On Quitting
When Moving on May Be the Right Choice
It’s a familiar mantra: “We write because we must.” We write for our characters, whose voices would otherwise go unheeded, and for their journeys and destinies. Yet few would deny that we also write for ourselves.
At the intersection of these two forces lies the motivation to continue—or, I believe, the reason we quit. Just as our characters’ flaws, desires, conflicts, and inner struggles must somehow get revealed, resolved, or foiled as a story unfolds, so, too, must our own demons be confronted, our urges satisfied, our personal yearnings fulfilled through the process of bringing our stories to life. In the absence of meaningful fulfillment, frustration and discouragement take root.
For fifteen years, I poured my energies into that space where nurturing my characters went hand-in-hand with nurturing myself. While drafting a first novel in the late 1990s, my personal desire to develop a writing career and generate income wove itself into the fabric of my inspiration. To write, I had left behind a profession, an income, and financial peace of mind. With enough dedication to my craft, I mused, it would all come back to me again through writing. My husband and I would once again be able to travel and perhaps to afford a house with enough space for not one child but two.
Soon my young family underwent a profound and unexpected change: We relocated from the south of France, where we lived at the time, to the Boston suburbs. My husband, a French national, was able to make a long-overdue career change, and I found part-time work. We settled into a house with space for four. That the longing for change and improvement I’d projected onto this novel had been satisfied by other means helped soothe my nerves as the rejection letters poured in—and even after the manuscript landed in the hands of a young agent who promised a contract but then headed off to grad school, leaving my book with a colleague who ultimately passed.
EXAMINE YOUR YEARNINGS—AND WHAT SATISFIES THEM
One mentor told me it had taken her two years to find her agent and advised me to be patient, to just keep sending out more queries. But without the specific hunger that powered the creation of that first book, the prospect of riding the roller coaster of hope and disappointment for an indefinite period of time simply didn’t seem worth the uncertain rewards. Choosing to move on from that first book—quitting, some would say—proved immensely liberating.
Pregnant by then with my second son, I turned my energy instead to a new idea: a series of children’s books drawing on the mythology of the Marshall Islands, where I’d spent my childhood. Today the Marshall Islands are best known for being at imminent risk of disappearing into the Pacific Ocean’s rising waters. A new yearning came to settle atop the continued desire for a writing career: one for excitement, engagement, and interaction with the world at large. Children’s book series were all the rage. The environmental and cultural context would surely resonate far and wide; this series could become a bestseller, get made into a movie—or three, or four! Enough sitting quietly in a corner.
My time to emerge came, indeed, though through a completely unanticipated plot twist. While still deep in the process of drafting the series, I met the owner of a small PR agency. He offered me a job. I threw myself with gusto into this new endeavor, exhilarated by the fast pace and constant stream of results. The energy, the interaction, and the engagement I craved had found me even before I sent out a single query.
EMBRACE CREATIVE FULFILLMENT, WHATEVER ITS FORM
By the time I wrote my second novel, Veronica’s Nap, my deepest and most urgent longing was for a reconciliation of the three sides of myself that coexisted without truly intersecting: publicist by day, writer by night, and mother during the infinite spaces between. I’d learned to keep my inner fiction writer hidden while at work and even at home, where the topic had become somewhat touchy after years without a breakthrough. I was bursting for permission to step out of this closet at last and shout, “I am a writer!” This desire infused every word I wrote.
When the manuscript was complete, a mentor introduced me to her agent. The introduction filled me with hope. Upon receiving the agent’s rejection note, I knew beyond all doubt that I could no longer bear the process of querying, gnawing my fingernails, waiting for a stranger or some turn of events to determine my future. The future was mine and mine alone to write. I stopped querying and opted to self-publish instead, giving myself a version of the permission I yearned for. Rarely had I felt so empowered.
The following year, Veronica’s Nap was picked up by a small press and republished. By then, however, this bit of success seemed anecdotal. I had let go of the dream. Having channeled my energy back into the very endeavors that were, in reality, yielding the results I craved, I found myself at the helm of a literary PR agency, BookSavvy PR, which technically I’d founded but in fact had grown organically from the synergy between my writing, my professional experience, and my literary connections. I took up dance and voice lessons, finding a new and formidable creative outlet in movement and sound.
Stepping back, I became aware of the pattern that had emerged: Fueled by a desire for fulfillment, I’d forged ahead relentlessly on the path toward a writing career. Yet the path kept splitting off. “Writing career” lay in one direction, and “fulfillment” lay in the other. The choice was baffling but clear.
Still, I scribbled. Short stories, mainly, many of which I never completed, and one of which I sent to a respected creative writing teacher I knew. His comments were positive, save for a few minor issues to iron out. He offered to take a look again once I’d reworked it.
Again, I never did. I had said what I wanted to say. I had learned what I needed to learn about my craft and myself. More firmly entrenched by then on the path toward fulfillment, I knew that the best way for the act of writing to serve its purpose for myself was to embrace that fulfillment, whatever its form.
ASK THE HARD QUESTIONS, AND ROUND OUT YOUR IDENTITY
“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” These words by Richard Bach were once my daily prayer. Yet I have quit in every way a writer can, from abandoning drafts in the middle and giving up on querying to leaving writing behind altogether—at least for now. In doing so, I have learned to ask myself the hard questions most writers must ultimately face and have found the answers surprisingly easy:
- Do the benefits of writing with a career in mind outweigh the material and emotional costs?
- What inner goals does writing represent to me, and is writing indeed helping me reach them?
- If I never succeed as a writer in the ways I’d hoped, would I still feel that the sacrifices had been worth it?
I have also discovered other richly satisfying sides of my identity. A well-rounded identity is crucial to a writer’s survival. When the relative importance of nonwriting aspects grows and these begin vying—or nagging—for attention, we owe it to ourselves to pay heed.
After all, rather than a “career” in any traditional sense of the word, writing is a path with a life of its own—one that can’t be crammed into a set of preset dimensions or made to conform to a particular definition. Who’s to say that, having quit, I won’t start again tomorrow? Or that twenty years from now, I won’t complete—and publish—a third novel?
Quitting is no more a sin than continuing for all the wrong reasons: peer pressure, blind acceptance of social constructs that define our objectives, or a hunger for validation or glory, perhaps. In this era where a love for words quickly triggers dreams of recognition, grandeur, fame, and fortune, let us reclaim the essence of what writing is from amid the hype of what we, as writers, should become.