I was unable to repair them to each other, no matter how hard I tried or how many nails I spooned into my mouth. . . . And it is precisely because I can see these things so clearly that I know them to be true.
In the end, it came down to my feeling of disliking the book. I’m not always rational about my work, and I can be self-deprecating, but I don’t call it garbage. I don’t say I hate it. That’s how I knew it was time to quit: when I called it garbage and meant it. It was time to quit because I began to write yet another book that came easily while this one stayed stuck. It was time to quit when my therapist observed that “. . . working on Maniacs is significantly contributing to your level of distress.” (Right!) It was finally time to quit after spending almost two years on it. That’s enough time. (This is my only job.) And it was definitely time to quit when I found myself googling “how to know when to give up on a novel.” The answer is because you want to.
I tried, and I did not succeed. I’m not sorry that I did it—any of it—the trying or the quitting. But I am sorry that the first several printings of I’ll Eat When I’m Dead have Maniacs written on them. That’s my bad.
Barbara Bourland lives in Baltimore, Maryland, with her husband and dog. Formerly, she worked as a freelance writer and web producer for titles at Condé Nast and Hearst, among others. Her first novel, I’ll Eat When I’m Dead, out now in hardback and audiobook, releases in paperback on July 17, 2018. Fake Like Me, a mystery that follows a naïve young painter who spends a summer at the private retreat of an enigmatic group of older artists, is also forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing and riverrun in June 2019.