Sunset Perfect is the novel that refuses to be written. I've decided to give up on a novel. That's not an easy thing for a writer to admit, particularly when you've spent years working on it. And when I say years, I mean years. Hundreds of drafts. Different plots. Different characters. Different perspectives. More beginnings than I care to remember.
And after all that, I've come to a rather unpleasant conclusion. I don't think I want to write this book right now.
The novel is called Sunset Perfect. I love that title. Apparently, I'm the only person who does. I remember someone once describing something to me as being "perfect, like a sunset." I remember the circumstances and who said it, and regardless, the phrase stuck with me. There was something about it that I liked. Something beautiful, but also temporary. A sunset can be absolutely perfect, but you can't make it last. No matter how much you want to.
Maybe that's an appropriate title for a novel I can't seem to finish.
Sunset Perfect was supposed to be the fourth novel in my series, following Vapor Trail (HERE), Toe the Line (HERE), and On the Edge (HERE). I liked the idea of having four books. Three seemed like stopping just when things were getting interesting. Apparently, three is also a perfectly respectable number of novels.
The original idea for Sunset Perfect actually came from a short story I'd written years earlier and published in Stories from the Day (HERE). It involved a revenge killing, and I thought there was enough material there to develop an entire novel. The trick was that I wanted to tell essentially the same story from a completely different perspective.
I still think that's an interesting literary exercise. Two people can experience the same event and walk away with entirely different stories. One person's justice is another person's murder. One person's hero is another person's villain. And sometimes the truth depends entirely on who's telling the story.
But I didn't want to simply rewrite the short story and make it longer. I needed something bigger. A world in which the murder could take place, with enough characters, competing interests, and complications to sustain an entire novel. So naturally, I decided to invent an NFL franchise.
The premise involved a relatively new NFL team struggling to establish itself. The organization was dealing with all the problems you might expect from a professional football franchise, along with quite a few you probably wouldn't. Internal politics. Ownership issues. Personal rivalries. Enormous egos. Money. Lots and lots of money.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, a murder.
I liked the setting because professional football occupies such an unusual place in American society. We treat football players like celebrities, coaches like military strategists, and team owners like royalty. Entire cities seem to rise and fall emotionally depending on whether eleven men can move a ball across a painted line. I'm a football fan, so I understand the appeal. But the business behind the game is arguably just as interesting as what happens on the field.
There are billions of dollars involved, careers that can end with a single injury, enormous pressure to win, and organizations filled with people whose personal ambitions don't always align with the team's interests. That seemed like a wonderful environment for a murder mystery.
The problem was that every time I thought I had figured out the novel, another version of it started looking more appealing. I changed the protagonist. Then I changed him again. I experimented with different perspectives. I rewrote the beginning. I moved scenes around. I introduced characters and subsequently eliminated them. At various points, I was absolutely convinced I'd finally discovered the version that would work.
I'd make progress for a while, sometimes quite a bit of progress, and then something would happen. I'd lose interest in a character. The plot would stop making sense. I'd discover that the perspective I'd chosen wasn't nearly as interesting as I'd originally thought.
There's something particularly frustrating about a story that you can see so clearly in your imagination but can't seem to get onto the page. I could picture the football organization. I could imagine the characters and their competing motivations. I knew the murder, understood the revenge, and could see how the various pieces might eventually come together.
Lately, I've started wondering whether the problem is that I've already written this story. Not the novel, obviously. But the original short story. Maybe the reason I keep struggling to tell the story from another perspective is that the first perspective was the right one. Maybe I already said what I wanted to say about that particular murder and the people involved. Perhaps the short story was the appropriate vehicle all along, and I've spent years trying to turn something that was already complete into something bigger.
Or maybe I simply fell in love with the idea of the novel rather than the novel itself. I suspect writers do that more often than we'd like to admit.
And perhaps that's the real lesson here. Not every good idea needs to become a novel. Not every character needs another chapter. And not every series needs a fourth book. Three novels might be exactly the right number.
Besides, I've got another story to write. And I still think *Sunset Perfect* is a great title.
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