The Art of Giving Up (and Starting Over) as a Novelist

We’re so often told to “never give up.” From sans serif font posters stuck on college dorm walls that declare “Keep Calm and Carry On” to the sob stories given by contestants on TV (“I never would have ended up on this reality show making Fabergé eggs if I had worked at Google like my parents wanted me to, sob“), we are bombarded with this idea that giving up is tantamount to failure, and that failure is not an option.

Yet I can tell you with certainty that if I hadn’t repeatedly done what society deems to be akin to moral failing, I would not be in the position I’m in today—a novelist.

I always thought I’d be a lawyer. As a child, whenever I argued with my mother she’d remark that if I talked back so much maybe I should be in a courtroom, though now I see this was clearly a stratagem to push me toward a prestigious career, much like how when my brother banged his chopsticks on pots and pans my mom said his innate understanding of rhythm indicated he should be a cardiologist.

During my teenage years I played Ace Attorney and decided that being a lawyer could be fun (and if practicing law really was like the video game, it would be). It wasn’t until college when I began to wonder whether this was really the best path for me. I interned at NGOs, tried out management consulting for a summer, but I felt lost.

Around that time, I read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and highlighted a passage where the main character, Esther, contemplates her future.

I saw my life branching out before me…[f]rom the tip of each branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked….I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.

As a twenty-two year old, I felt exactly the way Esther did and, horrified by the prospect of failing before I began due to indecision, returned to the branch that led toward the plump fig of a legal career.

In 2016, I graduated from Berkeley Law, passed the New York bar exam, and began my career as a corporate litigator at Davis Polk and Wardwell. In my dark blue suit jacket and pencil skirt I rode the packed 6 train every morning to Grand Central where I followed the morning commute crowd, eventually winding my way up to the office’s thirty-fourth floor.

My days became divided into six-minute increments, billable down to the bathroom breaks. I skimmed a hundred documents an hour, clicking “Responsive” or “Non-Responsive” over and over again as I ordered Chinese delivery to my desk for dinner. I got to fly to London first-class, but once there I spent sun up to sun down in front of a computer, unable to visit the Christmas markets outside, their twinkling lights an unfulfilled invitation.

Within a year, it became clear that my enthusiasm for the law was not enough to sustain a long-term tenure as an attorney. But I’d spent three years and tens of thousands of dollars to make it this far. I couldn’t give up. I’d climbed the branch to one glistening fig, but when my teeth broke skin it became clear to me that the fig was not yet ripe. Still, I chewed, swallowed. Maybe this fig wasn’t the fig for me, but surely if I kept climbing, the next one would be sweet.

A year passed. Then two. I lost sight of what I was climbing for. The fig, if it was still there, was far away, too distant to make out clearly. Instead, every evening—eyes blurry from reading legal documents, reviewing emails, and writing memos—I would begin writing again, but writing fiction. I wrote about a young woman who practiced alchemy in secret in a post-apocalyptic Chinatown. I wrote about unrequited love. I wrote about cockroaches in space. I wrote about a man who pretended to be a brother, father, and friend to strangers.

I don’t remember if there was a specific moment in which I realized I was giving up on my legal career, but after three years at the firm, I finally climbed my way back down and off that fig tree.

If your parents, like mine, pushed you toward a more traditional career path that you’d like to leave, here’s some advice: tell them you’re going to do something crazier than what you intend to do. When I knew I would leave the law, I informed my mom and dad that I was going to go live in a fishing village in Peru to work on a novel. Fresh ceviche in the morning and mapping character arcs in the afternoon. Maybe I’d finally learn Spanish.

When instead I got into Columbia’s MFA program, their relief was palatable. “Oh, thank goodness,” said my mother. “Go do that.”

When I started the MFA program, my sister asked me if I did it because I hated money, but otherwise the response was overwhelmingly positive: my friends were all curious about how I made this change and through these conversations I realized many people harbored fantasies of quitting their jobs. I fielded more coffee chats and phone calls about quitting than I ever had about becoming a lawyer. I became a poster child for quitting, and though that association still made me a little uneasy, I embraced it.

I wrote a novel-in-stories which I shopped around to agents. Several responded right away asking for the full manuscript and I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d left the fig tree behind for something I actually wanted—let’s say, cheese, why not, I love cheese—and I was on my way to the grocery store to pick up a big hunk of triple creme brie, yum.

But then, after the initial flurry of activity: silence. A month passed and I wasn’t sure if I’d sent my manuscript into the void, but then I received an email from a younger co-agent of the more senior agent I’d queried, asking if I could revise my manuscript. Ecstatic at hearing back, I revised. They asked for more revisions. I revised again.

After four months of back and forth, the agents passed on my manuscript, and it was then that I began to despair. If we’re going to extend this already extended metaphor to its limit—I’d arrived at the grocery store, but the store was closed, and I was sure I would never be able to eat my beloved cheese. What was there to do?  This was my dream.  I love cheese. I couldn’t give up on it, could I?

It was incredibly painful, much more painful to give up on that novel-in-stories than giving up on my legal career. Unlike the memos and briefs and interrogation outlines, I’d thrown my whole self into my creative work. I felt as though I’d been rejected, personally.

Since then I’ve heard from several writer friends that their first projects ended up shelved—either that they realized it wasn’t their best work, or that the market wasn’t ready for the topic, or any myriad number of other reasons—none of which makes it any easier. I knew I could query more agents and I knew I could revise the work further, but I instead I gave up, again.

Similar to how giving up on law allowed me to focus on creative writing, this time giving up on those stagnated novel-in-stories allowed me to devote myself fully to a new project: the novel which eventually became my debut. To give up isn’t always to lose out. Sometimes, it’s clinging onto what isn’t working that distracts us from what actually will serve us in the long run. The mentality of sticking something out to the bitter end often ends in exactly that: a bitter fig we never wanted in the first place.

So I say: do give up when you need to give up. And someone, please, feed me some eighteenth-month aged gouda.

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Five-Star Stranger by Kat Tang is available via Scribner.