Do I stay or do I go?
How to know when to make a move?
Before we begin…
Have you got a quitting story? How about a story about a time you teetered on the edge of leaving or staying in a job, a relationship, a house, a city, a state, a country? How did you finally make the decision to stay or go? How is it working out?
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Sometimes it takes leaving in order to arrive
I’ve been thinking about
’s post of last week, a lovely piece about how, at midlife, she left the city she believed was her home to start again in another. It was in this new place, this new city, that she began to write, something she’d wanted to do her entire adult life but had struggled to achieve in the way she’d envisioned.
“…when I looked at New York, all I saw was the past. So I left New York… and then the strangest thing happened.
I started to write. ✨” - Jolene Handy, Manhattan, when I was young
Boy, did her essay speak to me. Twenty three years ago, I moved from the East Coast to San Diego with my husband. Stashed in the boxes we hauled out west were clips from my early days as a reporter for a New England daily newspaper, an 800-word article about time sharing for a now-defunct magazine, a battered copy of the ABC Sports: The Complete Book of Sports Facts I’d helped put together when I worked for a book packager, also long-since defunct, and an article about clinical trials for a Russian magazine that may or may not have been what I submitted. I couldn’t read Russian and neither could anyone I might want to write for.
When I opened the box, the clips were so old and mildewed I sneezed. They, along with incomplete drafts of short stories or essays, and the painfully awful beginnings of a long feature article I’d successfully pitched to a big glossy magazine when I was just out of college and failed to write made up the sum total of my career as a writer.
I was forty-six. For most of the years up to this point, I’d lived with the desire to “be a writer” but had invested most of my time doing everything but writing. I had a child to raise, a job to do, an extended family, and a community of friends I cared about. I loved all of these responsibilities but I also wore them like armor. They protected me by giving me identity, structure, validation as a person, and lots of society-approved reasons to postpone any attempt to follow my desire to write in a sustained way and, possibly/probably, to fail.
Still, the desire to be a writer bubbled beneath the surface like a pot put on to simmer and abandoned. It finally boiled over the year before we made the move to San Diego. I knew that if I wasn’t half-way through my life, I was close. My son was grown and had been on his own for a considerable time. Work was important financially but was not meaningful. I wasn’t sure what moving would do to or for me but it felt very important to find out.
A couple of months after landing in San Diego, I found myself ripping through moving box after moving box to find the evidence that I had, in fact, been published at one point in my life. I pieced together the tattered, mildewed clippings, made xerox copies, refashioned my resume, and took them to a meeting with the editor of a group of local weekly newspapers in response to an ad he’d put out seeking stringers. He scanned the articles, told me to give it a try. I was paid $25 a story so, no, I didn’t give up my day job which I was now doing long-distance as a consultant. Not long after that, I took a short story class one night a week at one of the local universities. That led to joining other writers to form what would be my first writer’s group. The story attempts and rough drafts led to the decision to try a novel. A few years into the novel, my husband encouraged me to stop the consulting and just finish the book which thrilled and terrified me. That took away the last of the excuses I’d always given myself for not writing. Turns out, I was finally ready.
Like Jolene’s story, moving from one city to another coincided with the moment I committed to writing. I can’t say for certain what would have happened if I’d stayed on the East Coast and continued to do what I’d been doing. I do know that moving peeled away the layers of the familiar and gave me a sense of confidence and adventure. If I could make such a big change after so long in one way of life, I could make other changes. Although I have a horror of using the word, “reinvention,” I confess to feeling the exhilaration that comes with meeting new people without baggage. No one here knew me in the context of what I did for work or knew me when I was a kid. They didn’t know my old regrets, embarrassments, failures or fears. I was free to let all of those recede in importance too along with the notion of “being a writer.” I could just write and follow wherever it led me.
What came next
In 2014, ten years after I started my first novel, I sold it.. In 2016, the year I turned sixty, it was published. The process involved lots of starting over, lots of moving forward without always knowing where I was headed, lots of support and patience from fellow writers, family, and friends. I shared a bit about that with attendees at the Southern California Writers Conference in 2016. I listened to this five-minute segment again and heard a few things I needed to hear again, namely this (about two minutes in):
“If stopping feels worse than keeping on, well really you only have one choice. You've got to keep on.” - Me, in 2016 when my novel was launched
Where I am now
To my shock and dismay, I have not yet finished the book that was supposed to follow Casualties. I started it in earnest in early 2017. I expected that I would not stumble so many times with this one. I am a slow writer, yes. And I am trying to write across a span of years which is proving more difficult structurally than I expected. The characters, like my protagonist in Casualties, hid from me for a long time even when I thought I had them finally figured out. Finally, I am edging close to a version that can be called a book. This version won’t be the last one but it is the most essential because without it, I cannot begin the process that will bring this project home. I have targeted September as the deadline for this version.
I have to face the reality that I need to make a little more space in order to achieve this goal. Beginning with this issue, Spark will come out every other week until September 14th. This means I won’t be publishing next week, for example. Instead, I’ll be using that extra thinking and writing time to work on my novel.
I’ve struggled with this decision. I am very attached to this project and love my regular connection with all of you. Stopping altogether was simply not an option. This seems to be a way to keep that connection going while I try to advance my WIP so that there is a chance it will be done before …well, you know.
This is more than a little scary. I am committing out loud to a goal and asking you to support it. I have no idea if it will work as well as I hope. The only thing I can do is take this step and see where it leads. Thanks for coming along.
Stopping, starting, trying, failing
“Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.”― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away
Should she quit? This post by novelist and memoirist Amy Wallen on her Substack,
,lays out a dilemma: she has written a novel whose central character is a menopausal Nancy Drew. Agents like the story but there is a glitch – the lead character’s name needs to be changed. Or does it? I’m sharing this because you may have an idea to share with Amy to help her solve the problem. She wants to keep trying but she wonders how much further she can go…Speaking of walking away,
wrote a list of the projects she has abandoned or “failed” on her way to being a writer. It raises the question: is walking away failing or is it a path towards what we are meant to be doing?Actually, gambler and researcher Annie Duke addresses this question in her book Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. My husband read this book. I have not. I’ve heard a lot about it, read a few things, and watched some interviews. The material comes across as dry at times but the overall thesis makes sense: there is a point, and it’s often sooner than we want to realize, that it makes more sense to quit what isn’t working for us and start doing more of what is. I like what she says about how to stop giving so much weight to the amount of time we’ve been doing something and give more weight to doing the thing that may be more likely to lead us to where we want to go.
Not sure if you should finish reading that book? Here is how others make the decision about when to bail on a book.
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Jackson Brodie is coming back… even better, so is Reggie Chase
As I mentioned last week, Kate Atkinson’s new Jackson Brodie book, Death at the The Sign of the Rook, comes out in September. I have just finished my Netgalley copy and here’s my initial take: if you love Kate Atkinson and Jackson Brodie, you’ll be glad you read this one. If you don’t know Atkinson or her character, Brodie, you should find it a fun read but it will be even more fun if you read all of the others, in order, first.
The book is one part homage to Agatha Christie and one part tongue-in-cheek spoof of a latter-day Downton Abbey (at one point a murder mystery party at the manor house in the center of the plot is called “Downton with Daggers”). It involves a series of art thefts that are linked by a mysterious woman who is so ordinary she is invisible to most who deal with her but special to the few who see her. As with every Kate Atkinson novel - the plot takes some fun twists but it is the rich cast of characters that pulls the reader into the book and keeps her there.
Jackson Brodie former cop and now private detective, is in his sixties and feeling it which is why he’s purchased a giant behemoth of an SUV called a “Defender” and reaches out to Reggie Chase, formerly teenage orphan and knowledge sponge who, in When Will There Be Good News?, helped Brodie cover up a justified murder. Now, two books later, Reggie wishes only to keep her nose clean, follow the rules, and ascend the promotional ladder in her career. She regards him as trouble. He regards her as family. They are always going to be connected and there is the sense that if Atkinson continues to write about Jackson Brodie, the focus may shift to this younger, female version of him. That would be just fine with me. Reggie, like Jackson Brodie, is a complex character with her own very specific response to the chaos of her early life. As he moves into the later years of life, he feels few regrets. She has not yet reached that stage and tension stems from her resistance and attraction to what Brodie represents to her.
As she has in her other Brodie novels, each character - major and minor- is fully realized on the page and it often seems as though Atkinson prefers to spend time with them, having already given us all we need to know about Brodie himself. There is the mute pastor, the dowager of the manor, the veteran who has lost a leg and struggles with PTSD in the countryside with his sister and her wife and many more who are conveyed so crisply and so wonderfully in a sentence or two (“She could still touch her toes, something she found it necessary to demonstrate whenever possible. It gave her an inflated sense of self.” Kate Atkinson, Death at the The Sign of the Rook. ) that you need nothing more. I grinned all the way through and it felt as though Atkinson was grinning too. She wrote this book, I'm guessing, because she wasn't done with Brodie but also because she enjoyed the laugh and the chance to spoof the obsession with such cultural icons as Downton Abbey and Agatha Christie and, even, Jackson Brodie himself.
Lines that linger: let’s play
Let’s play. Share a sentence from anything you’ve read (or re-read) this week along with the source. No need to add any context, the fun part is getting to see how it impacts others. This week, I’m sharing a one-sentence description of one of the minor characters in Death at the The Sign of the Rook that conveys everything I needed to know without a single physical detail.
“She could still touch her toes, something she found it necessary to demonstrate whenever possible. It gave her an inflated sense of self.” Kate Atkinson, Death at the The Sign of the Rook.
Now it’s your turn. Share a line you read or heard this week that is staying with you for whatever reason.
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Ciao for now!
Gratefully yours,
Betsy
P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…an experiment in book selection
I unstacked the books by my bed and asked Lily and Frida to weigh in on which one to read next. I’m not sure I got my answer…
Calling for Your Contribution to “Moment of Zen”:
What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.
Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed.
I can’t wait to see what you send!
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We will still be here every other week--taking inspiration from you, cheering you on. More isn't better when you're already the best. xoxo
Elizabeth, taking time for your novel is clearly what you need to do, and there's no reason not to reconfigure your time to make that happen. Follow your instincts; they're never wrong. I'm a big believer in change, and sometime big changes. All my life I'd said I would live in Italy someday, my ancestral homeland, but you know, life yada yada. Then one day in summer 2016, at age 60, I said, "If not now, when?" I moved here in 2018 and have zero regrets. Live your life, baby; it's the only one you've got! And I for one will stick with Spark however often it's published. Forza!