101 Reasons to Stop Writing

This is really an addendum to Reason #8: What’s your Exit Strategy?. I’m posting it in the dying hours before the title becomes last year’s top catchphrase.

Hopefully you’ve spent some time with your family this week, if they haven’t already left you. Maybe you’ve had a chance to consider your writing goals, and how they impact your need for simple human intimacy.

Every writer gets rejections, and every writer can tell you an anecdote or two about the rejection that was totally bogus and personal, the one that turned up a year later, the one that really nailed the problem with the story, and the one that nearly drove them insane. (You might have to buy them a drink per anecdote, which is overpriced in my book.)

Most biographies of successful authors make note of how many rejections they received before their big break. A handful of unpublished novels, dozens, even hundreds of rejections are not uncommon. The common implication to these tales, however, is not “It took me that long to get a handle on this writing game,” or even “Gee, my early stuff really sucked.”

It’s “My, those dolts in the publishing industry wouldn’t know a good writer if they bashed them over the head with a Royal No. 10 typewriter.”

And it’s exactly this attitude that keeps the truly talentless from ever taking stock of the reams of first drafts spilling over their “writing nook” floor, the hard drive full of “fragments”, the pile of dog-eared, hand-annotated writing books, the notebooks scrawled with cuneiform-like characters once thought to be poetry, the used envelope with the next submission for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine already stuffed and taped in, postmark steamed off and ready for resending, or the grimy mirror covered with yellowed rejection slips for “inspiration”, some older than their marriage.

At no point do they think, “I have wasted my adulthood. I am beyond help. The guys who beat me up in high school all drive BMWs now and have sex with their secretary. I spent next month’s rent on story arc software. When the divorce papers were served, I revised and added six pages of backstory. I don’t know what day it is and I think the dog died in here, somewhere.”

They Stay the Course. They keep going until the cataracts form and they start typing on their televisions, and they start arguments with the postmaster about how he lacks the insight to fully appreciate how to mail his story. They don’t stop until Old Man Death says “Just finish the sentence you’re on.”

You’re probably not at this stage (yet). Your friends still call to let you know when they’re getting married or moving away. You haven’t wondered if you can save on toilet paper by wiping your ass on the rejection slips, then rinsing them off. You haven’t tried to reassemble back into the shape of the original tree. When you get a rejection, there’s still a small part of you who knows it’s because the story was crap.

Now is the time to set a timetable for withdrawal.

I’m not saying you have to Cut and Run, just think about when to slow down. When to permanently retire those execrable early novels you still send out every three years or so because you think the agents will have changed jobs by now. When to just burn the story rather than reworking it (again).

Then, think about when you will stop writing. Set some specific conditions, and a date.

Then tell someone.