The Joy of Letting Go

(And trusting that gut)

Photo by Ankush Minda on Unsplash

I am so sorry that I am such a poor Substacker. I promised regular posts, I gave you lemons. I hope you did something good with them.

Anyway, in my failings as a Substacker with a few lovely followers, I have realised I need to have something to say before I can drag myself here to write. I had various false starts, abandoned pieces that I wasn’t sure of. All perfectly pleasant, all lacking in something key for you. But today I think I have that, so I am going to type away until it forms into something vaguely coherent.

Anyone who knows me or has followed me for the last few years will know that I’ve been working on my Southern Gothic novel alongside my exhausted agent, Alice. It’s the book she signed me for, it’s the book that had all the promise. It’s a book I adore, with characters I feel I know intimately. I mean, as it stands, I have rewritten them six times, so I should know all the secrets of their hearts.

Here’s a little teaser for you:

This is the opening of that book, the book that is now on the ‘might be abandoned’ list. Even reading this now, I’m excited by it and its potential. It has everything I love: ghosts, superstitions, interesting setting, strong female characters. But with each draft, I felt something was missing. Something wasn’t pulling it all together. Maybe the story was too small, maybe the plot was too weak. I still don’t know. What I do know is that in the last feedback from Alice, she told me that it was almost there. ‘Almost there’ sounds so wonderful, doesn’t it? I was the closest I’d ever been to getting it over the line.

But…

The niggle was still there. Something wasn’t right.

I dived back in, putting aside book two that I’d been working on in pieces between edits of book one. I thought I would find that thing (I call it a thing because I’ve no idea what it was I was looking for). But instead all I found was sadness. The book was making me cry, quite literally. I was exhausted by it, by Grace, by her dead twin sister, by the thing not pulling together the way I wanted/needed/willed it to. So I decided, quite suddenly, to send that terrifying email to my agent asking her if she’d mind me putting this book aside while I finish book two. Her response was like a beacon in the dark!

“Definitely! It will be good for us both to have a break I think and go back fresh later.”

She then shared a story of another client that made it clear to me I wasn’t failing. And I loved her for this. Because in my head I was BIG FAILURE. I hadn’t given her the book that she’d put her time and faith in. It was a hard email to send but the response was perfect.

And so we move to book two. Beautiful, working book two where I knew everything from the outset. I have talked about this in more detail in my other (singular) Substack post where I also talk about how I embraced plotting (here).

For me, it was like being given permission to leave the table even though I hadn’t eaten my veg. I could sit there, nibble away, unhappy, getting more and more resentful of these undercooked peas and the time they were stealing from me. Or I could not let the peas ruin my life. (This metaphor is weak, I know). So I threw that cold, inedible veg into the bin (no actual food was wasted in the process of this creative unblocking) and I left the table. And since then I have completed book two, I am happy with book two, and, more importantly, so is my agent! We are back editing, but the edit feels right this time.

The other day I tweeted about the pride I have in this book (and got such a lovely response, I feel we should sing our own praises a little bit more!), and that is something that is very new to me. I had trusted my gut (no, I won’t push this metaphor any further by mentioning inedible peas). I still trust my gut. I have hope. What comes next is beyond my control, but I have produced something that makes me smile instead of cry, and that is a winner for me.

So I guess what I’m trying to say in my usual waffling way is give yourself permission to put it aside, to ditch it, to stick a pin in it, to burn it. You can go back to it (not if you burn it, obviously, that’s pretty final), but you can also move forward. And in this game, there is no better feeling than moving forward.

Will I go back to book one? Maybe. I quietly did, actually, while Alice was reading book two, and it felt lovely. I made some nice progress. So maybe this is what I’ll do - chip away without any expectation. Or maybe I’ll move onto book three that has been percolating for a while now. Because there is real joy there, in the unknown, the unwritten path, in the freedom of letting go.

Have you ever made that scary choice to move on from something you love? I’d love to hear your stories.

Happy writing!