Sonal Champsee

For the past few years, I’ve been working on a novel, which has also formed the basis of my MFA thesis. I sent in the final draft. Now I’m going to throw it away because it sucks.

This is the part where well-meaning people ask if I’m sure I’m not being too hard on myself, and after all that work surely I can salvage something and maybe I just need a break? reassure, reassure, reassure.

Let me address this.

I’m probably being a little hard on myself, since no writer has good perspective on anything they’ve just written. But I’m not being too hard myself. Parts of it are good. Parts, I like. Parts could be substantially improved with contemplative time and some effort. But major parts are just not working.

Could it be salvaged into a workable novel? Technically yes. If I were doing a manuscript evaluation of my own novel, I’d point out these parts and encourage the writer to dig deep and work it out, just as my own thesis advisor did for me. But when I actually sit down and try to write and revise these bits, I find myself fighting with the characters. I’m pushing them in directions they don’t want to go. Then we end up in a big fight with the end result being them kind of vaguely pretending to do what they need to do and me being to tired to say anything but “Fine, be that way, I don’t care anymore.”

This is the fundamental problem. I don’t care anymore.

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that as much as I study form and rules and structure, everything good that I write comes deep from my intuition. In this novel, I started with a situation that wasn’t going anywhere, and imposed a direction on it, one which sounded really good in theory and then spent five drafts trying to make it work in practice.

I can see now I should have just started with the idea that wasn’t going anywhere and explored it. The parts that work best were the parts that I had no clue about when I started writing them.

Do I just need time? I don’t think so. After I realized that this wasn’t working, I pulled out an old short story, tinkered with it, got some feedback from my writing group and tinkered some more. That’s how I remembered what it’s like to work on something you love. Every time I come back to that story, I remember that I love it. Putting that story out into the world, with my name on it, feels pretty good.

I’m retiring the novel because I don’t love it. The relationship is over, and we’re not going to marriage counselling. There’s a tendency to think of giving up on a project as having been defeated by them, but frankly, I think I’m going to enjoy not beating my head against the wall anymore.

In the meantime, I’ve learned from a lot from this project, about how to write a novel, and also who I am as a writer.

I have some vague niggles of ideas about how I could still do something with this, but not enough of a burning niggle to try.

In any case, I’m done. I’m glad. I spent a lot of the time writing this wishing I was writing something else, and putting this away frees me up to do that.