Should I Give Up?
Snapshot of the first draft of The Milkman’s Widow, my abandoned crime novel.
If you’re wondering whether to give up on an idea, the answer is probably yes.
I was in a dark place. Could have been the 2016 election, the electrifying fury of Lemonade, or the very existence of Pokemon Go. Or, because I’d just joined the Brooklyn Library and blown through Gillian Flynn, Paula Hawkins, and Ruth Ware. The first line of Dark Places—”I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ”—gutted me. My desire to write something so terrifying and beautiful was indeed as real as an organ. Pour a mug of thunderclouds, steam up the windows, froth the blood, sprinkle a few fingernails, and—yum!—murder latte. I got this in the bag!
Running alone off the main path in Prospect Park one day, I thought, could I get kidnapped right now? Okay, okay, that’s something. Girl gets hit over head and taken! By who? A sister! Why? She’s jealous! But why? Her father likes the other sister better!
This resulted in fifty pages of a lonely sister drinking in bars, pondering her loneliness.
Needs a more interesting setting…1950s! Small town!
And so on and so forth until I was writing a novel about a 1950s schoolteacher named Binnie, searching for her missing daughter named Abigail, who’d snuck out of town to get an illegal abortion and never returned. Quite a detour from my jog in the park, but welcome to my brain.
I wrote and workshopped this novel through two Sackett Street workshops with the talented Lynn Steger Strong and Heather Aimee O’Neill, and then with a writers’ group born out of Heather’s class. I let my husband read it, and he was kind enough to lie. I let my grandma read it, and she sent me a newspaper clipping from 1955 to show me what the 50s were really like.
Was it time to give up on this idea?
If you’re asking this question, the answer is yes. The story that you choose to write into a novel must be one that needs to be told. Asking whether to give up on your idea means you are questioning the point. Writing a novel should feel exhausting, humbling, and terrifying, but never pointless.
Stories need to be told for different reasons. Maybe you need to shine a light on injustice and hypocrisy, maybe your grandfather’s life needs to be memorialized, or maybe your idea is so funny you die laughing thinking about it and need to tell your friends. Whatever the reason, if you’re not compelled to the point of obsession, you won’t survive hundreds if not thousands of hours at the computer, punching out 90,000 words letter by letter. (And unless you’re Zadie Smith, 90,000 words is really 200,000 words or more because you’ve cut and rewritten.)
During a Catapult seminar called Turning Real Life Into Fiction, J. Courtney Sullivan framed her novels as obsessions. (Also here.) She’d visited an abbey where cloistered nuns lived, and became obsessed with them. She couldn’t stop thinking about nuns. She needed to write about them. Her nuns were not tools manufactured for the sake of writing a novel—they were the novel.
So I gave up on Binnie and Abigail, and what a relief. It was an awful novel, and writing had become a joyless, uninspiring slog. I wasn’t obsessed enough with Abigail to kidnap her from Prospect Park, transport her to the 1950s, and keep her locked in a cage in my bedroom while I studied her behavior. Turns out I’m not much of a murder latte gal. But I realized that all great novels are, in a way, crime novels. They are the aftermath of a writer’s insatiable desire to slice open and examine her true obsessions.