Pivot, pivot, pivot!
I will begin the final letter in this series with a story.
Most of you know I’ve been working on Warrior of the Wind, Book 2 of The Nameless Republic trilogy. What you might not know is that it’s taken me much longer than initially planned to complete this book—a year and a half, compared to the initial six-month plan. In the initial agreement with my publisher, I was meant to turn in the first draft by early 2021. It later got moved to mid-2021, then late 2021, then early 2022. As I write this letter today, I’m still (!) working on the final few chapters of the first draft.
For someone who’s been writing a letter series about how to strategically manage your writing like a project, this kinda feels like an epic fail. But as we all now begin to understand the impact of a two-year-long pandemic on our physical and mental health, I’ve revisited my performance through new lenses. 2020 and 2021, for me and most, were eight long years where everything we touched turned to gold and shit at an equal rate. Graduated three years of school; wrote, launched & promoted multiple books; moved countries (twice); started life over (plus a new job) in new city. All within the same 6-9 months. Rollercoaster doesn’t even begin to define it.
Remember when I said it’s a good idea to always bake the possibility of failures into your plan? A follow-up question: what happens when even those revised plans fail?
This was the case for me with writing Warrior of the Wind. The planning stage took me less than a month—I knew what the story was going to be about, generally: how many new characters, locales and creatures I’d be introducing, how much research I’d need to do along the way. I had my writing times, spaces and expected wordcounts set up. As I ventured into execution, I saw various rubber ball failures (RBFs—remember these?) pretty quickly: plot holes and dead-end directions, passages that no longer served purpose, extraneous wordage that’ll need to be culled in edits, and the worst of all: an increased final wordcount that continued to balloon as I wrote. No matter: I learned from them, revised my plans, and zoomed past pretty efficiently.
But as has been the nature of the last two years, it wasn’t just about the types of failures, but the sheer amount and recurrence of them. Constantly putting out so many fires began to wear me thin. Each revised plan was doomed for a new failure simply because the general conditions surrounding it (health anxiety! heightened safety concerns! travel and movement restrictions! economic sinkhole! darned immigration! darned supply chain!) were not only unprecedented but unfavorable. No amount of pretty spreadsheets or daily affirmations could get the train back up to speed.
Like most of us in these past two years, my project ground to halt because it ran out of fuel. I felt like Ross, Rachael and Chandler in Friends trying to get a couch up the stairs of their New York apartment building. I was burnt out physically and mentally, and there was simply no amount of pivoting I could do that would get me out of the rut.
“Pivot, Rachel, pivot!”
So why am I here pontificating about pivoting, then? Because the real trouble was not the pivoting itself, but that I was pivoting wrong. Like the friends and their couch, it wasn’t about whether I was angling the couch at all, but if I was angling it in the right direction.
I eventually crawled out of that rut (or else I wouldn’t be wrapping up the book right now, ha). Surprisingly, the trick was that there was no trick at all, because pivoting tactfully requires the opposite of everything that has been done in the earlier stages of this project, which is to stop doing and start looking. Here’s how mine played out.
Stop. When even the lessons you have gained from your failures so far cannot help you move in a different direction, the first thing is to revisit the Why of your project. For me, specifically, it was: Why now? Sure, I have a publishing contract and a due date, but the first port of call was to remind myself that I could stop going full speed whenever I wanted to. And stop I did. I stopped tracking words and insisting on a work schedule. I threw out most plans and worked around whatever circumstances I had. And when these approaches reached their limitations, I simply stopped writing.
Step away from the work. There was a point when I was sure that I would never finish writing Warrior of the Wind. To rid myself of this disastrous mental state, I had to step away from the novel for a while. I did this at least thrice during the year-and-a-half period. (One other lesson I learned is to stop while you’re still excited. It made the inertia required for me to re-enter the work lower because excitement built up even further during my absence).
Think long-term. Longer. Longer. Because projects are so short-to-medium-term, we tend to prioritize shorter-term rewards. Oh, if I can just finish *this* next scene, then today’s burden will be over! Except, there are still fifty-leven scenes to go. It’s better to think about the best approach for a longer-term situation. Especially as, in my case, my long-term health is much more important than one of many [future] books. Other long-term things I prioritized over simple completion of the project: economic goals, keeping relationships steady, better communication with project—and life!—stakeholders (to ensure they know how + why things are changing and could help me change—even when that meant giving me the space I needed to carry out my pivoting).
Perhaps it’s time to pivot away forever? Lessons are only as good as how we use them. If what we’ve learned after many failures during our project is that this project is unsustainable, then perhaps it’s time to give it up (I didn’t, though, because I don’t want to get sued, haha). Pivoting away from a project may be permanent or temporary. The most important thing, I think, is giving yourself the freedom to bring things to an end.
