How To Know When It’s Time To Quit

I feel like I quit a lot.

I actually wanted to quit the podcast last year, but it didn’t feel right. There weren’t enough episodes. I hadn’t made it to 21 yet, and what if there was something small I was missing that would make everything better – that’s why a few weeks ago I asked on the podcast if anyone had ideas. Because I didn’t.

No one responded.

Tonight, as I was thinking about how to make this week’s episode interesting, I realised no one had responded and wondered what I was doing.

Podcasts are not overnight successes.

Nothing is. Please see the article on Hollywood and persistence for more on that.

That’s why the one big rule of podcasting is if you’re not enjoying it, you should stop.

And that goes for everything else too.

Learning to Quit from a Running Club

At the beginning of January I joined my town’s running club.

It’s a fantastic club, very professional, highly organised, full of lovely, friendly and welcoming people.

They’re doing a couch to 5k to welcome new members and it seemed like a great way to get fit while meeting new people.

And here I am, four weeks later, and I quit.

The people are lovely, but the small talk is starting to grate on me. Still, I should stick it out because even though most people don’t want to talk with me, it hasn’t been that long!

At the end of every run I’m filled with a crushing low, which can’t be right.

But, most importantly, everything hurts.

Not in a ‘muscles aching I’ll get used to it’ way; in a limping on my ankle, feel like I’m about to injure myself way.

The runs are also at times that just don’t suit me, and on the day of the evening run I spend most of the evening feeling sick.

Yes, the people are lovely, but for the most part I’m standing in the freezing cold, not talking to anyone, running and trying not to hurt myself but still keep up, and then feeling like crap for the rest of the week.

So, I quit.

Back to the podcast

There are aspects of the running club I enjoy – the crisp weekend morning run, getting out of the house and having some time to myself, generally being around nice people.

There are also aspects of doing a podcast that I enjoy, and the thing I’ve most enjoyed about this podcast is the learning of new skills.

That’s why I quit so many things – because I love learning new things. I want to try stuff, and the majority of it doesn’t work out, because imagine if I loved it all! When would I find the time to do anything?!

Over the years I’ve tried learning to crochet, but it left me frustrated and seeing hooks and loops whenever I closed my eyes, so I quit. I tried attending events to sell my books, but ended up feeling it was some sort of scam that I couldn’t make back what I’d paid for the table, so I stopped.

Don’t get me started on the amount of jobs I’ve quit. If most managers were actually decent people and good at their jobs, I would be still be employed full-time right now.

There are lots of things I’ve tried that I haven’t quit, by the way. During the pandemic, I taught myself cover design and I love it! Then I taught myself typesetting and book design, and I loved that too.

I love trying new marketing techniques, putting things together and then waiting to see if there’s an impact in sales.

And the podcast is fun in some ways, but the coming up with ideas, the editing, the putting it together, feels like such a chore that I’ve started dreading it. The having to be perky and fun sounding when I’m low and just want to sit in the dark writing a fantasy story for some escapism.

Yeah, I’m not sure podcasting is for me.

But writing?

Writing is who I am. Something I know I’ll never quit.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t given up on stories, though.

What are the writing lessons from all this quitting?

You’re writing your story and something just isn’t right. You find that you have to drag yourself to the screen to keep writing, that each word feels like torture to pull out.

It isn’t you. You still love writing and storytelling, but something is very wrong.

Now, I’m not saying you should quit when storytelling gets hard.

There are some things to try first:

1. Are you just bored with the story? Maybe it’s time to freshen it up. Figure out where you started getting bored and rewrite it. Throw something at your characters. Something big. Something life threatening, or story threatening. A huge curveball that even you don’t know how they’ll get out of. Something that excites you – that’s the important bit.
2. Is there something wrong with the characters? If a character or relationship isn’t working, go back to the drawing board. Maybe remove a whole character and replace them with someone different.
3. Similarly, is there something wrong with the plot? Characters or plot, if something feels off about the whole story, go back to the start. Figure out who you’re writing this for and try to work out where it went off the rails. Maybe you’re trying to write to market but the whole market makes you want to cry with boredom. Maybe you’re stuck in a trope rut and need to bring in something new. Perhaps you’re in the wrong genre, because the genre you want to write isn’t one that ‘sells’.
   (For the love of all the gods, write the genre that excites you the most!)

And if you don’t know how to fix the story, if you keep going back and trying again and it still isn’t working.

Then it’s probably time to quit.

Not writing. You don’t have to quit writing, unless your gut is telling you to because it turns out you don’t enjoy it.

Just quit that story.

Park it. Shelve it. Maybe you’ll want to come back to it later.

Or, more likely, you’ll move on and find something you fall madly in love with.

And that story you quit on won’t be wasted. It’ll have taught you something that you’ll take into future stories, because that’s the point of trying new things.

As writers, we never stop learning, never stop growing, but sometimes we have to call it quits to make room for something better.