Know When to Let Go

If anyone understands how hard it is to let go of a creative project, it's me.

Logically, I know when to let go of a book. An idea flitters around in my head until I feel the need to follow it. I sketch out an outline or simply jot down ideas until I decide if it's worthy of more of my time.

Months of writing pass until I finish my first draft. Tweaking comes next—fine-tuning, rewording, making it sing. Editing is the final writing activity. I look for spelling and grammar mistakes, check for holes in my story, and ensure all my strings of thought are nicely tied up.

More weeks pass as I create my cover and compile my final draft to look nice on the page. Finally, I publish.

I’m done. Right?

That's what I keep telling myself. The problem is, my creative brain rarely agrees.

So I move on. Start my next book. But things about the last one still niggle at me. People find errors when they read it that I missed. How is that possible, I wonder? I fix them, because I can’t stand knowing that my book has a mistake in it.

Then, one day, years later, I go back and read the beginning again and cringe, realizing, now that I’ve had more experience, that it could have been so much better. It's too wordy. The pacing is slow. The inciting incident takes too long to arrive.

I set it aside anyway. It’s published. I can’t change the story now. It’s time to move on and finish my next book. So that’s what I do. I finish two, in fact. But the beginning of my first one still sits in the back of my mind. I can’t seem to let it go. So, I pick it back up and rewrite it.

After five years. And now I’m done.

Really.

What am I going on about? In 2021, during the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, I completed and published my first book, The RH Factor. I was very proud of it. And I should have been. Anyone who has written an entire novel, 82,830 words in my case, should be proud of it. Even if they never publish it. Writing a full-length book is an accomplishment that is not for the faint of heart.

But even after all those years, I couldn’t let go of the fact that the beginning still bothered me. I had taken too much time to get to the important stuff. It dragged, and all the details about other characters that were included there were covered in other parts of the book.

If you’re a writer, you are probably familiar with the phrase, “In writing you must kill all your darlings”, attributed to writer and Nobel Prize laureate William Faulkner. I should have listened. But when you’ve put as much work into a story as I had mine, it’s hard to let go of those precious words.

But I had to. They slowed the story down, even if I loved them. And now, I need to learn to let go of making any more changes to my first book. I’m done. Stick a fork in me.

The end.

Sometimes I wonder why nothing in either of my other books bothered me as much as the beginning of my first one did. Did it mean they were perfect? Absolutely not. I think there are always things you can do to improve a book. It’s kind of like painting.

There have been many paintings I've wanted to keep tweaking because they never quite matched the vision in my head. Sometimes I revisit them years later. Other times I decide they're finished, walk away, and move on.

The hard part about anything you create from scratch, whether it be writing, painting, creating music, or whatever your talent is, is knowing when to stop. Knowing when you’re truly done.

So how do you know when you're really finished?

I’ve decided it’s all about listening to your inner voice. After making those final changes to The RH Factor, I finally feel like I'm finished. I’ve republished it with fewer chapters at the beginning, and like it much better. And I think my readers will too.

So, if you’re struggling to know whether you’re done with something, ask yourself these questions: Would changing anything make it better? Am I just in a hurry to move on to my next project?

I think looking at that last question is where I made my mistake. I was in a hurry. I was tired of editing, and my next idea was begging to be written. But what I should have done was take more time with my current book.

For most writers, the editing phase is the least fun part of the process. It’s developing the story, living in our characters’ minds that is the most fun. Imagining new worlds from nothing. The editing phase is the grunt work.

But it’s one of the most important. When I find grammar and spelling errors, chapters that aren’t needed, rushed endings, sloppy writing in books I read, I wonder why their editor didn’t note them and have them fixed before putting them out to the world.

Yes, editing is important. But you also need to know when to let go. An error here or there will not interrupt the story. It shows you’re human. And maybe that’s a good thing in a world where AI-created books are showing up everywhere.

How do you know when you’re done with a project? Do you have a method, specific questions you ask yourself, or opinions from others you garner?

For me, I finally know I'm done. I’m moving on from my first book.

I’m letting go.

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