It was Virgil’s private theory that in a world of six and a half billion people, only the hopelessly driven obsessive could out-hustle the masses of the sane—those who insisted on rounded lives, filled out with steady lovers, concerts, vacations, hobbies, pets, and even children. Sane people could not begin to compete with the crazies who lived and breathed their work, who fell asleep long after midnight with their farsights still on, only to waken at dawn and check results before coffee.

Limit of Vision (Tor, 2001)

I’m not a “hopelessly driven obsessive” as described above. I think that’s a good thing. But there is a tendency among writers to admire the “do or die” philosophy. On Twitter I’ll often see writers admonishing one another to “never quit!” — on the theory that your next project could be the successful one.

And it’s true that you never know when things will start to turn around, when rejections will start to become acceptances, and success will become noticed and… Well, who knows how far it could go?

A friend of mine used to describe each new novel as a lottery ticket, and I think that’s accurate.

The thing is, very very few people ever win the lottery. You could bankrupt yourself trying. Same thing with writing: You could bankrupt your health, your life, and your relationships with a single-minded devotion to “making it” as a writer. That’s why I feel very uncomfortable when I hear writers insisting that we should never quit!

Quit if you need to. That’s my advice. And I can say that without hypocrisy, because I did it. I quit. Not utterly, and certainly not irrevocably, but I basically walked away from the game for ten years. (more…)

So…I just finished a very rough draft of The Red: Trials, the follow up to The Red: First Light. There is A LOT of fixing up, figuring out, and filling in to do — and maybe there will be fatal flaws, I don’t know — but this was a very difficult book for me, so getting to this point is a triumph.

For those of you who are writers, I thought I’d share my experience of how I finally got those last pages done, in case you might find it helpful someday.

With many writers it’s common to write faster as you approach the end. That’s usually the case for me, but it didn’t happen this time. I was still slogging through it, even though I really didn’t have that far to go.

This has happened to me before. Long ago, when I was writing the first draft of my novel Vast, I was stuck. I was maybe 80% through and I couldn’t write anymore. I had a decision to make about how the end would work, and the uncertainty of what that decision would be worked to hold me back. I’m a very linear writer. I write chapter 1, then chapter 2, and so on, through to the end. I don’t jump around — until I got stuck writing Vast, that is. Eventually, out of desperation or despair, I jumped ahead and wrote the climactic end of the novel–and after that, writing the rest of the draft was relatively easy.

Every novel is different. With Trials I wasn’t facing a decision about the end. I knew how it would end — the generalities anyway, if not the details — but as with Vast, it turns out I needed to write the climactic ending scene before I could write all the scenes leading up to it. After a terrible writing day, I sat down on the evening of November 21, and skipped to the end. 1500 words later I felt far, far better about things. Over the next five days I added another 8500 words to create the missing scenes. I won’t say the writing was painless, but it was much less of a struggle than almost all the rest of the novel.

So this is the Vast method: when you’ve struggled close to the end but the story still isn’t writing itself, try writing the climactic scene first, and then drop back and fill in the rest.

Sometimes it works.

I don’t know how many times, during out usual post-movie analysis, I’ve turned to my husband and said, “Why didn’t they explain [insert current subject here]? It would have taken like two lines of dialog to let us know /why/how/a reason for/ this seeming silliness, but as it stands, it makes no sense.

Movies seem to commit this sin more often than books, but maybe that’s because when a book starts seeming absurd I just drop it and start another.

Madeleine Robins has some great advice on this very subject that’s definitely worth reading for those who are writers:

A little handwaving in those first scenes, a sentence of dialogue to smooth over the issues that snagged me, and I would have eased right into the story and enjoyed it. If there’s something that you think is going to snag your audience, address it in some way, then go right on past (“move along, folks. Nothin’ to see here.”)

Read the whole post here.

Sometimes, just a few lines of explanation can make all the difference.