"Am I struggling with this book project because books are hard to write, or am I struggling because it's the wrong book for me?"
My thoughts on a common question authors ask (or scream) in the throes of proposal and manuscript development. TL DR: the answer is something you feel in your body vs. know in your head.
Last week, during an editorial Zoom call to figure out some complex but routine editorial issues, one of my authors and I started crying. Both of us. Started crying. Bit of a professional first for me.
We weren’t crying because the proposal on the table was “bad.” We weren’t crying because we were at some kind of irreversible dead end. Nor had either of us done something rash to the other in the throes of high emotion, e.g. leaving a flaming bag of poop on the other’s doorstep or stealing the other’s heirlooms.
No: we were crying because 1. it’s 2022 and 2. we’d hit the near-ubiquitous point in the life cycle of a book proposal when both author and agent feel like they’re losing their minds. (Oh, and 3. we both happen to be Emotional Bottlers Triggered to Semiannual Cumulative Sobs by Random Routine Frustrations. High fives for all you other WASPs in the chat!!)
The seasoned publishing professionals reading this will know such “dark night of the soul” moments well. For the rest of you: there’s almost always some point in a book project pre-submission in which everyone loses all perspective, and things feel like they’re so close and yet so far, and nobody can say exactly what is fucking MISSING, and and and.
Granted, most of the time, nobody cries. But it’s SUCH a common occurrence.
Eventually, my author and I stopped crying and figured things out. The proposal is now taking shape quite nicely, despite the fact that this seemed near-impossible last week. How we did this, I will get to in a moment. (We asked ourselves question number one below, which is behind a paywall. Aren’t I the worst?)
Like the Point of Existential Despair itself, a swiftly-followed final turn into greatness is also—I have learned from experience—normal. As a matter of fact, I have come to see “author and agent both spinning out from despair” as the sign that a proposal is finally about to achieve its final form.
It’s hard for me to remember that in the moment, though. And first-time authors like this one have no precedent to remember.
Which is why, at some point during what I will always remember as the Great Weep of March 2022, my author asked me a question I had heard from many, many others before them: “should I just throw in the towel here?”
They weren’t quite sure anymore whether they were stumped about their book’s structure in a sort-of-fun, let’s-figure-out-this-here-Rubik’s-cube way or stumped because this was actually a book that they lacked the intrinsic motivation, time, resources, and/or range to write and write well.
In this author’s case, it was the former. It isn’t always, though. And if you’re in the same stuck place they were last week, how do you know whether YOU should throw in the towel?
That’s what this week’s newsletter addresses.
Here’s how I help my authors navigate this question when (when) they find themselves asking it. Generally, they only need to ask themselves two questions; one or both of their answers will bring them the clarity they seek.