Don’t Fear the Red Button

The best is yet to come.

Last month, I showed a draft of my second novel around and received some feedback on it that basically amounted to: Nah bro, this ain’t it.

As soon as I heard this feedback, I realized it was true. I realized that what I was actually working on for most of this year was a false start.

Shortly after receiving the notes, and sitting with them, I made the decision pretty quickly to press the red button and start over from scratch.

This might sound jarring to you. You may want to express sympathy. But I promise you that no tears were shed. By now, thankfully, I’m a pro at throwing away pages.

I’ve earned my stripes. I hit the red button numerous times over the course of the 10 years it took me to finally get my debut novel, VICTIM, right.

By my count, there were at least five full rewrites, in which I re-configured the plot, swapped protagonists, tried writing in different tenses, and, at one point, lost all hope and wrote 100 pages of a sci-fi novel where gentrifiers try to train kids from the hood to act more civilized (I might still resurrect this one day).

I’ve learned—the hard way, unfortunately—that sticking with something I’ve written that isn’t quite working simply because I spent a lot of time on it and feel attached to it, is a choice that will ironically lead to more wasted time. And wasting time sucks.

To this day, I still remember—and lament—wasting a couple of years trying to re-tool the first completed version of my novel back in 2015.

At the time, it was called DOUBLE-DUTCH—a title I still love, even though many didn’t. It didn’t really have any of the satirical elements that is VICTIM’s calling card. It was a friendship story between the two main characters, elements of which ended up remaining in VICTIM.

I have fond memories of finishing that first draft of DOUBLE-DUTCH. I remember printing the full thing out in my apartment in New York and admiring the weight of all those pages in my hand. I remember celebrating with my then-girlfriend (now wife) over drinks and dinner. I remember announcing it to all my friends and my family: I did it. I finished a novel.

Paging through Double-Dutch back in 2015.

Finished. That’s what I kept telling myself, and anyone else who listened.

But when I sent it around to a few agents and other readers, including a well-known novelist I met at a reading who graciously offered to read it, the feedback I heard was unanimous: The writing is strong, there’s something here, but you need a plot, a more active protagonist, and a more distinctive perspective.

Looking back at those emails, which I did while writing this dispatch, I’m struck by how kind and generous these early readers were. How it was clear they’d spent some time thinking about what I’d given them, and what was missing.

But back then, when I was 24 or 25, all I remember was feeling crushed.

It took me a little while to get over the response I received, but when I did, I didn’t jump back into revising the book significantly, or re-thinking the plot structure as much as I should have. I spent another two years tinkering with the same book. I added new passages here and there, removed some, messed with commas and dialogue, and tried to convince myself I was doing something.

But I never fundamentally started over from scratch. I didn’t have it in me to face the blank page all over again. Yeah, I felt tied to those early pages. But a bigger obstacle was fear.

Fear that what I’d already put down couldn’t be discarded because there was no guarantee that what came after would be better. Fear that I’d already exhausted my talents. Fear that I wasn’t actually growing with each new writing session, with each new life experience, with each new book I finished reading, or writer I listened to at an event or on a podcast.

Hindsight being what it is, it’s easy for me to sit back and say that I was just being silly, especially now that throwing away 200 pages is a lot easier. But after receiving notes on my new project, I was reminded of all my intense feelings around DOUBLE-DUTCH and the fear I once had of pushing the red button.

I realized that this is a hard lesson emerging writers must learn.

I bet there are probably a lot of you out there right now toiling away on a draft that just isn’t working. You’re sticking with a protagonist who isn’t making people turn the pages, or a premise that isn’t really holding up, simply because it’s something you’ve already invested a lot of time in, and something you’re afraid of letting go of.

Trust me when I say that I know that fear! But also trust me when I say that letting go and trying something else out, pushing yourself to think outside of the box, and confronting the blinking line on the blank page again can actually be a great, liberating thing for you.

It was for me.

After finally abandoning DOUBLE-DUTCH, I wrote another completed draft which had the same characters, but was significantly different in terms of plot. That draft was much better than what came before it, but it also didn’t get any bites from agents. Abandoning it, however, was a little easier the second time around, and abandoning the new version that came after it, was even easier.

All of those projects, which are now old files in a hard drive somewhere, were necessary to get me to a place where I could come up with VICTIM, with something so different from what I initially started with in DOUBLE-DUTCH. Each misfire helped me sharpen what I was really after, sharpen my characters, and ultimately find the right vehicle to put my story into so that it could be something readers could enjoy.

Funny enough, I now find myself in the same place that I was roughly ten years ago. I know the sort of story I want to tell and why, but I’m on the hunt for the right vehicle to put it into.

Today, in fact, I broke ground on something new, after spending a few weeks outlining and taking notes. I won’t front: Staring at the blank page still feels scary and daunting. Looking down and seeing that I only have one page in my file, and knowing that in another file there are so many more pages, ain’t easy.

But I’m grateful that I’ve earned the confidence to know that whatever I write next will be better. It may not be the final thing, it may end up being discarded eventually, too, but it’ll teach me, and it’ll get my closer to where I know I want to be.

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Some good news in VICTIM world:

• End of year lists are happening now, and I’m grateful that VICTIM has appeared on a few of them. Many thanks to NPR, LitHub, Reader's Digest, and She Reads for showing love recently! It is very much appreciated.

• I’m feeling the holiday spirit and giving away six signed copies of VICTIM for you and a friend. Details on how to enter to win this week are over on my Instagram page. In the new year, I’ll probably run a separate one of these giveaways just for my Substack subscribers, too.

Happy holidays, Substack Fam.

I hope you all enjoy time with your families and the people you love, and I hope you keep writing.

Peace,

Andrew