I have a world I’ve fallen in love with but I’m afraid of putting out a story in my favorite world too early and having it not sell well because I haven’t gained some critical mass of skills or fans.
I haven’t talked much about the business side of writing lately, and this question falls squarely into that area.
It’s also fairly typical of the sort of question a lot of would-be writers ask. It comes because they’re worrying about the far future – months or years or even decades ahead – instead of focusing on the next couple of days or weeks. Or, to put it bluntly, they’re worrying about what might happen instead of, you know, actually writing something.
I used to tell people like this that they should stop fretting about business decisions until they have something to sell. I don’t think this ever worked; they would nod politely and go off and keep worrying and fretting about when and whether they should sell something they hadn’t even written yet.
So now what I do is lay out their choices.
- You can write the story you want to write and try to sell it.
- You can write the story you want to write and put it in the bottom drawer, planning to revise it when you’re a better writer.
- You can write some other story in order to practice and get good enough to write the story you really want to write.
- You can stop writing completely while you dither about what to write and/or what to do with it when you write it, thus making no progress whatever in any direction, but also allowing you to have all the angst of being a Creative Artiste without doing any actual work or taking any risk of being turned down.
You can probably guess from my phrasing that I really don’t like or approve of #4. It is, however, where an awful lot of these folks seem to end up, sometimes for years, because they are so afraid of making a mistake that will cripple what they want to do.
The thing is, every writing career has ups and downs. Things go right; things go wrong. You can anticipate some of them and make good choices, but trying to anticipate what the market will do with your story is not one of those things. Sometimes, the market does what you expect; other times, books and stories that you labored over and thought were marvelous will sink without a trace, while ones that you tossed off on a bet and didn’t think were anything special become bestsellers or win awards. This is fairy dust; you cannot ever predict it reliably.
If this is not something you can accept, then “stop writing while dithering” is probably a good choice after all. I still think it’s better to try, though.
If you rule out #4, deciding among the other three choices depends to a large extent on the writer’s personality and process, and on their real reasons for worrying about the story. A writer who is truly obsessed with a story (or a world, or a character, or an idea) probably won’t have much luck writing about anything else, no matter how much they really want to pick #3 as a “safer” choice.
On the other hand, sometimes one’s backbrain presents one with something that one instantly knows one doesn’t have the chops to write. Note that this is not in any way about the market or selling the story; it’s about doing justice to the story itself. You can see that it’s a brilliant idea, but you already know you can’t handle twenty subplots and major characters, or doing a hallucinating schizophrenic as your viewpoint/protagonist, or imitating Faulkner’s style, or whatever the key thing is that the story absolutely requires. In this case, holding off on writing it while you work on your skills might be your best choice; if it’s an obsession, and you’re not a “my writing sets up like concrete and I can never change it” sort of writer, then you might be best off doing a rough draft to get the obsession out of the way, and setting it aside to revise when your skills are better.
I’m not a big fan of writing for the bottom drawer in general, especially if the writer isn’t putting anything out for sale. This is because nine times out of ten, the real reason writers do this is because they’re afraid the work will be rejected, not because they think the work isn’t good enough. Rejection is part of being a writer; nobody ever gets through a writing career without having stuff rejected. Lots of stuff. However, if you honestly think that there’s something wrong with a piece and you don’t have the chops to fix it yet, hanging on to it for a bit while you improve is a reasonable option. (If you are doing this with everything you write, however, you may want to reconsider.)
Which leaves me with my personal preferred choice, write the thing in spite of your misgivings and send it out. If it doesn’t sell, you can stick it in a drawer to revise in a couple of years. If it sells and doesn’t make the splash you’re dreaming/hoping for, well, that’s how things usually work. It doesn’t mean you can’t do more with the character/setting/idea/plot/world that got you interested in it.
But really, your choices are: write this story, write some other story, or don’t write anything. Once you have it written then decide what you want to do with it – submit it, save it for later, or delete it. Worrying and dithering about what might possibly maybe perhaps happen if/when the thing comes out in two or three years is a waste of energy.
I had to put A Diabolical Bargain on the backburner twice — for years — because I needed to work on my novel writing skills by writing other novels. (It was my first — it had snuck up on me by feigning it was a novelette.)
Nowadays it is hard to remember that my original metier was short stories, and my first story sold was a short-short.
I had one story that I needed to write – for me it was a set of characters – but that I couldn’t get right in spite of “finishing” it half a dozen times. Finally I put it aside, and then about 5 years later was able to write a version I’m happy with.
It didn’t sell, but that wasn’t the point anyway.
I once had a villain hang around in my head for over ten years before explaining that despite his ancient Egyptian origins, he was actually in a 19th century story. And a Englishwoman.
“Magic of the Lost God” FINALLY
When my then-writing group declared a “novel in a year” challenge, I declined to do the story I’d always thought of as My Novel because I didn’t think I had the chops to pull it off. Instead, I did some new thing — that turned out to be as if not more challenging than the one I’d set aside. It was supposed to be a one-off, and it’s spawned a universe of other novels and related short stories. It was safe to work on because it didn’t matter, and it became an obsession that affected everything down to the way I take my coffee.
And I probably have the skills to handle that set-aside novel just fine now, but it’s back-burnered behind at least half a dozen other ideas.
My point being, write the story. Or write some other story. But either way, don’t assume that the outcome will look anything like what you imagine.
“It was safe to work on because it didn’t matter.” I hear you!
I wrote a fanfic once for an online game that was shutting down, leaving its complex plot a-dangling. The shutdown was announced eighteen weeks before it would happen. I spent one week doing a rough plot (with little Post-It notes on the back of a baking tray), and then wrote seventeen chapters in weekly installments, and put them up on a fansite. I have never worked so fast before or since. I could do that because it was based on somebody else’s IP, and there was no chance in hell that I could ever sell it. But I gave the story closure, at least to my own satisfaction.
I remember putting the third scene of my novel Troll-magic on hold, because I could tell that I’d approached it wrong. It wasn’t at all what I wanted it to be. I decided to carry on with scene four (and more) and circle back to the unfortunate scene later.
I knew what happened in that misshapen scene. I just had not told it right.
My plan worked really well.
The rest of the book flowed out the way I wanted it, and by the time I’d reached “The End,” I knew exactly what I needed to do to fix the broken scene. I fixed it, sent the book off to my first reader, made various revisions that her feedback prompted, and then called it good.
All of my books have presented “stretchy” bits that really challenged me. But, so far, I’ve managed to figure out how to write them anyway. Fingers crossed! 😉
Oh yes, that’s such a pain.