“We’re Going to Have to Let You Go”—Firing a Writing Project

By Lee Upton

Years ago I was fired from a job at a credit agency. My first reaction: I sobbed. I sobbed so much it felt like tears spurted out of my neck. I sobbed because I was embarrassed. I sobbed because I was humiliated. I sobbed out of pity for the sad and anxious manager with the responsibility to tell me “We’re going to have to let you go.” And a part of me sobbed because I was relieved. Why had they waited so long to let me go? I was terrible at the job. I should have let myself go.  

It was years before I discovered how I could assume a little power over that remembered situation by self-administering insults as if I could fire myself. The poem I wrote is called “One Hundred Ways to Say ‘You’re Not Taking This as Well as We Hoped.’”

It includes the promised one hundred insults, including two knock knock jokes that should require audience participation, but I’ve never read the poem in public. I’ve always felt it might sound like I’m insulting the audience. As you can imagine, being “let go” still carries a sting in my memory. But the idea that some of my writing has to be “let go,” as long as I’m the one letting it go, has been essential for me—often. 

I’ve let whole novel manuscripts go as well as short stories. Sometimes, though, I’ve been fortunate and something I let go eventually proves generative. One of my failed short stories, in fact, turned into the seeded field for two of my novels. Both my literary mystery Wrongful (May 2025) and my comic novel Tabitha, Get Up (2024) grew out of that short story. In Tabitha, Get Up, I borrowed the high energy of a voice that emerged in an email at the end of the story. For Wrongful, my literary mystery, I borrowed a portion of the short story’s premise: writers behave badly at two literary festivals and a voracious reader attempts to discover the truth about the bewildering fate of a popular novelist. Both novels bear little resemblance to the original story I had to let go.

Lately, I have been thinking about the whole matter of letting a piece of writing go because I did exactly that to a short story I worked on for years. It’s a story I rewrote again and again, changing points of view and extending the plot. It’s a story that didn’t provide the basis for any other piece. It’s a story I expended a good deal of love upon, and finally I decided to let that story go.

I thought I would endure a sense of failure. Instead, the relief was almost instantaneous.  

I don’t mean to suggest that all the writing I abandon is always permanently exiled, although it might be. I have files where these failed possibilities linger. Yet sometimes, especially with novel manuscripts, I’ve performed acts of deep shrinkage. (“The Meadow” in my second collection of short stories, Visitations, clocks in at six pages; it’s all that’s left of my first attempt at a novel. Which means I let roughly somewhere over a hundred and ninety pages of typescript go.) 

Still, letting anything go will never be easy for me. I’m from what could be called the annoying “trying people”—always trying and trying, most often refusing to give up.

Of course so much must be excised from imaginative work to clarify, to accelerate, to build tension. Whole stanzas, chapters, subplots, characters, and more may need to shrink or dissolve. But truly letting go of an entire piece that has occupied a good deal of time and labor and hope—that’s something else and not without danger. Let go too soon out of doubt or fear and something powerful may fall out of sight.

When I put a manuscript away it’s sometimes because the writing has become dutiful, forced into my preconceptions even before I’ve began writing. It’s too “deliberate.” I think of Alexander Chee’s point #90, in “100 Things About Writing a Novel” in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: “[T]he novel begun deliberately is so often terrible, with the worst qualities of a bad lie, or a political speech given during a campaign. The writer turned into something like a senator.” Trying to force a story into a predetermined shape may deaden the piece and block other writing from emerging. It might be better to admit to the project: You’re just not working for me anymore. Or I’m not working for you.

A story can be a source of abundance. While writing we can keep saying “Yes” to the beautiful ambitions we have for the story while asking for more and more from the story. There’s a quotation purportedly by Lauren Bacall, or a character she’s playing, that makes me a little happier whenever I read it: “If he asks whether you’d prefer rubies, sapphires, emeralds, diamonds or gold, look him straight in the eye and say ‘Yes.’” There is also another kind of answer that we can consider when it comes to writing: loosening one’s grasp and at last saying “No.”  

I want to think that every time I let a piece of writing go it’s not exactly an act of abandonment, not necessarily, for the initial energy of the piece may return in subtler, more evocative forms. To let go may mean another mystery is waiting, another chance in another story, and perhaps that mysterious chance needs something more than doggedness.  

TWO WEEKS AND FIVE DAYS LATER

Oh god, I can’t let the story go. 

I keep wondering what’s wrong with the story and what I can do about it. Why doesn’t the story seem quite right—even though on some days I have actually imagined it was finished? 

Here are the basics of my story’s situation—not the plot, just the situation:

A woman wakes up to find that jellyfish (or jellies as they’re now called because they’re not actually fish) cover her porch, her lawn, her driveway, and the entire mountaintop where she lives, and in the dead of night her husband has abandoned her, taking her cell phone, laptop, and car. Then other things happen.

What to do? Posted in LitHub, as part of a conversation with Paul Yoon, Laura van den Berg mentions that she seldom returns to stories she hasn’t included in a collection: “They seem to slide into some kind of abyss of forgetting.” At other times she returns to story possibilities that might have been left forgotten: “I do on occasion go back to stories that I really want to write, but maybe I’m just not ready. I’m not yet the person I need to be in order to write the story.”

I ask myself: Do I need to become another person to finish this story? Possibly? Soon?

I tell myself that even seemingly superficial technical shifts might crack open the story. I try shearing off the beginning, eliminating the ending, substituting the ending for the beginning. I change tenses. I alter and re-alter point of view again. What next?  Omit a character? Keep trying what everyone advises: ask “What if?” I add characters—a small child arrives on the porch; a couple in a camper trailer choose to park outside the house and invite the main character in for a drink. I create a different backstory for the primary character. I rub out the backstory.

Once again I ask “Why?” Why this woman? Why these jellies? Can I get rid of the jellies? Jellies—no brains, and yet I want them to answer my question: why are you in this story?

 I don’t think I can get rid of the jellies—they’re too beautiful to reflect upon, too marvelously odd—and the husband is already out of the picture. Did the husband turn into a jelly? I suppose that’s already been done.

 Maybe the woman’s anger and despair summoned the jellies? Or her ecstatic reappraisal of her new life brought the jellies? Maybe she will step out of her house and, deliriously happy, skid on the jellies all the way down the mountainside?

I do some research on jellies… and then reenter the story. Something will come to me while I’m writing, in the midst of the story, won’t it? It’s not as if while writing we’re consciously making all the decisions. Every story has its own secrets. 

But what is this particular story’s secret? What does it need? How can I respect what that might be?

I remind myself: a story is fueled by obsessions, by what can’t be reconciled. The story itself must have something to say to us. It’s just not what we think it should say.

I have hope now—now that I’m certain I don’t know what I’m doing. 

—

WRONGFUL

When the famous novelist Mira Wallacz goes missing at the festival devoted to celebrating her work, the attendees assume the worst—and some hope for the worst. Ten years after the festival, Geneva Finch, an ideal reader, sets out to discover the truth about what happened to Mira Wallacz. A twisty literary mystery dealing with duplicity, envy, betrayal, and love between an entertainment agent and a self-deprecating former priest, Wrongful explores the many ways we can get everything wrong, time and again, even after we’re certain we discovered the truth.

 

Lee Upton is the author of books of poetry, fiction, essays, and literary criticism. Her forthcoming literary mystery, WRONGFUL, in which writers behave badly at two literary festivals, is forthcoming in May 2025. Her comic novel, TABITHA, GET UP, appeared in May 2024. Her seventh collection of poetry, THE DAY EVERY DAY IS, received the 2021 Saturnalia Prize and appeared in spring 2023. Her second short story collection, Visitations, was a recipient of the Kirkus star and was listed in “Best of the Indies 2017” and “Best Indie Books for December” by Kirkus. The collection was also a finalist in the short story collections category of the American Book Fest Best Book Awards

Her first short story collection, The Tao of Humiliation, a finalist for the Paterson Prize, received the BOA Short Fiction Prize. Kirkus selected the collection for their listing of “The Best Books of 2014,” one of eleven books in the subcategory of short stories that included collections by a slate of international authors, among them Paul Theroux, Tove Jansson, and Hilary Mantel.

Her awards include the Lyric Poetry Award and The Writer/Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America; the Pushcart Prize; the National Poetry Series Award; and the Miami University Novella Award. Her collection of essays, Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy, received ForeWord Review’s Book of the Year Award in the category of books about writing. Her poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, Poetry, and other journals as well as in three editions of Best American Poetry.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing