It’s just not very good, is it?
This week’s piece about a writer’s need for treats was written, titled and adorned with a picture of Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette for good measure. There was just one problem - it wasn’t very good.
The concept had to quickly shift after plans to interview some writers fell through, and as a consequence, it didn’t feel wholly developed. The tone veered between irreverent and arrogant in a way that came off as thoroughly unlikeable (to be expected when writing about buying a Gucci bag to spite a boyfriend), and no matter how much I tinkered with it, I couldn’t get it to a place where I was happy.
The Queen of Substack, Hunter Harris, wrote in her piece, The Best Writing and Interviewing and Editing Advice I've Ever Gotten, that you should, "Write something worthy of your name." And even though I am Lily Hyde, the Lily Hyde of Falling Upwards is me at an eleven, whereas I usually inhabit a nonchalant, deeply chic six. And yes, the dialled-up Lily loves to write nonsense pieces about vampires, lusting for Dior and Cecil Vyse, but these pieces are my nonsense, and I’m proud of them in a way that I wasn't of what I had drafted.
I am comfortable enough in my ability as a writer to acknowledge that it is easier (and likely better) to set forth an admission of failure into the world than a failure that would make my neck twinge every time I saw it or begged people to read it on Instagram. I am not advanced enough in my career to put my name to something I am not proud of. That will come when I am fifty and doing a Masterclass™ to pay for a new Aga or something else that fifty-year-olds buy…I don’t know, a Zimmer frame?
As a writer, knowing when to walk away is very important. I’ve been in creative writing classes with people trying to hone ten volumes of fantasy they’ve been working on for 20+ years into something publishable within twelve weeks.
When the teacher would naturally advise them to maybe adjust their expectations and consider focusing on one book, this kind of pupil (and believe me, this kind of creative writing pupil is very real, and there are more of them than you think1) would come to the thoroughly misguided conclusion that their story, such is the breadth of their vision, actually needed twelve volumes to be fully told, and that the teacher, a published writer himself, had no idea what he was talking about.
Writers are particularly susceptible to the sunk-cost fallacy, and why wouldn’t they be? Their work is the summation of their love and their time - why would they not give everything you have in service of it?
I have fallen for it too; I tried to get an agent for my first novel for eighteen months, for which feedback usually read something like, ‘Fantastic first effort! Please let me know if you write anything else.’
I did not take this as a sign to stop with this novel, which I’m certain in some universe was good enough to make me the youngest-ever winner of the Booker Prize. Unfortunately, it was not this one, and I continued to work on it before eventually coming to the (very late) conclusion that it just wasn’t its time.
My second novel, which I started work on in 2021, with a protagonist from Ukraine, genuinely had to be put on pause because of the Russian invasion, but even if that hadn’t happened, I don’t know how far I would have got with it.
It hurt to put these novels away, to acknowledge that if they had failed, then I had failed too, but I did so knowing that if I loved them and that if I believed in them, as I knew I did, then one day I would return to them - and I have.
I am currently developing a rewrite plan for my second novel, with a protagonist straight outta Lviv, and with the distance of time, find that Ukraine’s strange new normal of stagnant violence with no clear outcome works wonders for Mr Kozlov’s hazy malcontent2.
Last Summer, after a year away from it, I reread my first novel. It was a genuine joy to be reunited with the characters that have been with me since I was sixteen, that I know and love as if they were my own family, and at the wretched sincerity of my protagonist's unhappiness with the new life she has to navigate. With fresh eyes, I could see that the prose was there, the characterisation compelling and believable, but the plot was a complete mess. Quite simply - it just wasn’t very good.
But at twenty-six, I knew how to fix it far more than I did at twenty-three when I started sending it to agents and at sixteen when I started writing it.
We grow, and we move on - to the next novel and next week’s post.
See you there.
L x
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I have been to CityLit, and I have the scars to prove it. And yes, these students are almost exclusively men.
I feel the need to state that the novel does not take place in Ukraine, but within a world where the invasion did happen.