If I were on Grey’s Anatomy, I’d have been fired. (Wait, scratch that. I’d just be on probation and then I’d save a patient’s life with my bedside manner and hopefulness and everything would be fine again).
My crime? I left the patient (my novel) cut open on the operating table. Cruel? Nah, there are gobs of painkiller and anesthesia flowing into the patient right now.
OK, let me explain myself. While THE MOCKINGBIRDS was on submission to publishers (Little Brown will publish it in 2010!) I kept myself busy working on another novel, which we shall henceforth refer to as THE PATIENT. I managed to write about 40,000 words in it when I realized I had attached a hand to a leg and a nose to a knee and an elbow to a buttock. As you can imagine, THE PATIENT required extensive reconstructive surgery. But I was up to the task. I got out my scalpel and my scissors, scrubbed in and started cutting. I moved the nose back to the face, then attached the elbow to the arm. But as I worked other guts and organs started popping out. I found an eyeball rolling down the leg and then five toes were wiggling around totally unattached to anything. I seized the toes and sewed them back on, but by the time I got to the big toe I stopped. That’s it. I just stopped.
Why?
Well, why do you think?
A new patient walked in and this new patient was fresh and clean and didn’t have any parts in the wrong places. It didn’t have any parts at all, in fact! This patient — let’s call it GRASSISGREENERONTHEOTHERSIDE — was so pliable I could start crafting it properly. I could start with the toes or the nose or the hair and put it together any way I wanted.
So I did. I left THE PATIENT behind and now it sits, a faintly beating heart, a patchwork of mismatched parts, breathing in, out on the operating table, waiting for the surgeon to return.
I don’t know if the surgeon will return, not when she has eyes for GRASSISGREENERONTHEOTHERSIDE .
Writers, friends, business people — tell me about projects you started and then stopped! Did you continue? Did you leave them on the operating room table and return hours later, months later, years later? Or are they still under, perhaps never to be heard from again?
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I have stopped a couple projects, but I never like to think of them as dead and gone. I try not to make a habit of starting and then not finishing, so I don’t have TOO many limbs around without bodies, but sometimes it happens. Sometimes other stories intervene, or life does. I do have one, a MG for boys, and I am determined that one day, ONE DAY I will return to it and put the pieces back together. It got left on the table between revising one story, and writing another. I don’t like to think of it, because I feel guilty. It also doesn’t help that one of my favorite *characters* I’ve ever written is in that story, buried amid the wreckage. For that reason, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to abandon it completely.
Aw poor Patient. Yes I have a similar unfinished novel which is more like an Igor because I think it’s actually what should be three separate stories whacked together, badly. Don’t think there is any hope for it.
I’m IN that situation at the moment. My poor patient is lying in a coma, waiting for resuscitation.
Since giving birth to WITHOUT REPROACH, I’m afraid the next patient has been neglected -
Definitely know where you’re coming from. About four years ago now, I started working on a play that had a solid concept but was really just an excuse for me to spend lunch breaks at my temp job working out my mother issues. After about 75 pages or so, I abandoned it. But last year, I picked it up again, cut the really self-indulgent crap, and gave it an ending. This spring, I cut it down yet again to make it into a one-act which we workshopped at a one-act festival, which went really well. And then this summer I did the second draft of the full-length version, which I am now sending around in the hopes of getting staged properly. Sometimes, patience and faith in your idea really does pay off.
That was the most graphic and perfect description of this kind of event. Ohhh my goodness. I started and stopped the book I am returning to now! I couldn’t leave all the body parts attached to all the wrong places. Other novels have not been so lucky, and they languish on the table.
All the more reason for a Public Option. Otherwise, THE PATIENT – with a horribly bad pre-existing condition – wouldn’t stand a chance! Love your analogy. Too darn funny!
Oh, the horror! Yes, I admit to only one novel completed, but about five others started and abandoned, left in various stages of decay. I’m just about to get them out and re-read to see if something sparks. Of course, there’s another new idea begging for my attention. There is one I can’t wait to get back to, and one I just don’t see how to continue, though I love the concept. As always, Time is the enemy. How do you fight an enemy that is so fluid? Maybe I need to work on some sci-fi.
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