How Do You Know When It's Time To Give Up?

Are things over or am I just exhausted?

Always tired and mildly sunburnt.

I’ve been writing my first manuscript for a few years now. It’s changed and developed. I’ve loved it and hated it, and then loved it again. It’s been a lot of things but the core story has always remained very much the same.

Mould is Katie’s story.

Without any warning, Katie’s partner packs his bags and leaves her, letting her arrive home one evening to an empty flat. In the midst of her sorrow and confusion, Katie notices an otherworldly mould has appeared on her bedroom walls and it’s growing at an alarming rate.

Katie becomes obsessed and communicates with the mould, convinced that it has arrived in order to transform her into the creature she’s always truly believed herself to be.

Ignoring the desperate pleas from best friend Zola and tough-loving mother Emmy, Katie shuns reality, preferring instead to wallow in the swampy waste-land the mould has built for her. While Katie begins to mutate and lose sight of herself, her life outside of the mould starts to crumble.

Will Katie choose life and the people left who love her or will she succumb to a darker existence trapped with the mould?

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I’ve spent the last six months querying the manuscript to literary agents and I’ve gotten nowhere with it, and while the reality of the publishing industry is not lost on me, it doesn’t feel any less heavy nor disappointing.

I received some extremely helpful feedback from the brilliant Malika (I couldn’t recommend her services/Substack/podcast more) and it was clear that I needed to go back in for another, deeper edit.

Except I hit a brick wall. I couldn’t decide if I had anything left in me to give.

There were too many questions rushing through my head like wayward trains on weaving tracks for me to feel enthusiastic about the work I’d already done or what else there was left to do.

What if this was as good as the story was ever going to get? Maybe the quality of my writing just isn’t good enough. Do you have to be a natural born talent to be a successful writer or is this something I can keep working on?

I spent the next morning at my day job with a box of tissues next to me so that I could absentmindedly cry while answering emails and running reports. If there is a specific kind of fatigue you get from consistently chasing your creative dreams and not getting anywhere then that was what I felt.

How do you know when it is time to give up on a project?

I’ve been having the wobbliest of wobbles. About Mould and my ability to write in general. It’s honestly made me so sad. What if Mould never makes it? When you believe in something so much, the thought of it rotting away on my laptop is actually heartbreaking.

What about self-publishing? I hear you ask. I think that for a lot of people, self-publishing is a brilliant and successful option. I just don’t think it’s the right option for me. I think I’d actually been kind of awful at it.

I don’t think I have the kind of brain you need to self-publish successfully, at least not to a standard I’d feel comfortable with. I don’t know enough, I still feel too green and, although I’ve had poems and prose published here and there over the years, I don’t feel like I know enough about the literary world to really feel like I belong there yet.

If Mould is ever going to be published, I want and need guidance from an agent that gets the story and believes in it like I do. Is that so bad? I’m sorry if I’m not meant to admit that I still need that kind of acceptance or validation that I am not entirely useless at stringing a sentence together.

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I decided to put Mould away for a weekend; closing my laptop and giving myself room to breathe, to think and to decide whether I had it in me to work on Katie’s story some more. Despite how dejected I felt, I didn’t want to rush into declaring myself fit for nothing.

In the end, I felt like I owed Katie more. It’s a story that I still feel this almost feverish need to tell. I know that I can do the story justice. It deserves more time and more effort.

I’m not sure that I’ll ever stop feeling like I’m running out of time and I know that affects more than just my writing but telling stories takes time, doesn’t it? And all I want to do is tell stories.

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I suppose this is all to say that I haven’t given up yet. Maybe I’ll know when it’s time to put the pen down because then I will actually do it. I just know that I can’t let go of Mould yet and I don’t know if I can live a life that doesn’t include writing in some form or another.