When to Let Your Book Go

How to stop revising, start submitting, and move on to the next writing project

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There comes a time in the writing of every book when you have to say, “I’m finished.”

This time may be after five revisions or fifteen. It may be after one year or five or six years. But you can’t hold onto it forever.

I once heard a writer on a panel boast, “I work on a short story for ten years, sometimes more.” He presented this information as evidence of his commitment. That was more than fifteen years ago. He has yet to publish a book. He probably could have, if he’d been willing to let his writing go. What does he gain from ten years on one story that never sees the light of day?

I think he might be too much in love with that story. I think he might be too much in love with the idea of himself as the writer of that story, picking apart the words and commas one by one, day by day, week by week, year by year, until the story ossifies.

The Art of Imperfection

Attention to craft is essential, and developing craft takes years. But you don’t have to wait until something is perfect to send it out. There is no such thing as literary perfection. Any book you write in your thirties, revisited in your forties, will make you scratch your head at some of your choices. As you get older, you will probably look back with a critical yet affectionate eye at the writer you were, and you will notice things you would do differently if you had that book to do over again. But you don’t have that book to do over again. You have the next book to do, and that book will benefit from your years of experience. Every story or book you write will benefit from every story or book you wrote before it.

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When I look back at my “breakout” novel, The Year of Fog, published in 2007, I see things I would have done differently if I were writing the same story today. But I also admire the book’s messiness, it’s meandering nature. The fact is, I couldn’t write The Year of Fog today. I could write a book based on the same premise, exploring similar themes, but if I took the same premise and filtered it through my current life experience, my current ideas about narrative, it would be a different book entirely.

Writers change. Our voices develop. Our fifth book may have a similar voice to our first book, but it will be informed by our new experiences, our new knowledge, our new perspective. The book you write with a five-year-old screaming, “But I want to watch Curious George and I need my jelly sandwich!” in your face will be different from the book you wrote during that one-month residency on an island in a cottage with a wood-burning stove, back before you had a child, back before Curious George even registered. The book you write with a teenager texting, “Mom my metro card doesn’t work I don’t have any $ my phone is almost dead I am lost what to I do” will be different from the book you wrote when you had a five-year-old safe and sound at home, screaming about Curious George. Your books evolve with your life. Time moves quickly and it is suddenly a new decade. Don’t let life pass you by without sending any of those books or stories or essays out into the world.

The moral of the story is: if you want a career as a writer and you don’t plan to live forever, ten years may be too long to spend on a novel. I should mention a caveat here. You may have one novel or memoir that you return to again and again over a period of many years, trying to get it right. But in the meantime, you should also be working on other projects. I have a novel like this. It has cycled in and out of revision for more years than I care to admit. But while I’ve been tinkering with it, I’ve been finishing and publishing other books. If I had waited to write the other novels until that one was done and dusted, I would have missed out on a big chunk of my writing career.

Your books evolve with your life. Time moves quickly and it is suddenly a new decade. Don’t let life pass you by without sending any of those books or stories or essays out into the world.

Revision is essential. There is no good book without rigorous revision. But you can revise a story or a book to death. You can revise it until the raw energy with which it began has completely disappeared, leaving behind an overworked, unexciting thing on the page.

Some Notable Exceptions

There are exceptions, of course. Donna Tartt took more than ten years to write The Goldfinch, but it won the Pulitzer Prize, so a decade seems like a small sacrifice. In The New York Times, Julie Bosman called The Goldfinch“perhaps the most anticipated book of the season, a 771-page bildungsroman that has been called dazzling, Dickensian and hypnotizing.” In which case a decade is justified.

Junot Diaz spent ten years on The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which also won the Pulitzer, which goes to show that if you are really aiming for the Pulitzer, it’s okay to take your sweet time.

Are You Making It Better, or Are You Just Making It Different?

I’m not saying that quantity trumps quality, of course, but I do think that one can overwork a novel. There comes a point of diminishing returns when revision isn’t making the book better, only different. If you’re holding on to your book because it is incomplete, then by all means, hold on until you finish it. On the other hand, if you’re making it different, but you’re not making it better, it’s time to let go.

What does letting go look like, exactly? Letting go may mean sending it out to agents. If you already have an agent, it may mean letting him or her see it before you think it’s completely “ready.” If you want to self-publish, letting go means publishing the damn book already.

If you’ve chosen the traditional publishing route and you’ve sent your novel out to dozens of agents and no one has bitten, letting go may mean setting it aside and writing your next novel. Yes, you can do that. You can put it away while you write something new. It will still be there when you finish the new thing. The old thing may be informed by the new thing. Something you discover while working on a new book may illuminate a problem you’re facing in the older book.

Letting go without publishing doesn’t mean you failed. It just means you’re progressing. You can always come back to it later. It’s quite possible that the lessons you learned while writing the novel you can’t publish will help you to write a much better second novel. You may very well find that you are more skilled, more efficient, and more focused the second time around.

Something you discover while working on a new project may illuminate a problem you’re facing in the older project.

I’m now returning to a novel I wrote between 2013 and 2016. It’s a novel I love but couldn’t quite part with. I felt something else needed to be done. I set it aside, wrote and published three more novels, and am returning to the older, quieter novel with a clearer eye. Upon my return I see new ways to fix what’s broken. The last two novels taught me something, as every novel does. Like The Wonder Test, my new/old novel involves espionage. Like my 2017 book, The Marriage Pact, it involves marriage. But this new/old novel emerges from a slightly different voice, a different worldview, as it traces back to a time in my life when I was a different writer, a different wife, a different person.

Your books grow with you. Your voice and your themes deepen and develop over time. But that growth can’t happen unless and until you let each book go, often before you feel you’re ready.

Go ahead, take a look today at a piece of writing you’ve been holding onto for too long. Is it a novel? An essay? A story? Think about why you can’t let it go. If you can identify specific things you can do to improve it, do those things. If you’re holding on out of a misplaced sense of preciousness, an unrealistic idea of literary perfection, let it go. Free yourself to write the next book, the next story, the essay. Move on.

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