Create a Contingency Plan For the Days When Writing is a Real Bastard
This is how you stick to your writing habit when quitting seems like your only choice.
In July 2014, an imprint of Penguin released my second novel.
Looking at that sentence — I still am in awe that this is my life. I put my mind to a thing (getting published) and worked hard at it for a long time, and it worked.
But here’s what happened that day in July. I dressed my kids up, cajoled my husband into a nice shirt, and trooped the whole gang to my local Barnes and Nobel. It was time to see Mama’s book on the shelf.
We rode the escalator up to the second floor, where all the YA novels were, and went to the spot where it should have been. Right next to its sister, Viral Nation.
Neither book was on the shelf.
I knew the woman who managed author affairs at the store. She’d set up a signing for me when Viral Nation was released the year prior. I found her and asked about my book.
She told me that the store hadn’t ordered it.
At least she had the grace to seem embarrassed. Maybe she really was. There aren’t so many writers in Reno that having one whose traditionally-published book just wasn’t ordered at all probably wasn’t an everyday occurrence.
We took the elevator back down. And I cried. You know that kind of crying where you’re not sobbing, but you still can’t breathe? Yeah. That kind.
Sometimes, things don’t work out the way you want them to.
That day, in July 2014, my writing career didn’t go the way I’d planned it to. I planned to be a bestseller. I planned to at least be a local hotshot. I planned to be a real writer with books in Barnes and Nobel.
I 100 percent did not plan to sit in my car crying in front of my husband and my kids, because not even my local bookstore cared about my novel.
I had a book already finished that my agent hated. I couldn’t get her interested in any other ideas and in the end, we parted ways — sweetly, but still, it was one of the most difficult things I’d ever done.
So, before that day in July, I’d sent that other book out to agents and signed with a new one. And about a week after I realized Rebel Nation was a non-starter, she let me know that A) her first round of submissions didn’t result in a sale and B) she wasn’t going to represent YA anymore.
So. I had no agent. No manuscripts. Two-thirds of a trilogy that my publisher wasn’t going to finish.
For about a year, I didn’t write fiction at all. I still wrote, every day. But I blogged. I worked on a non-fiction idea that went no where. I wrote school papers for my undergraduate degree.
Anything but fiction.
It wasn’t until I found myself seriously contemplating becoming a classroom teacher — and giving up writing all together — that I decided I needed to give it one more try.
That was my plan. One more try. I decided to blog about the process of writing another book. That series became Ninja Writers, which five years later, is my business.
That book, though? It didn’t sell. The next one did. And the one after that.
A Contingency Plan
I wish that prior to 2014, I’d thought about what I’d do if things didn’t go the way I planned. I didn’t even let myself think about the idea that maybe my publisher wouldn’t pick up the third book in my series. Or maybe my books wouldn’t sell as well as we’d all hoped they would.
I really didn’t consider what I’d do if my agent didn’t like my ideas anymore and I found myself unrepresented again.
I honestly thought, when I sold my first book, that the part where I had to worry about that stuff was over. And if those thoughts did knock on my brain, I didn’t let them in. I didn’t want to jinx anything.
I was wrong. And because I was so wrong and I hadn’t let myself think about the possibility that I might be, when they did happen, I was knocked for such a loop that I almost flew right out of writing all together.
What I needed then and what I have now is a contingency plan.
Plot, Write, Edit, Brew
I don’t have any clever name for this framework. I literally just call it Plot, Write, Edit, Brew.
I always have three books in the mix and a list of active ideas.
I have a book I’m plotting, one I’m writing, and one I’m editing. Right now I’m plotting a middle grade novel called The Odds, I’m writing a YA called 312, and I’m editing a romance novel that I want to use to experiment with indie publishing. That one’s called Thunderstruck.
I have a list of ideas that are in different stages of development, ready to move into the plotting when my whole system moves to the right. So — The Odds will shift to Writing, 312 to Editing, and a new idea from Brewing will move over to Plotting.
My contingency plan is a perpetual motion machine. No one book ever becomes so important that it could derail my whole career. There’s always something new in the works.
Fall Back on Tiny Goals
When things get really tough, my contingency plan tightens up.
The one book that matters most is my current work-in-progress. That’s whatever I’m writing at the moment. If I ever find myself in spot I was drowning in as I cried in my car at Barnes and Nobel, I’ll have my current WIP as an emergency break.
My tiny goal is to write for ten minutes a day on that book. Most days (the vast majority of them) I write far more than 10 minutes a day. But I get full credit for hitting my tiny goal.
I can write for ten minutes no matter how terrible a time I’m having. Even if I really don’t want to.
Recently, I’ve struggled with my WIP. This book, 312, is killing me. And it would be so easy to let it go. Really, to let fiction go all together. Ninja Writers is doing really well. I’m so busy. Fiction is the least lucrative of all the writing I do.
So for a couple of months, I just did my ten minutes. My contingency plan worked. Eventually, the bug to write more bit me again. The last several weeks, I’ve written at least an hour a day and I’ll finish this first draft by the end of this month.
And I’ve picked plotting and editing back up, too.
Evaluate Your Project
There’s always a possibility, of course, that your current writing project really is wrong for you. Or that you’d be happier doing something else all together.
This isn’t about never quitting. It’s about not quitting without intention.
Seth Godin suggests making a contingency plan for quitting, right from the start. Under which circumstances would you let this project go. And when? The ‘when’ makes the plan time bound, which is a good thing.
Ramping back up my writing on 312 involved reading what I already had done. Just sitting down and reading it over the course of a couple of days. Not editing. Not revising. Just taking in the story.
Was it any good? Why was I struggling so hard with finishing it?
I needed to have a reason beyond not wanting to be a quitter to stick with it. Or I needed to just move on and pick up a different project. I also had to know what would have made me quit.
If I’d been uninspired, after re-reading and if I couldn’t get the book done by the end of 2020 — then it would go in the trunk and I’d move on.
After reading it, I decided that it is a good story and I thought that if I finished it, my agent would be able to sell it. I talked with my friend Juneta Key, who is a killer developmental editor and she just listened to me ramble about my story for a while until I worked out the kinks for myself.
And then I started writing. This one is a keeper.
But I might as easily have decided that the story wasn’t going anywhere, because it wasn’t ever going to go anywhere. And then I’d have put it to bed and started on something new.
That would have been okay, too. Because quitting a project is part of my contingency plan for making sure I don’t quit on writing all together when it’s hard.
Create Your Own Contingency Plan
This is a big part of developing and keeping a daily writing habit. It’s the antidote to writers block and a sluggish muse.
Think about your projects. What’s Plotting, Writing, Editing, and Brewing for you? If you don’t write novels and the fiction words through you off, think about it as Starting, Writing , Finishing, and Brewing.
Think about your emergency brake. What will keep you from quitting all together during a rough spot?
And think about your plan for actually quitting a project when it’s time to.
Create your own daily writing habit.
Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, two dementia patients, a good friend, Alfred the cat, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter @shauntagrimes and is the author of Viral Nation, Rebel Nation, The Astonishing Maybe, and Center of Gravity. She is the original Ninja Writer.