Putting It Aside

I wrote a novel called Meddletown. I wrote the first, four-hundred-page draft over my senior year of high school, and felt convinced that this novel about androids and fate the human race was the best thing I’d ever written. After, In a moment of more or less equal parts humility and laziness, I decided that I was not equipped to do the story justice at that time and deferred the project, deciding I would revisit it sometime down the road when I had the time and the bettered skills to realize my vision.

I came back to Meddletown four years later, that first fall after college. It wasn’t long before the desktop Dell computer my parents had bought me when I went to college gave out. I’d lose what little new progress I’d made on the revision, and put the whole thing aside for a few months, before I connected with a professor at Syracuse who offered to read my manuscript. I scrambled to strip away the parts of the manuscript I was embarrassed about now, to polish the scenes I was still proud of, to get a draft to him within a couple weeks of the offer. He never did get back to me, and in the years to follow, I did a full rewrite and enrolled in an undergrad fiction workshop where I tried out rewritten chapters from the novel.

I moved to Baltimore, and after those initial months of getting settled in I tackled it again. I was so convinced that the core of the story was not just good, but important, that I would not let it go, and did full-scale rewrites on the thing at least three times more, sharing chapters in a novel workshop at my grad program at Hopkins, and the full manuscript with friends and with a writing group based at my work.

For each iteration, I do hold that the manuscript got better, but after about four or five non-consecutive years of work, I still had the sense that the project wasn’t ready for publication. By the 2010, I was seven years removed from self-publishing a pair of other novels I’d written in high school, and was embarrassed about the middling quality of the work that had my name attached to it. The next time I published, I wanted it to be a story I could stand more fully behind. Between my imperfect understandings of artificial intelligence and robotics, not to mention a rotating first- and then close-third-person style of narration that never quite clicked—I just couldn’t get over the hump to feel I’d gotten the book right.

I tried limiting the novel to just one point of view. I watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall and the note about how Jason Segel’s character’s puppet vampire musical made more sense as a comedy struck a chord, and made me consider the potential transform my largely absurdist android premise into something comedic.

Then, I put it aside.

For the first time, I put aside Meddletown without any intention of coming back to it, while I transitioned to a collection of interlocking stories about circus performers, and then narrowed my focus to polishing two stories for my MFA applications. After I’d arrived at my MFA program, I focused on short stories and flash fiction and prose poems. IN my final quarter, I set to work on a new novel that had nothing to do with robots.

When I offer my students or my friends advice about writing, one of the values I I tend lean into is the value of persistence. I contend you can’t get better at writing without practicing writing, and that no piece will reach its potential if you don’t see it through to the end, or if you don’t rewrite and rewrite until you’re proud of what you’ve done.

A less inspiring truth?

Some projects won’t ever make it to the promised land.

There was a time when I’d consider the act of putting Meddletown aside to have been a sign of failure. After so much time and so much effort, anything less than seeing it through to publication and assorted accolades would mean one of my life’s great regrets.

I learned a lot from pursuing, Meddletown. I became a better writer in lessons learned about how to structure a novel-length project, and how to approach writing and rewriting such a piece that was hundreds of pages long. I learned about rewriting on a sentence level to affect change on a macroscale. Over those years of revision, I learned about letting go of subplots and characters—about the old writing wisdom about needing to kill your darlings. I learned about persistence.

The last lesson learned, however, and perhaps the most important of all was when to recognize when it was time to put a project aside. Yes, there’s a level on which it felt like a defeat not to see this book go all the way. But there are also lessons to be learned about not throwing good money after bad—or in this case, squandering more time and effort just because I’d already sunk a lot of other time and effort into the thing.

Every now and again, I’ll talk to someone who read a draft of Meddletown, or at least a chapter from it—I showed enough of it to enough people over enough time that I’ve lost track of some of those steps in between, who saw what and in which iteration. Sometimes I still say that I might come back to it.

I don’t think I will.

I put this one aside. I carried on. It has been seven years now, and I don’t see myself turning back.