Maybe It's Time to Let the Old Ways Die

2023: The Year of Quitting Things, Including Writing

San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk by Monet

I never could have known, coming into 2023, that I would quit so many things, including writing fiction. 2023: the year of quitting things. This isn’t to say I’ve written zero words in any stories—there have been a few writing sessions, a short story, a few quiet evenings when the words poured out. But 2023 marked the first time in nearly ten years that I didn’t spend most of my days working on one of my own stories, feel it come together, and then at some point type THE END on a first draft.

It took me all the way up to my 47^th year to learn this: loss will make you quit things.

* * * * *

I’m in a plane flying up the East Coast, into a thunderstorm, the Everglades shimmering like a thousand mirrors in the light of the evening sun. The young woman beside me has already fallen asleep. In front of me, a row of siblings all watch movies on separate iPads. Most people have pulled their blinds down, perhaps not wanting to see the storm, opting instead for the sanitized interior of this tube of plastic and metal that miraculously ushers us 1,000 miles to our destination.

But we feel the storm, all of us, even if we can’t see it: it throws its tendrils after us, and the plane shudders up and down, and the young woman beside me grabs instinctively for the armrest, no longer asleep.

We turn and rise and turn and rise and turn again, all to avoid the thunderstorm that left only a crack in the sky for us to escape. We whisk through. Now it drifts behind us, to the south, suddenly distant and harmless.

How to describe the towering thunderstorms, the ones with edges fading to pink, the ones we have barely escaped? How to describe the feeling of leaving such a thing behind?

* * * * *

So, in the year of quitting, Maile and I quit our podcast and stopped offering writing classes online and began the process of closing our online community. Maile quit her part time job. I left Twitter and (mostly) stopped writing fiction.

In addition to quitting things, I became someone new writers should not talk to. In the past, my advice to new writers was to keep writing, to find a rhythm, to never give up. 1,000 words a day, or 100—either one will get you closer to the finish line. Your writing life can be whatever you want it to be. The truth is, I was running on the fumes of a few realized goals and nearly realized dreams, and everything felt possible.

But in the face of loss and recent writing rejections and the kind of parenting and life stumbles you never expect to experience, I found myself holding an overwhelming sense of What’s the point? The naïve optimism of new writers made me sad. That was on good days. On bad days, I wanted to shake them by their shoulders and introduce them to reality, to shield them from wanting to win a National Book Award or a Newbery Award or some other grand recognition. Or of getting published. Especially that. I wanted to pat them on the back and usher them quietly away from the writing life.

Can I introduce you to Netflix? Or online poker? Or Instagram reels?

Yes, I became someone new writers should not talk to, not because what I had to say wasn’t true, but because I couldn’t tell the truth in a way that would still make them want to write.

This, I wonder, might be the key to everything: knowing the truth, but knowing it in a way, seeing it in a way, that makes us want to keep going.

* * * * *

I look out my window, one of the only open windows on the plane, and for a moment I feel a sense of panic. I am on the left side of the plane, and we are flying north, and yet there is water there, stretching out as far as I can see. And I think that perhaps I got on the wrong plane, and I am flying south, to Miami, or Cozumel, which would not be a horrible thing in and of itself, except I’m desperate to get home, and home is north. And the way north should have shimmering ocean to my right, not my left.

But there is the setting sun shining, also to the left, to the west, so we must be flying north, and I realize that what I mistook for water is only the top of a wispy layer of clouds at sunset, so flat and dim and far below us.

How easy it is, to see something for what it’s not. How easy it is to see something in the wrong way, and then think you’re going in the wrong direction, when all along it’s not the direction you’re going that’s wrong, but the way you’ve been seeing.

* * * * *

Back in 2014, when I finished writing The Day the Angels Fell and decided to self-publish it, I was writing for the pure love of writing. Of course, there were small pieces of me that hoped it would be popular, but after not being able to get an agent or a publisher, I wrote it for me, and for my kids, and for this small group of readers who cared about it. Some of those readers were you all, which is one of the things I’m most thankful for. I listened to Neil Gaiman’s Ocean at the End of the Lane in my spare time and I wrote. 3,000 words a day. 4,000. 5,000.

But after 2016, when I signed a book deal, and then proceeded to write six books over the course of five years (not including the dozen or so books I wrote for other people), the writing became about other things—about WINNING AWARDS and being IMPRESSIVE and SPEAKING AT CONFERENCES and writing something that EVERYONE would love.

Writing something that everyone would love.

That’s exhausting and impossible. People would tell me this, but I didn’t believe it.

Then came this year of 2023, of loss and of pain and of quitting things.

And suddenly, eight months into the year, I realize I’m ready to start writing again, because I don’t care about what EVERYONE would love.

I only care about what I would love to write, and perhaps, a little bit, about what this tiny circle of people around me love to read, because those things line up—my love and their love, my cares and theirs. And so that’s what I’m going to write about. A story about fallible fathers and what happens when raising kids doesn’t go the way you thought it would and what to do with a faith that’s been buried and might be gone and then somehow pushes up through the parched ground, sort of weak and anemic but somehow alive.

A story about all of that. And I’ll write it for me.

* * * * *

On the plane I watch the first 20 or 30 minutes of A Star is Born. The middle and end are far too sad but I love the beginning, how he meets her in the bar and her singing knocks his socks off and, most of all, how he convinces her to get up on stage with him in front of thousands of people and they sing that song, the one she wrote.

I’m off the deep end, watch as I dive in.

I’ll never meet the ground.

Crash through the surface, where they can’t hurt us

We’re far from the shallow now.

But that’s not my favorite song in the movie. My favorite song is:

Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die

Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die

It takes a lot to change a man, hell it takes a lot to try

Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die

The plane bumps up and down in the turbulence, then smooths out again, the storm far behind us. The sun sets in the west, a long thin line of blue and distant orange. We begin to descend, and I can see the lights of houses, the steady stream of cars, their headlights leading the way.

Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die.

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