Apparently We’re Starting Over

I have a habit of getting quite far into a writing project, looking at everything I've accomplished, and deciding the most sensible thing to do is burn a substantial portion of it to the ground.

It's a wonderful system. Very efficient. Highly recommend it if you're interested in creating unnecessary work for yourself and developing a complicated relationship with your own deadlines.

This week, I was deep into the final formatting edits for Even the Fire Loves You Until You Are Ash. Not outlining. Not working through an early draft. Not sitting at my computer wondering what might happen next. I was formatting the manuscript, which is generally something you do when you've finished writing the bloody thing.

And then I made a decision.

I deleted everything after the two prologues.

Everything.

I also completely changed a character profile, which meant that even if I'd wanted to salvage large portions of what I'd already written, the story I was now trying to tell had fundamentally changed.

So that was nice.

I would love to tell you that I handled this development with grace, maturity and a reassuring sense of artistic purpose. Unfortunately, I handled it much more like a woman who had just discovered that the person responsible for creating an enormous amount of additional work for her was, in fact, herself.

Am I frustrated with myself? Oh, absolutely.

Did it need to be done?

Also yes.

And that's the particularly irritating part, because if I genuinely believed I'd made a terrible decision, I could simply undo it. I could restore the previous version, carry on with the formatting and pretend this little episode had never happened. But I don't think it was a terrible decision. I think it was the right one, which means I now have to live with the consequences of having been right.

There is something deeply unfair about that.

I suppose this is one of the more difficult things about writing a novel. You can spend months working on something, investing yourself in the characters and their relationships, researching things you never imagined you'd need to know, and carefully building a story toward the ending you have in mind. Eventually, you reach a point where the manuscript is technically complete, and you begin doing all those final little jobs that make publication feel reassuringly close.

Then, if you're me, you discover that being close to finished is apparently an excellent time to reconsider everything.

The frustrating thing is that the original manuscript wasn't necessarily bad. There were scenes I liked, passages I was proud of and a considerable amount of work that I had every intention of keeping. But as I moved through those final edits, I couldn't quite shake the feeling that something wasn't doing what I needed it to do.

I kept trying to work around it, which is something I've discovered I'm remarkably good at. I can convince myself that a problem is relatively minor, that I can address it with a few adjustments, or that perhaps I'm simply overthinking something that readers won't notice.

Sometimes that's true. I do overthink things, and I'm certainly capable of turning a perfectly serviceable sentence into an existential crisis.

But sometimes the feeling persists because there really is something wrong, and the only reason I haven't fixed it is that fixing it would be inconvenient.

In this case, it was extremely inconvenient.

Changing the character meant changing the story, and changing the story meant acknowledging that an enormous amount of work was no longer going to serve the book I wanted to publish. I could have kept going with the existing manuscript, and I suspect I could have produced something perfectly readable. But I would have known that I'd reached a point where I believed the story could be better and decided not to pursue it because I was tired of working on it.

And I don't think I could have been comfortable with that.

Which brings me to something I find particularly difficult about being an author: eventually, you have to stop writing and allow other people to read what you've written.

I know. A horrifying concept.

The entire point of publishing a book is to put it into the hands of readers, and I genuinely love sharing my stories. But there's a peculiar vulnerability in knowing that something you've spent so much time creating is about to exist independently of you. Once it's out there, people get to experience it however they experience it. They can love it, dislike it, misunderstand something you thought was perfectly clear, or connect deeply with a moment you barely thought about while writing it.

And you don't get to stand beside every reader explaining what you meant.

I don't expect everyone to love my books. I don't even expect everyone to like them. Reading is personal, and I know that a story that means something to one person might leave another completely unmoved. That's part of the wonderful, terrifying business of creating something for other people to experience.

What I do want, though, is to feel as confident as I reasonably can in the work I'm putting out into the world.

Complete confidence isn't something I think I'm ever going to achieve. I could edit a manuscript for another ten years and still find a sentence I'd like to change, a conversation I'd like to expand or some tiny detail that suddenly strikes me as unforgivably awkward. At some point, I have to accept that a book is finished, even if I could theoretically continue fiddling with it until the end of time.

But there's a difference between knowing a manuscript will never be perfect and knowing I've left something important unresolved.

That's the distinction I'm trying to make for myself.

I don't need to believe I've written the greatest novel in the history of literature. That would be a fairly ambitious expectation, particularly for someone who can spend an entire day arguing with three paragraphs. I do, however, need to believe that I've written the best version of this particular story that I can write with the experience, ability and understanding I have right now.

Ideally, I'd also like to give myself the best possible chance of making it through release day without having a nervous breakdown.

I feel this is a reasonable goal.

Of course, there's also the question of when to stop listening to the little voice telling me something needs to change. I know that constantly rewriting a book can become its own form of avoidance, and that there comes a point where the pursuit of improvement starts preventing the work from ever being finished.

I'm aware of that danger. I'm just not entirely convinced that being aware of it makes me any less susceptible.

In this instance, though, the decision felt different from my usual bouts of uncertainty. Once I understood what needed to change, I couldn't unsee it. The new direction made more sense to me, and although the amount of work involved was deeply discouraging, I felt something I hadn't been feeling about the previous version.

Relief.

Annoyed relief, admittedly, but relief nonetheless.

I think the story will be stronger for the changes I'm making. I think the characters will have more room to become who they need to be, and I think I'll eventually be glad I made the decision when I did.

I would have preferred to make it several months ago, of course. Perhaps while I was outlining, or during the early drafting process, or at literally any point before I started formatting the finished manuscript.

But apparently that would have been too convenient.

So here I am, back at the beginning of a substantial portion of Even the Fire Loves You Until You Are Ash, with two prologues, a reimagined character and a truly impressive amount of work ahead of me.

I'm excited about the direction the book is taking. I'm also frustrated, tired and occasionally tempted to send myself a strongly worded email about the importance of making decisions in a timely manner.

Both things can be true.

And perhaps that's the part of writing I keep having to accept: caring deeply about a project doesn't always look like steadily moving forward. Sometimes it means recognizing that the direction you've been travelling isn't quite right, even when turning around is the last thing you want to do.

I just wish my creative revelations would occasionally arrive before I'd done all the formatting.

Anyway, I'd genuinely love to know whether anyone else does this. Have you ever made it ridiculously far into a project, only to decide that a substantial part of it needed to go? Did you feel better once you'd made the decision, or did you spend several days wondering whether you should be legally permitted to manage your own creative endeavours?

Because at this point, I'm beginning to think I need adult supervision.

Peace, love, and inspiration,
Britt 💚