MEG MASON

Two years ago, writer Meg Mason made the heart-wrenching decision to ditch a book she’d been working on for more than a year, a choice that reduced her to feelings of grief and shame. But after the failure settled, she found the fortitude to start over on

have said that the natural peaks and troughs in a working life are never that precise. More just a sense that you’re doing well at the moment, or vaguely, in a rut, the retrospective realisation that you found your flow around about then.

Now I know there are also exact moments in a career. Having experienced one, a sudden, sharp culmination of something that has been a long time in the making. Unmistakable for the impact it will have on your career from now, and recognisable even as you’re in it.

November 29, 2018, just on a quarter to 10 in the morning. The moment I decided or finally accepted what I already knew: that the novel I was a chapter off finishing and due in a matter of days was no good. Not redeemable with another draft, but fatally flawed, all 85,000 words of it.

I had been working on it for a year, not in a hobbyish way, here and there. Slavishly, up in the dark to write before work, or afterwards into the night, every weekend and holiday, missing things I shouldn’t have as a mother, shelving friendships, saying no to all fun, out of my ambition from childhood to write fiction. Latterly, to do it full-time.

And I had done it before – I had published two books. But I couldn’t do it again. Whatever talent I had, it had run out. The waste of time, willpower, emotional energy and now nothing to show for it was upsetting. But the death, just before 10am, of a lifelong ambition was unbearable. And for some reason, more so because it wasn’t a spectacular, public career implosion, just a quiet ending, unmarked by another person.

I emailed my publisher. I told her I was sorry, I had tried, and unfortunately, I wasn’t able to try again; we would have to talk about undoing my contract. Sent, I moved the manuscript into the trash, then sagged forward and, forehead on my desk, cried for I am not sure how long. Afterwards, in some act of self-punishment, I went onto Seek.com.au to find out what other careers exist for someone who, only ever wanting one, has only one skill.

I am aware how overly dramatic I sound. No one had died. It was just a book. But perhaps my reaction is more forgivable for the fact I had just turned 40. It is a confronting milestone at any time, an age that’s loomed from the beginning of adulthood but in such a far off way we’ve been able to say, blithely, ‘by 40 …’ By 40, I’ll have a house. Be married, a mother. This much money. Here in my career.

And then 40 comes and we’re not. We haven’t. We aren’t. Possibly not even close. Life choices that seemed right once look desperately regrettable now. And they can’t be unmade or forgiven easily as say in your 20s, with the reassuring sense of there being plenty of time.

BEFORE, I WOULD

(And let’s glance past how it feels, additionally, when everyone around us, our age or younger, does have the thing.)

The two months that followed I spent in a sort of dissociative fugue, grieving, rudderless, ashamed when anyone asked me how the book was going. Two years! Surely I must have finished it by now! A friend who, discovering I’d quit, asked me what I hoped to do instead. I said “nothing”, I was Post Hope as a person.

I was about to write, ‘so I have no idea what compelled me to start again in January, 2018’. But thinking about it, I do. And I think it is how any of us can know that an ambition isn’t as ridiculous or unrealistic as we believe or have been told: because it won’t go away. The screenplay, the business, desire for a family, the PhD.

Not even if, but particularly if, you’ve failed at it before and experienced all the grief or shame in that, yet still haven’t been able to put it away, your ambition is real and central to who you are.

And although it’s natural to assume, when it compels you to start again, that the chances are lower because of lost time, time also raises the stakes. Urgency and increased risk turn out to be extremely clarifying. I want the thing. I am going to get it.

For me, it wasn’t by the age I’d hoped. Maybe, how you thought it would look isn’t the way it will look. Not the very thing you’ve dreamt of, but a version of it.

And while, you may be required to modify your original ambition to achieve it, if having failed I’m allowed to offer advice, it’s don’t shrink it before you have. Whatever. It’s still allowed to be grand.

I finished the book. Or rather, a totally different book about a woman called Martha who has only ever wanted one thing, and what her two-decade refusal to give it up earns her in the end.

It took another year and more work than the first one. It is the best thing I have ever written, the thing I am most proud of. And in a novelish, far-too-neat ending, it’s the one out of three that’s succeeded and will publish in 21 territories from 2021, across 16 languages so far. On the same day it sold in the UK, after a five-way auction, the screen rights sold to a major US studio. It feels like too great a reward. And I still can’t say why exactly it happened. I only know it wouldn’t have if I hadn’t lifted my forehead of the desk.

Now, out of it, I’m allowed to level up my ambition as a writer, and find new things to want. Just as a person, my ambition is that Sorrow and Bliss, the story in it, or the story of it, starting again from precisely my lowest, will find other Post Hope people. People who have tried, failed, who know they must and can still start again.

Urgency and increased risk turn out to be extremely clarifying. I want the thing. I am going to get it