
Why Do Writers Abandon Novels? - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/books/review/Kois-t.html?_r=1&ref=review&pagewanted=all
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RiderOfGiraffes
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.

~~~
mayank
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_.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Congratulations!

~~~
mayank
Thanks!

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nikcub
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.

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jseliger
The real question is why writers keep _writing_ novels, which I engaged here:
[http://jseliger.com/2010/12/09/why-unpublished-novelists-
kee...](http://jseliger.com/2010/12/09/why-unpublished-novelists-keep-writing-
why-not-an-answer-as-to-why-this-one-does) .

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.

~~~
muhfuhkuh
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-...](http://jseliger.com/2011/03/10/why-publishers-are-scared-of-ebooks-
the-standard-reasons-and-amanda-hocking-as-symbol/)

------
transmit101
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)

~~~
beaumartinez
> _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.

~~~
transmit101
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.

------
studiofellow
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>

------
ljlolel
A piece of writing is never finished, only abandoned.

------
stewbrew
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.

~~~
cstross
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.

