On the Sunk Cost Fallacy, or Why I Wrote a Horror Novel

This is a Mark Sampson guest post, in case you didn’t already gather that from the title (I would never write a horror novel, though I am a big believer in the sunk cost fallacy—I mean, I believe people should understand it, not that I doubt its falseness. Anyway, Mark Sampson, husband of mine, writer of things, on how he wrote some of those things.

In the summer of 2018, having completed a final-ish draft of my novel All the Animals on Earth, I set out on my next writing project. From day one, I had grand plans for this new manuscript: it would be a collection of 12 to 15 interconnected short stories built around a clique of friends who meet in the early 1990s as university students in Halifax, Nova Scotia—the place I myself did undergrad and lived for seven years—and who stay friends, or at least acquaintances, for years afterward.

Written in the tenor of lyrical realism, the stories would follow these characters across the decades as they endured marriages and divorces, deaths and births, new careers and thwarted ambitions, their lives intersecting (as the lives of old university friends often do) at odd intervals. The tension would come from how the vicissitudes of time and tragedy would alter these characters’ viewpoints—of themselves, of their former friends, and of the world. The book would culminate when one of them, transformed from a small-town Red Tory as a teen into a deranged, radicalized middle-aged incel, commits a crime so shocking, so heinous, that it draws the clique back together after many years apart.

As with my masters’ thesis, written 16 years earlier, the plan for this collection was for each piece to both stand on its own as an independent tale and to form a broader narrative with the others when read together. This is a challenging structure for any work of fiction, but I figured I had done it before, in grad school as a much younger writer, and should have no trouble doing it again.

As per my usual pre-first draft writing process (what LM Montgomery in her diaries called “spadework”), I did detailed outlines of the core stories and elaborate character sketches of the main players in the book, going so far as to give each of them a Myers-Briggs personality test. By the time I had set out to write the first draft of the first story, I felt like I almost knew these people as well as my actual friends.

Yet, almost immediately, something was wrong. That first story didn’t really gel, even after three or four completed drafts. Nor did the next. Nor the next. I couldn’t get these characters to come to life on the page, despite all my spadework. I also couldn’t pull off the optical illusion I wanted, of these pieces both standing alone and weaving themselves together. It felt too obvious, what I was attempting. Each story was like an apartment unit that wore all of its plumbing on the outside.

I couldn’t get the tone right, either. Some pieces were overtly “literary”; others were written in a more comic register, or just plain weird. One story felt too much like a giant love letter to Halifax: it ends with one of the characters literally having sex with a donair. I thought: Jesus, this is too much—even for me.  

Worse, as the weeks and months mounted, I came to dread working on this collection. Day in and day out, I had to drag myself to the writing desk. With Animals, and with my previous novel, The Slip, I practically leaped out of bed each morning to go write. But I had come to hate this new project, which was bad news. If I couldn’t figure out a way to love it, what chance did its potential readers have?

After 14 months, I had completed just five stories. (This is a slow pace for me. By contrast, I wrote Animals, comprised of 13 chapters, top to bottom in 21 months.) Even if I limited the collection to 12 pieces, I was still closer to the beginning than I was to the end. But I’d been working so hard on this for so long. The sunk cost fallacy, bane of struggling small-business owners and PhD candidates alike, began to set in. If I ditched the project now, wouldn’t all that time and effort be wasted?

But the book just didn’t want to be written. By the fall of 2019, I was ready to tap out. I refused to use the word “abandon”; I was “setting the manuscript aside.” Maybe I could salvage one or two of its stories and use them in something else. Maybe that donair scene wasn’t so bad; perhaps it would go on, if published, to become an iconic moment of CanLit provocativeness, equivalent to “Ride my stallion, Morag” in Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners. But, in the meantime, I had to stop. I had to go write something else.

But what? Actually, in less time than it takes to utter the phrase But what?, I knew what I wanted to write. I’d had an idea for another novel rattling around in my head for a few years by this point—really, since the 2014 mass shooting that terrorized the city of Moncton, NB and left three RCMP officers dead. What’s more, I knew it would be a horror novel, sharing a kinship with the works of Stephen King and Peter Straub, of Shirley Jackson and H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. I loved horror as a kid and wrote a couple of (thankfully unpublished) horror novels as a teen. I found my way back to the genre in the mid-2010s when the world started to fall apart. By the end of the decade, I was eager to take another shot at writing something of my own, this time as an older and more seasoned writer.

So, in the fall of 2019, I set my story collection aside and almost immediately started the horror novel. The spadework took no time at all: the characters arrived fully formed; the beats of the story barely need to be outlined; the historical research I had to do fell easily into place. The mass shooting in Moncton slipped into the background: I moved it to the 1990s (my creativity remained preoccupied with that decade, it seemed) and changed its core circumstances to suit my needs. Most importantly, I relocated the main action of the novel to my native Prince Edward Island. I was practically calisthenic with excitement to work on this project. It felt like a homecoming on a couple of fronts, to set a tale of cosmic horror on sleepy PEI.

The result is my new novel, Lowfield, coming out this April with Now or Never Publishing. My experience of writing it was the exact opposite of the previous project’s. According to my log, I completed a rough first draft, totaling 161,000 words over 42 chapters, in less than eight months. This was despite the fact that it had a far more complex structure than the short story collection—probably the most complex structure I’d written since my 2014 novel Sad Peninsula. The original version of Lowfield had three distinct timelines: the 1990s (the main action), the 1860s (told through journal entries) and the (at the time future, now present) year 2025. I worked on this novel every day in a white heat.

Fourteen months and several drafts after that, it was ready for my agent to send out on submission, which she did in the late summer of 2021. We had high hopes: horror fiction was/still is enjoying a real renaissance (again, perhaps because of the times we live in), and we targeted a wide swath of large, medium and specialty publishers, both here in Canada and the United States. While we waited, I did what I usually do: I tried to write something else so I wouldn’t chew my fingernails for 18 hours a day while we waited for editors to get back to us.

Alas, the sunk cost fallacy was not done with me. We received some very warm, very admiring rejections, but rejections just the same. (Seriously, a few of these letters contained more positive reviews than some of my published books received – I wish I could blurb from them!) Then, an editor at a large and well-known Canadian publisher wrote to say that he was rejecting Lowfield at its current length but would be willing to read it again if I were willing to cut it down by a full third. My agent worried that I wouldn’t be able or willing to do such an invasive expurgation, but by now panic was starting to set in. I agreed to try. Sunk cost fallacy? Pshaw! I was ready to sink some more costs into a project that had so excited me and saved me from my funk.

I still don’t know how I did it, but over a marathon period of about three weeks, I made cuts that amounted to nearly a third of the manuscript. (Not sure when I slept, considering it was also very busy at my 9-to-5 during this time.) I significantly scaled back the 1860s timeline and eliminated nearly all of the 2025 period, then stitched the book back together and buffed out the seams.

It went back to the editor. He read it again. He rejected it again.

Yet, now that we had a shorter version of Lowfield, it opened doors for my agent to submit it to other publishers who wouldn’t have looked at it at its original length. She sent it out to a targeted list of these presses, and, after many months, they too came back with rejections. Some of the presses who were still in the process of turning down the original version agreed to see the shorter one. Many more months passed, and then they too sent along very kind, very flattering rejections. Looking back now at the Excel spreadsheets and email exchanges with my agent, I can see my heart breaking in real time.

This whole process took more than a year, and by the fall of 2022 my agent had exhausted the list of targets that would have offered an advance on the book worth her time and effort. She released the manuscript back to me and said I was welcome to submit it on my own to more boutique, indie publishers. I nearly gave up then. Sunk cost fallacy – ammaright?! But then I thought, no. I still have some gas left in the tank.

So I assembled a whole new list of targets – again, both here in Canada and the US, and now the UK as well – and, in late 2022/early 2023, I began submitting the shorter version of Lowfield to them. More months passed. More rejections came back. All in all, between my agent’s submissions and my own, I figure the manuscript went out to some 65 publishers.

And then, finally in May 2023 – success! Now or Never Publishing, a small but mighty press out on the west coast, specializing in fierce and uncompromising prose and poetry by the likes of Brett Josef Grubisic, Liz Worth, and my dear friend Gerald Arthur Moore, and which published a short story collection of mine, The Secrets Men Keep, back in 2015, sent me an acceptance and a contract for Lowfield. A publication date was set for spring 2025 (yes, two years is how long the publishing queue is at most presses), and here we are. Hazzah!

A lot happened concurrently to all of this. I wrote a whole other novel. I moved houses. My literary agent fired me. There were massive layoffs at my 9-to-5 that had me terrified for my livelihood for months on end. I’m still writing and submitting like a madman, but without an agent I’m back in the tall grass. I’m back on the street with my bindle, peddling my literary wares on my own.

But I’ve learned a lot from this experience. In my previous post for Rebecca’s newsletter, I drew a comparison between the writing life and farming. So it’s perhaps no surprise that this quote about farming, from Ann Patchett’s exceptional novel Tom Lake, stopped me in my tracks when I read it:  “One Nelson or another has been [farming this land] for five generations. Either they hate it—my father hated it—or they were like Ken and couldn’t imagine doing anything else.”

I know a lot of writers, and agricultural workers, and other people toiling away in shaky and unremunerative pursuits, who feel this way: that the opposite of hating your vocation is not loving it, but rather being unable to imagine doing anything else.

That doesn’t cut it for me. I’m not a writer because I cannot imagine being anything else. I’m a writer because I fucking love it, all of it. Even the rejections, which are the second-worst thing that can happen to creative work that you’ve put your heart and soul into.

To conclude, I’m happy to report: after writing that whole other novel, I’ve rotated the crops (ugh—another farming metaphor) and am back on short stories again, pulling together a new collection. And yes, I even managed to salvage two of the pieces from that other manuscript from 2018-19. And yes, one of them is the story that ends with that (hopefully, one day, infamous) scene with the donair. I will see that fucker published yet.