So you’ve been working on your novel for years, and you can’t get it across the finish line. You’ve tried everything, and there’s just no more gas in your tank. What do you do when you just can’t finish that novel?

Meredith posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hi Randy,

Big fan of yours over here. I love that you answer questions on your blog and thought this might be a good one for you. 

I’ve been working on a novel for about 4 years now. It keeps shifting — the characters stay roughly the same, but the genres and plots change. I keep getting about 75%-80% of the way through an outline (either through Snowflake Method or my own) and then end up with a blockage. I’ve workshopped this book in a WIP format and got pretty discouraged by feedback both at the idea and at the word level. I took a 3 month break from it to work on other things and have returned, but keep having the same problem.

Is my issue psychological? Is it work ethic? Every time I think I’ve unraveled what this particular book is, I feel stuck again. Is it because my idea isn’t any good? Is it because I’m not any good? What gives?

I’m at a point where I’ve written probably a novel’s worth of content in many different scenarios, from many character viewpoints, as many different genres. I feel very lost in the woods here. Is there any way out?

Best,

Meredith

Any advice you can offer would be appreciated. I’ve completed several shorter works in my day but never been able to crack a novella-length work. This one keeps eluding me.

Cheers,

Meredith

Randy sez: I can sympathize, Meredith. Here’s why…

I’ve Been There 

I’ve had projects that seemed to take forever. I’ve had projects that got me bogged down to a standing stop.

I was looking through my old files last weekend and came across my very first novel. Which I restarted several times, changing the title, changing the characters, changing the plot, changing a lot of things. 

That novel never got published. I think someday I’ll come back to it and publish it, but it’s not burning a hole in my brain just now, so I’m working on a project that is.

In fact, the current project I’m working on is ridiculously hard. It’s a four-book series. Each book is very long. And I’m making good progress on it. I recently published Book 1 and I’m a few scenes away from finishing the first draft of Book 2.

In every measurable way, this project is massively more difficult than that first novel I tried.

How is it that I can do this hard project now, when I couldn’t publish that (much easier) project 25 years ago?

Writing Makes You Strong

The answer is time. I’m 25 years more experienced now than I was back then.

So as I was browsing through that story over the weekend, it occurred to me that the project wasn’t a failure. 

It was a success—precisely because it taught me things I needed to learn. I wrote 5 or 6 unfinished or unpublished novels before I finally sold one. Each of those was a necessary stepping stone along the way. The value was in the doing, day in and day out, for years and years.

It wasn’t a failure to walk away from those projects. It was school, and I’m a better writer because of them. As I recall, Stephen King didn’t get published until his sixth novel. Those first five weren’t failures. They were metaphorically his kindergarten and his third grade and sixth grade and ninth grade and eleventh grade. Then he finally wrote one that worked, and he metaphorically graduated. 

Switching Gears is OK

So Meredith, here’s my thinking. I might be wrong, because I don’t know enough about you and your writing, but I think you might have chewed all the sugar out of this particular piece of gum. You might be done with it. It might be time to move on to some other project. And give yourself permission to put this one away for good.

That’s not a failure. You developed crucial skills that you couldn’t possibly have developed any other way than by working on this project. Now you have those skills, and the next project will develop other skills that you also need.

I’m of course just guessing here, but I’d say to go write another book. It’s possible you won’t finish that one either, but the very act of working on that project will build “writing muscle” in you. 

If you do that long enough, you’ll get to where you want to be as a writer.

Good luck! And please email me again in a year to let me know how things are going.

Got a Question for My Blog?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

Sunday night at 10:31 California time, NASA will be running a high-stakes thriller, live from Mars, with billions of dollars at stake.

There’s no room for error. The one-ton Mars rover Curiosity is traveling right now toward Mars at 13,000 miles per hour. Within a seven minute window of time, it has to come to a clean stop, exactly on the surface of Mars, at a precisely determined spot inside the Gale Crater.

How do you go from 13,000 to zero in seven minutes? It’s complicated.

The ship doesn’t carry enough fuel to slow it down, so it’s going to fly through the thin Martian atmosphere, using a heat-shield as a giant brake. At 13,000 mph, a ship flies like a brick, but it does fly — if you steer it on a needle-sharp course.

If you go in too steep, the atmosphere doesn’t bleed off enough speed and you go splat on the ground.

If you go in too shallow, you bounce off the atmosphere and skitter off into space, with no way to turn around and try again.

You must fly at exactly the right angle, letting the atmosphere bleed off your speed, using your heat shield to keep you from frying to a crisp.

But that only slows you down to 1000 mph. Seven miles above the ground, you open your parachute. The atmosphere of Mars is less than one percent the density of earth’s atmosphere, so the parachute has to be huge. Even so, it can only slow you down to about 200 mph. Still way too fast to land.

Now you release your parachute and fire off your rocket engines. You don’t have much fuel here, but you have enough to slow you down to 2 mph.

Can you land safely at 2 mph? Yes, if you happen to be inches above the planet when you reach that speed. But there’s a catch.

Those pesky rocket engines are blasting out hot gases to slow you down. If you’re a few inches above the ground, those hot gases are going to blow up a massive cloud of dust that will mess with your rover’s instruments. You can’t safely get inches away from the ground with your rockets.

Here’s where it gets crazy. You use your rocket engines to hold you steady a couple of dozen feet off the ground while you lower your rover on a cable down to the surface.

As soon as the rover touches down, you cut the cable and zoom your landing ship away to crash land somewhere safely far from the rover.

It’s never been done before. NASA has spent over $2 billion on this project, and now we get to find out if it succeeds. If everything goes right, the rover will be sending back photos and scientific data for the next decade.

And if it fails? Don’t even talk about failing. There was a mission planned in 2016, but it’s been cancelled. There was a mission planned in 2018, but that’s been cancelled too.

If the Curiosity mission fails, it’s going to be a long, long time before NASA gets the money to try again.

Here is a YouTube video, “7 Minutes of Terror,” showing how it’ll all play out:

And why spend all that money going to Mars?

It’s good science, for one thing. It’s great science, in fact. I’m a physicist, so don’t get me going on that or we’ll be here all day.

For another, the challenge of exploration always has unexpected benefits — from the 15th century exploration of the New World up to the Apollo missions to the moon that began in the 1960s.

More importantly, taking on difficult challenges gives mankind a vision. Yes, $2 billion is a lot of money. But the US government spends $2 billion every 4 hours and 52 minutes of every day. Vision is a precious commodity, and we need all we can get.

The rover Curiosity is a robot. Why send a robot? Why not send humans?

If a robotic mission fails, that’s bad but nobody dies.

With humans on board, everything changes. As Dave Akin noted many years ago, “Space is a completely unforgiving environment. If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies (and there’s no partial credit because most of the analysis was right … ).”

Someday, we should send humans to Mars. It costs more, because humans need to take life-support systems with them and they need to return home. Every life-critical system needs a backup and a fail-operational option. That adds weight, and every pound you send to Mars costs money. Every extra system costs money and adds complexity.

As my Loyal Blog Readers know, back in 2001 and 2002, my buddy John Olson and I published a couple of novels about the first human mission to Mars. We set those missions during 2014 and 2015, the earliest time-point that we could envision for a human mission to Mars. But the first novel OXYGEN actually begins on August 14, 2012 — just a couple of weeks from now.

Why 2012? Because when you’re sending humans to Mars, one of the hardest tasks is finding people with the right psychological makeup. You’re sending people on a three year mission in which they might die, they might see their friends die, or they might have to make an agonizing decision using “the calculus of suffering.”

Not everybody’s head is screwed on right for that kind of a mission. If you send the wrong people, if you make just one mistake, you could kill everybody.

In our novel OXYGEN, things go horribly wrong and it’s up to the humans to make the hard choices about who gets to breathe. That is doubly hard when two of the four crew members are in love. Read more about OXYGEN on Amazon.

In the sequel THE FIFTH MAN, an unexpected hazard is waiting on Mars. NASA thought it sent a crew of four — but is it possible that a “fifth man” has come to Mars? How is that possible and what is his mission? Read more about THE FIFTH MAN on Amazon.

The virtue of sending humans to Mars is that humans are still much smarter than robots. If you have to make a split-second judgment call that weighs human values against each other or calls for imagination, then a human is still far better than a computer.

The virtue of sending a robot to Mars is that a robot doesn’t need oxygen, water, or toilet paper. Robotic brains are fast and never get tired. A robot is tough. Just don’t expect it to use imagination or make human value judgments.

Sunday night’s mission belongs to a robot named Curiosity. Good luck, Red Rover! May you arrive safely, make great discoveries, and pave the way for some of us to join you someday!

Can you write a story using both third-person and first-person point of view? Will the POV cops arrest you if you do? Will you confuse your readers?

Sanhita posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Sir, I have recently written a short story christened ‘Remembered’. In this story I wrote initially in third person about a family with a missing mother, then after putting three asterisks I wrote about what actually happened to the mother in first person.

Critics say that since I was writing the fiction in third person, I should not have changed it to first person.

Is it necessary to write the whole story in either third or first person? I am now in a fix whether to change it to third person or not. Kindly help.

Also I have put the story about the mother in such a way that she, at first, tells how she left her home and why(in past tense) and then (in present tense) commits suicide. Some of the critics have commented that since she is dead she can’t be telling the story.

Kindly guide me whether and how to change the story. I would highly appreciate if you kindly spare a few minutes to read it. I will be awaiting your reply. Thanks.

Randy sez: I don’t know who your critics are, but they are wrong. There is no rule that says that all parts of a story must be written in the same POV.

Diana Gabaldon’s bestselling novel Dragonfly in Amber mixed first person and third person POV throughout the story. The reader was never confused.

And that’s what matters — you want your reader to never be confused. If you execute your story well, you can switch between first person and third person smoothly.

The second part of the question was whether a dead person can narrate a story. Sanhita’s critics say he can’t do that.

I say he can. Alice Sebold’s bestselling novel The Lovely Bones tells the story of a 14-year-old girl, Susie Salmon, who is raped and murdered in Chapter 1. The rest of the novel is narrated by Susie from heaven. Nobody is confused by this. Not one reader ever said, “Wow, that can’t happen because, you know, Susie’s dead.”

Readers are generally pretty smart. They aren’t confused by dead narrators, omniscient narrators, or for that matter, cat narrators.

This highlights an important question that all writers should constantly keep in mind: Should you take advice from just anyone?

I’ve phrased the question in a way that makes it obvious that the answer is no.

Be careful in taking advice. Not all critiquers are created equal. And some of them, even when they are giving sound advice, don’t know how to make it clear just how certain they are of being correct.

I often hear novice novelists complain about the “rules.” These “rules” are allegedly fixed in stone and nobody can violate them.

That just isn’t true. There are very few unbreakable rules in fiction writing. There are many rules of thumb. Some of them work so well and so often that you should be wary of ignoring them.

But most of these “rules” can be broken, if you know what you’re doing. You’ll know when you can break one of the “rules” after you’ve learned them so well that you can follow them without thinking.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Do you need an agent? Is it still possible to get published without one?

Jason posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I enjoy reading your novels very much. As an aspiring writer, I have completed my first novel. How important, if at all should a writer have a literary agent? Your advice would be much appreciated.

Randy sez: That depends on what your goals are.

If you want to publish your novel with a traditional, royalty-paying publisher, then you desperately need an agent. It’s possible to sell your book to a publisher without one (by pitching your novel at writing conferences), but even if you sell your novel, you still need to negotiate the contract. My agent friends tell me that a lot of publishers have changed their contracts massively in the last year — in a way that is far more favorable to the publisher. This has forced agents to spend a lot of time negotiating terms to get a decent deal for their authors. If you don’t have an agent, you probably won’t have any idea what’s important and what’s not. Even if you have great negotiating skills, those will do you no good if you don’t know what to demand.

If you decide to self-publish (either in print or in e-books), then you don’t need an agent — yet. However, if your book does well as a self-pubbed book, then eventually you’ll want to publish it with a traditional, royalty-paying publisher. In that case, (see above), you’ll need an agent. When you need one, get one.

A quick note on the obvious question — what’s the advantage of working with a traditional, royalty-paying publisher? The answer is that those are the people who will get you into Barnes & Noble, Borders, Costco, and all the other bookstores. Good luck doing that on your own.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.