Caroline O'Donoghue: Quitting - cutting loose from something that is weighing you down - is its own kind of victory

Caroline O'Donoghue

Once, in a Film History class at college, our lecturer told us that the way people died changed between World War I and World War II. During the first world war, she said, when soldiers were shot and killed they fell backwards.

By the second, they were falling forwards.

Why?

Because the gangster movies and film noir of the 1920s and 30s had shown a new generation of soldiers what being shot looked like. When James Cagney got shot, he clutched his guts and fell forward, into the camera’s eye. Of course, no one was actively thinking about James Cagney in his final moments. But on some subconscious level, mass media was starting to parent us. It was starting to tell us what things should look like.

Success is another thing that the movies have taught us about. I think we like seeing success as a three-act structure, where there is a rise, a crunch moment, a breakthrough. We valorise determination, vision, and brilliant young inventors who ignore their wives when they say ‘come to bed, Mort — and stop tinkering with that thing’.

And we hate quitting.

We treat quitting like a disease, or something disgraced politicians do. Quitting is bad and so are quitters. Quitting is something the hero merely thinks about doing, and then decides not to do. There are no good films about people giving up. If you must quit your job it is because there is something bigger and more exciting that has come knocking. But looking at a project, a job or a relationship that you have put an enormous amount of effort into and to simply decide that the effort was both not enough, and not worth the hassle — we have a hard time digesting that. It doesn’t fit with our fantasy.

I’m saying this because I quit something recently. I had 77,000 words of a novel that I had been working on for well over a year. A book, for the record, is usually around 90,000 words. I could have, technically speaking, knuckled down and finished it in a fortnight. But I couldn’t. And more pertinently, I didn’t want to.

I’ve been a novelist for a while, and so have experienced all sorts of crises of confidence: imposter syndrome, inferiority complexes, or sometimes just thinking something is shite when it isn’t. I had never experienced this before. I had never been this embarrassed by my own efforts. Not the quality of the writing itself, which was fine, but the queasy sense that the novel was full of silly made-up things, silly made-up people, and would feel silly and made-up for as long as I looked at it.

I tried everything to make it seem less silly and made up. I did my research. I interviewed people. I had a long lunch with a Lebanese priest; I went for boba with a barrister; I chased a friend who owns a bar to get a sandwich with me on his one day off. If there was a career or a life experience that was even tangentially related to my plot, I made sure I was investigating it. This, I resolved, would be a big book for me. It would have a wide span of characters and points of view; it would have an ambitious yet tight narrative; it would have both artistic merit and commercial appeal. The difficulties I was having would become an anecdote of success later, something I would talk about in interviews. “Once I solved for X,” I’d say. “Then the whole book came together.” But I could not solve for X. And it was making me more miserable by the day.

Every time I imagined myself finishing it, I imagined spending another year in the editing process, and then another year promoting it. The idea made me feel carsick. But what could I do? I had already promised this book to my publishers. I had already been partially paid for it.

I put it off. And off. I kept finding other projects to do instead of the one I had put so much work into. I did not want to admit to my own sunk costs. This came to a head in February, when, in the midsts of the greyest, darkest part of lockdown, I burst into tears about my own failure. I had to quit the book. There would be no third-act breakthrough, and no Eureka moment.

What happened next was this: I moved on. I started working on something else. I eventually finished the something else.

I explained to my publishers that I was currently not a good enough writer to write the book that I had pitched, but that I may be someday in the future. I asked if they would like the new book instead. They said 'ok'. It will be on the shelves in early 2023, wherein I will probably rehash this anecdote.

I’m telling you all this even though I know that it is not a relatable story. Most people do not get to work this way, left alone on long projects for several years. I’m telling you this because, in the months before, I swallowed the toxic narrative around quitting like a poison. I felt as though it were a serious mark against my character, and that it made me flimsy and undeserving. This is the same feeling, I think, that stops other people from quitting things. It doesn’t matter if it’s a bad job or a bad marriage. They are terrified of admitting to their own sunk costs, and sad to lose the cinematic moment they were promised — the moment where their tenacity is rewarded, and they pull through in the last few seconds of the movie. But let this column be a reminder: cutting loose from something that is weighing you down is its own kind of victory. There may be no riches or screaming crowds when you do it, but the lightness in your step will be reward enough.