![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
Are you “Stay the course”, or “Cut and run”? How many novels and stories do you have in the field? How many more are you prepared to deploy?
Recent discussion on various blogs has centred around the idea of quitting writing. The broad consensus seems to be that a writer will inevitably return to writing, in the same way that a chronic masturbator cannot look at their open palm without fleetingly wondering where the nearest bathroom is.
But you can call yourself a ‘writer’ without any requirement to actually produce anything, which is why it’s so difficult to define ‘quitting’. Quitting implies failure, or at least non-success, and you can’t fail if you never set any standard for yourself.
You can call yourself a ‘carpenter’ too, but unless you eventually produce a table, you’re just whittling.
If you have a goal for your writing, some measure of success, then by definition you have a threshold for failure. The only variable is time - how much you’re prepared to waste. If you have no measure of success, then your writing will only ever be good by accident.
If you’re only writing to ‘please yourself’, well, the bathroom is second on the left.
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…a chronic masturbator cannot look at their open palm without fleetingly wondering …
You can call yourself a ‘carpenter’ too, but unless you eventually produce a table, you’re just whittling
And if you try to do them simultaneously, you’re setting yourself up for a world of hurt…..
“The Whittling Masturbators” would be a great name for a rock band.
Lee and I were in the Whittling Masturbators, back in ‘89-’91. It was more bluegrass-core, kinda Nine Inch Nails meets the Notting Hillbillies. I played banjo with an electric pickup, Lee played harmonica and whittling stick. We broke up after, um, an unfortunate accident on stage which left the bass player impotent.
If only we’d had the foresight to do bluegrass covers of hard rock tunes, like Hayseed Dixie. We could’ve made thousands.
Oh, those heady day. The drug, the groupie, the wild night on the raod.
Sigh. If we could have just broken through, we could have lasted the whole weekend…
It’s only because you had the drug, that you could use the term ‘groupie’. He was there to clean the toilets.