Some Darlings Deserve to Die

A few months ago I - very reluctantly - came to the conclusion that the novel I was writing was just not good.

I started it in 2019. I had a full outline, character sketches, beginning, middle, an end. I knew exactly how it needed to go; I just needed to get it there.

And a lot of stuff happened. The pandemic. Donald Trump. Black Lives Matter protests and their backlash. Some health issues of my own. Through it all I doggedly and joylessly worked on this book, sometimes writing only twenty or thirty words per week. It was agony.

I kept writing things that I knew didn’t work, and I kept pushing through, thinking, “I’ll go back and fix that once I’ve got a completed draft.” But the things that didn’t work kept piling up, dragging at my feet. The broken draft began to seem like something unfixable. The book - the book was bad.

(Fiction is full of knowingly bad authors. Characters who knowingly write crap and don’t care, so long as the money flows in. I don’t know, guys. Writing a bad book is hard.)

And then, sometime towards the end of 2021, I got inspired by a new story. A different story. One that I really wanted to write. But did I really want to abandon the book I’d been working on for so long?

It felt like the wrong thing to do. I’d made a commitment. I wasn’t a quitter. But Lord, did I want to quit.

I did, and I think it was the right move. The new project is flowing out of my brain and into my computer in a way the old one never did. I’m remembering what it’s like to love writing, to wish I had more time to do it.

So that’s the update. The old thing is dead - saved in a secure place, to be mined for content later, but dead. The new thing is growing like a young sapling.

I’ll tell you more about it later.