Why Do Writers Abandon Novels? | Hacker News Reader

Why Do Writers Abandon Novels?

nytimes.com

48 pointsrobg15 comments

I don't know about novels, but I do know about a Ph.D. thesis. You start with great ideas, high hopes, and an intention to produce something wonderful.

By the end you're just desperate to get shot of the damn thing and move on. The level of detail, the irrelevant nit-picking, the positioning of the diagrams, the alignment of the text, the wording that jars the senses, chosen to be more correct and more precise, but nevertheless an insult to the lover of decent prose, and so on.

I can imagine that a novel is the same, and to quote transmit101:

  > Coding is pretty straight-forward in comparison.

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2313149)

Yes. Yes it is.

And to reply to beaumartinez who said:

  > I find coding elicits the same things
  > you've mentioned about composing.

Perhaps, but unless you've experienced both, it's hard to appreciate the sheer intensity. Many people express doubt without themselves having the experience.

Two thumbs up to this, as someone who just finished writing his dissertation yesterday, and hasn't completely figured out how to deal with the lack of stress. I realized that the old adage about writing is absolutely true for anything that you spend multiple years writing: it's never finished, but at some point it has to be done.

Congratulations!

Thanks!

This also happens a lot with code as well. I am sure each person here has at least a few abandoned software projects that they either couldn't finish, didn't want to finish, or at some point later regret not finishing.

I would like to hear those stories, it would be interesting.

One of mine is I built a web based blogging application in 2002/03 which was supposed to kick MovableType's ass. I had beta testers with great product feedback, but just simply got distracted with another project, thought blogging would never be that popular, and just abandoned it. I even let the domains expire (one of the hosting domains was bloguser.com). I wrote a lot of code for that project, including Javascript in the text editor so you could select and make text bold etc.

The other was discovering the original IE 5.0 xmlhttprequest while working on a corporate intranet role (this was in 99-00 IIRC). I remember thinking 'this is awesome, literally every desktop app is going to be written as a web app, I should totally quit my job and setup a company to do web email, web word processor, etc. with fancy javascript'. I spent a lot of hobby time playing with it, writing prototype code, showing my old boss, etc. but then thought it wouldn't get far because it only worked on IE - and at the time most of the web community frowned on IE and I wanted to be one of the cool kids.

The real question is why writers keep writing novels, which I engaged here: http://jseliger.com/2010/12/09/why-unpublished-novelists-kee... .

As for abandoning novels, I can only say that it took me four or five attempts at writing novels before I "finished" one, and even the first two I finished were terrible. It took until the novel after that to actually have something publishable, although adventures in agent land mean that it's still on my hard drive rather than bookstores.

Of course, having said that, your recent article[1] on Amanda Hocking and the indie e-book revolution must tempt you to blow the dust off those first two, stick a $.99 tag on them and beam them to hungry Kindles and Nooks and Kobos.

And, why not? There could be a (willing, paying) audience that you are neglecting to see because of your prejudice against those orphaned novels. And, hey, gets your name out to the relatively nascent ebook buying crowd, who heretofore may have never even read books.

[1]http://jseliger.com/2011/03/10/why-publishers-are-scared-of-...

I don't know about novels, but finishing a piece of music is a truly arduous task. I've never found another activity which is so deeply challenging: forcing you to confront your own ideas of what you're trying to produce, how good you expect to make it, your own self-confidence and self-belief, stamina, you name it.

Coding is pretty straight-forward in comparison.

I don't doubt that writing novels is similarly tough (possibly tougher)

> Coding is pretty straight-forward in comparison.

Really? I suppose it depends on what you mean. Sometimes "coding" can be akin to writing a single bar in someone else's composition. Other times you're writing a whole opera yourself, from scratch. They're two different ball parks.

I find coding elicits the same things you've mentioned about composing.

Interesting, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's very different for different people.

For me, coding comes very naturally indeed. Next, writing, then music, and finally visual art which I find next-to impossible to master. :-)

And when I say "naturally", I have no doubt that there is a direct correlation between what comes most "naturally" to me, and what I've spent the most time over the years practicing.

That's exactly how I feel about drawing a portrait of a friend or family member. I realize that it's a very small task compared to writing a novel, but after getting the initial sketch done, it gets a lot harder. Even after many revisions, I keep finding little things that are off. After a while, I start doubting my own judgement about how light or dark a given area should be. At that point it's very easy to walk away from an 80% finished work, procrastinate indefinitely and then start working on something easier like a plant.

I couldn't help but selfishly compare to founding a startup while reading this. I've been working on my startup for 6 months and have hard days. I can't imagine how throwing away 5 years of work would feel.

To me the struggle holds true anytime you are creating something. A novel, a song, an application. I wouldn't say coding is a struggle. Nor writing. But building an application or writing a story—those are challenging.

Reminded me of this post too:

When you want to quit because it's just not worth it http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2271405

A piece of writing is never finished, only abandoned.

i find this sort of fetishism disturbing. i much rather like Kurt vonnegut's stance on this: authors are not obliged to finish what they began. he also claimed having trashed quite a few novels.

Au contraire: knowing why authors abandon novels is of some considerable interest to those of us who earn our living by writing them.

Speaking only for myself, about 90% of all novels involve a phase where my relationship with it is "this is shit, it sucks, why can't I be writing something else?" ... The only ones that don't go through this phase are written rapidly, in a driven death-march, so that I don't have time to sit back and stare at it. And on the basis of conversations with other writers I've concluded that this is pretty much normal.

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