Another book bites the dust.

The road to success is littered with abandoned projects. And that's OK.

Ask any writer to open the proverbial desk drawer, and chances are you’ll see a lot of abandoned carcasses. Of books, that is.

All of us have projects we’ve started but never finished. In some cases, this could mean just a few pages, in other cases, a few hundred. We lose steam, we get stuck, we decide to pivot and work on a different project, we see a squirrel. Sometimes we return to abandoned works later, but more often than not, we don’t.

It’s not easy to give up on something that you resolved with great courage and enthusiasm to do. For me, it can come with feelings of self-recrimination (I’m just being lazy; I could push through and do it), regret (I can’t believe I wasted all that time and effort on the wrong thing) and even embarrassment (I told a lot of people I was working on this thing, and now if they ask, I have to tell them I gave up on it).

But there is a Maya Angelou quote—of course there is; there always is!—that I come back to often, which I find helpful in the case of aborted projects or plans whenever those feelings creep in. (And when I cut and pasted from elsewhere just now, Substack decided to make it GINORMOUS, but I’m going to just go with it.)

“Each of us has the right and the responsibility to assess the roads which lie ahead, and those over which we have traveled, and if the future road looms ominous or unpromising, and the roads back uninviting, then we need to gather our resolve and, carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road into another direction. If the new choice is also unpalatable, without embarrassment, we must be ready to change that as well.”

―Maya Angelou,Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now

It’s the “without embarrassment” part that I really love. The new road isn’t always the right road, and sometimes you have to change course again. And that’s OK. Even if there’s that one tactless friend who says something like, “Jeez, you keep changing your mind. Maybe you should just choose someone and stick with it?” Just ignore her.

So now, in the spirit of not being embarrassed, I present to you a few of the many, MANY projects I’ve enthusiastically begun but ultimately abandoned over the years:

— The one about the alien invasion where humans are offered the chance to go back with the aliens to their planet (where who knows what awaits…), or stay on earth which, the aliens claim, is going to be destroyed by an asteroid in 5 years. Or something like that? I don’t fucking know. The idea that I was even considering writing something involving SPACE is hilarious to me. What the fuck?? I hate space!! And aliens! I think I only got like 10 pages into this one before I came to my senses.

— The one set in the 1980s, about a possibly haunted theater, a caustic, failed-actress-turned-director who let the place burn to the ground, an aging actor dying of AIDS, an overbearing mother with dementia, and general urban decay. What a crowd-pleaser! I ran out of steam about 50 pages in, luckily for everyone.

— The one about a beach town in Massachusetts that gets destroyed by a record-breaking hurricane, and the estranged sisters—a high-strung perfectionist who’s the head of the chamber of commerce, and a jaded, failed artist who’s perpetually stoned—who join forces to try to attract tourists back the following summer. This one, I was actually quite excited about. (There was a restaurant called ‘The Clam and Dairy Shack’! How delightfully gross is that?) But it petered out when I fell in love with another idea.

—The collection of “Mysterious Mystery Plays”—one of dozens of books I started but never completed when I was between the ages of seven and ten, written in little booklets of stapled-together paper. I got six pages into the first play, ‘The Phonograph Ghost,’ before I gave up, perhaps realizing that drama was not my medium. Here, see for yourself. (Trigger warnings: Ghosts, misspellings)

There are three more pages, but let’s not go overboard now, shall we?

As of a couple of weeks ago, I can add one more abandoned book to the pile.

For a long time, I’ve mulled the possibility of writing a memoir about my relationship with my father, who had a narcissistic personality disorder. He was as playful, charming, and generous as he was self-absorbed, explosive, and disdainful. I worshipped the ground he walked on when I was a child and was barely speaking to him by the time he died. It was….complicated.

I thought maybe I could figure out how to spin this story in all its ups and downs into something honest and sad and funny and relatable; something that might resonate with other people who have navigated relationships with narcissists. I even had thoughts on how to make it fun to write.

Note that by “fun” I don’t mean a laugh a minute; obviously this book would cover some heavy material. What I mean is that I had a structure and framework in mind that I thought would make it interesting and creatively satisfying to work on.

So. A couple of weeks ago, I finally took some time to explore the idea in earnest. I headed for the little cabin in the woods where I’ve done DIY writing retreats a few times, and got a bunch of words down on paper. Computer. Whatever.

But here’s the thing: Writing it felt like a grind. Not that writing is ever a walk in the park, mind you. But there’s effort and then there’s….ugh. And I don’t think it was because I was writing about difficult things; I’ve written about a lot of painful personal stuff over the years—depression, rejection, grief, my daughter’s cancer, etc.—and in most cases found the writing process rewarding, even when it wasn’t always comfortable.

I think in this case, the issue was that I didn’t feel like there was a Big Question I was trying to answer, and nothing to imagine or discover along the way. It’s all stuff I’ve processed and pondered many times over.

This isn’t to say that I couldn’t (or won’t) still write a good book along these lines; I think I could. But I could also probably write a decent gay hockey romance if I wanted to. And I don’t. (Did I want to watch one? Oh hell yes. #TeamIlya)

So, on my third and final day of my retreat, I put my nascent memoir aside, opened up a new blank document, and started playing around with something else: an idea for a novel that had popped into my brain a few days earlier following a text exchange with a friend about terrible tech billionaires and their awesome ex-wives.

I don’t know if his idea will go anywhere, or if I’ll stick with it for the long haul. I may need to, without embarrassment, step off this road onto another. But I do know that I had a lot more fun in the three hours I spent working on the novel I idea than I did in the ten-plus hours I spent on the memoir.

So. In the end, it ended up being an incredibly productive little retreat. Not in terms of pages racked up, but in clarity gained. I left feeling satsified. It’s almost as if the little saying I keep on my bulletin board—which I came up with—has really embossed iself upon my little brain:

“Process is progress.”

―Jane Roper, author of The Phonograph Ghost (unfinished)

When it comes to writing (or, dare I say, life?) working your way through one idea is often the way you get to the next one. The pages you throw away pave the path to the ones you keep. And, yes, fine, sometimes you get into a rut where you really are just spinning your wheels. (Books involving aliens, anyone?) But hey. That’s life.

On that supremely eloquent note, I shall leave you to your (barf) respective journeys.

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All posts on Jane’s Calamity are free and publicly available, but writing is how I make my living. If you enjoy my work, I’d be deeply grateful if you would consider leaving me a one-time tip or upgrading to a paid subscription. Or, hey, buy my book! Thank you as always for reading. xoxo

P.S. I’m going to be teaching a few (online) writing classes in April and May, on writing with humor, novel beginnings, and memoir writing. Check out my events page to learn more and register!

P.P. S. I agonized over whether to also share an excerpt from another childhood unfinished work, All My Fun—a Gen-X childhood horror novel about a fourth grader named Lisa who is constantly terrified that she will be kidnapped. She does, indeed, get snatched from her home (after a brief sailing trip on the Mississippi River), put into the back of a van, along with several other children. Does she escape? We will never know.

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