I’m writing a fiction novel and trying to get through my midpoint (a notoriously swampy place) and here I am wondering if finding out if your girlfriend is a bank robber is a big enough of a reason to break up.
And, yes, yes, I know, this is my first novel and it has predictably become larger and more bloated than it was ever meant to be. But since it is my first book, I’m willing to let a lot of stuff slide. The most important thing is not to make it perfect, but to make it good enough so that I can finish it.
You can’t build a portfolio from unfinished work.
One of the first things I learned as a young artist over 20 years ago, is that a lot people will start but never finish. But you can’t do much if you don’t have that body of work behind you. And I know the same is true now.
There’s a music trend on TikTok, which visual artists jumped on, that captures this very well:
To build a career as a writer, or well another branch in my career as a writer at this point, I’ve got to finish the work.
And I’ve seen the stats that are generally being thrown around — that only 30 in 1000 people who start a novel actually go on to finish it, and only 6 out of those 30 go on to see their novel published — but I can’t find any hard data to say whether this is true or not.
I remember I read some statistic once that about 1% of books started actually make it to publication, but I can’t find that either. (And that says nothing about what happens after publishing.)
If we consider how people generally tend to begin things with excitement and then let them drop by the wayside when it turns out it’s a lot more work than they first thought it would be (or didn’t think, to be precise) I guess it seems realistic.
The bottom line is that only a small number of people who start a project as big as a full-length novel actually finish it. And that’s on top of writing not being a sustainable job for a lot of writers, making writing increasingly for the privileged.
Only those really serious about finishing a project, will do so. Even when what you end up with isn’t perfect. (Gotta give the reviewers something to gripe about, right?)
All jokes aside, I think it’s also pointless to try and craft the perfect book. A book like that would take so long to write, you’d never finish more than that one book. If that. Because if you want to aspire to perfection, that’s one way to get bogged down creatively.
I write because I love the craft of writing.
I get fired up by the process itself. It’s why I’ve been writing for a living for the past 20 years. But now transferring over from copywriting to fiction writing, I have a lot of things to learn.
The only thing I’ve got going for me is that I have the habit of writing every day in the bag, because from what I’ve seen in writing groups, that can be a huge part of the battle. I also finished a prequel novella before the novel, which made me realise how much I enjoyed writing a story to the end. And now I want to do more of that!
I’m also pretty on top of my own biases, which I personally consider a good skill for a writer to have, but it isn’t a requirement by any means. I just find it helps me to write better, more honest characters when I can check my own biases.
So, I’ve written over 114,000 words of fiction this year. No, not just for one project (I could be churning out books like Nora Roberts if that was the case). My 100k is spread out over a few projects.
But I do have one main project, which I try to work on more than anything else, and which I have a goal of finishing before I finish any of the other big projects. I have taken time from that project, when I got bored and when I noticed that my brain started to get stuck in a rut. I turned writing short stories or helping other people with their stories, because I find that that’s very good for my own creative process.
And now I’m trying to work out what would be a big enough reason for my love interest to need and want to take a break from the FMC. And I found myself sitting in my kitchen furiously pondering if he finds out that she’s going to rob a bank and she refuses to tell him why, is that enough of a reason for him to say, ‘You know what, I need a timeout’?
As I sat with that thought I realised I may have lost all sense of relativity as a writer, because in real life, finding out that your girlfriend is going to rob a bank (or something similar, TBD) and won’t tell you why, that’s enough to make you pretty mad. And while characters aren’t real people, you still want to retain a sense of relativity to their normal, or the world you’ve built loses all credibility.
After a day of sitting with this thought, I know that the answer lies somewhere in the habits and characteristics I’ve set up for these characters (my FMC refusing to tell the truth and be honest), but it’s sometimes really hard to see the forest for the trees when it’s your project. So, wish me luck, because this is a nut I’ve been trying to crack for months.
All the love, all the power!
Starsheep
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