Karl Whitney: On abandoned projects - when writing is a stumble through the darkness

Karl Whitney, author and writer

Sometimes writers will confess — often years after the fact, while promoting a book — to their work being rejected. This is my published work, they say, you should see the stuff that didn’t make it into print!

A project on which they might have spent days, weeks, months, even years, may have been given the thumbs down by an agent or editor and is subsequently stashed away in a brown envelope or hidden on a hard drive somewhere — decaying data that testifies to the more than occasional futility of the writing life.

Or a writer will make the decision themselves to drop an idea that they have cherished for some time, perhaps even worked on at length. Such aborted projects are dismaying. When I experience them, I spend more than a little time staring into the abyss. Why did I squander my time on this, I think, then try to move on to the next thing instead.

It’s easy to think of writing as a results-based business, where word counts and number of titles published and copies sold, and starred reviews, are the main thing. 

But the reality for many is that writing is a stumble through the darkness, with light appearing quite late in proceedings. The words that don’t make it to the page are as much a part of the process as the words that do.

There’s a question to be asked about why one thing works and not another, and when and why does a writer realise it’s not actually working at all. 

In my experience, some ideas remain frozen and filed away as a single line in a Word document in which I compile subjects I might like to write about someday. 

They’re an initial impression of something that could become something. Most are never fleshed out, although occasionally I’ll strike a line through a topic that’s been incorporated into a larger project or has become a standalone essay or article.

Looking again at the ideas document, which I started in 2010, I can see that lots of the ideas are specific to a time and place: when I was working on my first book in Paris and Dublin, or when I was living in the UK during the Brexit vote. 

Mostly, though, I’m simply throwing ideas at a page in the briefest way possible. A two-word note, ‘Tony Schwartz’, became an article I wrote for a website about said American advertising man and oral historian, who taped conversations with taxi drivers and documented the aural landscape of mid-century New York.

Sometimes the writer will give up on a piece of writing before the wider world does. I can think of at least one piece I wrote which went around the houses, so to speak, before finding its place in the pages of a literary journal. I was as surprised as anyone, seeing that I had become resigned, after many rejections, to the piece remaining unpublished.

When asking the question of what works and what doesn’t, then, it might be useful to acknowledge that sometimes you, the writer, just don’t know.

Writers will often shroud their work in a mystique that can seem to me a little bit hippy-dippy — as if they’re a medium channelling the spirit world. 

But there is something plausible about a writer looking at the work they wrought and saying with a degree of disbelief: well, I don’t know how that happened.

Every piece of writing that you compose contains an engine that drives it forward from sentence to sentence. But the engine’s mechanism and its power source will most likely remain obscure to you. 

There’s a risk that, if you stop to consider the driving force too deeply, the forward motion of writing might be interrupted, or even worse, grind to a halt. This is a source of much writerly superstition and goes some way to explaining why the writing process might remain a mystery even to the writer.

Such obscure, mysterious yet essential elements of the writing process get expunged when you promote a book. Everything you’ve written becomes a distillation of the purest intention. You perform mastery and genius.

You might find yourself sitting in a chair in a radio studio trying to get an idea of what you’ve written across to the presenter and listeners. 

Perhaps when you get to telling the world about your writing you might rationalise it, make it fit into the kind of thing that people might expect a writer to say — this book is about class or identity or technology and how we live today — even though the reality of its writing was a rollercoaster of ups and downs and trying things out without knowing if they’d succeed. 

The significance of what you’ve written accrues in retrospect, not in the moment of its creation.

Writing is a confidence trick and, as a writer, the first person you must fool is yourself. It all comes back to you and the page. Who are you writing for? You’re writing to yourself, or some version of that self, or some imagined version of someone else. 

The American singer-songwriter Jason Isbell recently told Uncut magazine that he writes his songs ‘imagining a single target […] I have this imaginary critic, somebody I try to impress, that makes me go a little further to erase anything that will take the listener out of the moment’.

The writer, in Isbell’s case, acts as his own critic or editor, imposing a degree of quality control on the work, being tough on it without killing it, or stopping it in its tracks before it reaches a wider audience.

You work with a sense that hovers between expectation of publication and resignation that the words you’re writing may never make the printed page. 

And that tension is in some ways essential to making the work come alive, investing it with an energy that drives it onwards. It encourages you to take risks.

The unpublished work might merely be an uncanny doppelganger, a peculiar twin, of the published work: the same but different; tainted, you might well think, in some indefinable way. 

But to dismiss it as failure would be to leave unacknowledged an essential truth of writing as a process that generates both good and bad work that can be difficult to sift through with an Isbell-like eye on quality control.

The piece that I wrote, which was rejected by several publications before finding a home, that I had essentially given up on, was about a fire that smouldered underground next to a riverbank in the north of England. 

I had spotted a local news item about it and visited the site to find the earth baked hard and smoke emerging from the cracks in the ground. One theory was that a coal seam beneath the surface had been ignited somehow and was burning slowly but steadily. 

Initially, I thought it was just a weird story, but lately, I’ve come to admire that underground fire’s endurance.

To live in the dark without hope can only be sustained for so long, though. 

Eventually, you need to see that the efforts you make are bearing fruit, that there’s an audience beyond the limits of your desk, and that the words won’t always end up being filed away to gather dust.