Time to give up.

This past month I was editing away on Night Falls when I came across a really seamless piece of description. I had used The Story Grid’s technique of describing something by having the characters interact with it, which I had just learned when I edited that paragraph, and I loved how easily the background dropped into place without stopping the action. This was in chapter twenty.

(As Tim Grahl explained in the training where he taught that technique: People don’t read stories for descriptions, they read them to find out what happens next.)

Of course, I wanted to go back and re-edit all of the descriptions to be that beautiful. I wrestled with myself for a day, then flipped back to page one and started re-editing.

Two things happened while I was re-editing. First, I got through the previous chapters a lot faster than I had the last time through. It took me almost two months to get to chapter twenty, and in three weeks I’m up to twenty-three. So that’s awesome. I’m gaining momentum as my brain heals. (Still in trauma therapy. Yay!)

Second, I went through another Story Grid training and realized that Night Falls is missing the main element I learned in that training, as well as an element I missed from another training earlier.

I thought about re-editing the whole dang book yet again, and thought, “You know what? This novel is not my magnum opus. It can be better, of course, but it’s coming along very nicely, I’ve learned a ton working on it, and all that new information is going to come together in my next book, and even more so in the one after that, and the one after that. I’m happy enough with the round of edits I’m doing now.”

I kept editing and chewed on that for a day or two, and you know what? I’m content with that. I’m going to do my best on the book this round, and then I’m going to call it good. I have no plans to stop learning about writing, and I can’t keep adding every new technique I pick up to this same story. The books are just going to have to keep getting better as I go.

So it is, indeed, time to give up. I can’t make Night Falls into a never-ending project. I want the book to be good, of course, but I truly believe it is good and will be the best I can make it right now. Between the pandemic and my own trauma, it’s already taken me long enough to get it done. It’s time.