Pressure

So I’ve been having a totally unexpected reaction to signing my first book contract: pure, unadulterated terror. For the first, oh I’d say, four or five days, I was riding a wave of absolute bliss, but once I got down to work with my editor, the fear began to set in. My deadline for having the final draft in the hands of the Editor-in-Chief is only two months away. I know I can do it—and, in fact, that I will—but I feel terrified that the stories won’t be as good as they could be and that any readers that I can actually convince to buy the book will read it and hate it and never want to read anything by me again.

I’ve spent more time in my life than I’d like to admit daydreaming about what it would feel like to get a book published, and the way it actually does feel never once entered into those fantasies. I think my fear comes, somewhat, from having read so many books in my life that I felt needed further revision, or that I felt had some strong elements and an equal number of weak ones. I don’t want readers to read my book and wonder, “How the hell did this win First Prize?”

Part of it, too, is that I’m addicted to revising. I’ve never looked at a story and felt absolutely, positively certain that the story is as good as it could be, that this is the final draft. It’s one of the main things I struggle with as a writer: how do you know when something is done? And yet in two months, I have to be sure about an entire book’s worth of stories. Even though about half of these stories have already been published in journals, I’ve revised most of them since their respective publications and probably would have continued to revise them forever, except that having them out there as a book feels very final to me. I could continue to revise them after the book comes out, I suppose, but there’d be no point. This is it. In two months, I’ll hand in the final draft of the manuscript, and, with the exception of proofreading, that draft will be the one that readers read for as long as the book is in print.

But now for the upside: I’ve decided to embrace the fear, to let it push me to really whip this book into shape. I’ve gotten some excellent feedback from the press’s fiction editor, and I’ve enlisted the help of a few friends to give me more. And then there’s my husband, who is diligently going through the entire book with me line-by-line, in spite of having read and given feedback on most of these stories before. I’ve put all of my other writing projects on hold for now and am focusing as much energy and attention as I can on trying to polish this book until it shines. And maybe this will be good for me: to be forced to call something officially finished. Maybe this is a leap that all writers must eventually take.

False Starts

In his recent Poets and Writers article about his experiences self publishing a couple of books, Steve Almond (who, it should be noted for the sake of credibility, had published several books with actual publishing houses prior to his foray into the self publishing arena) points out that “for most of us mortals, the path to publication is littered with false starts” (68).

Let me just say that Almond is so right.

The climb upward as a writer is slow going and is full of small successes, which don’t end up meaning much in the big picture but which sometimes may feel much more significant than they are. Your first publication, for example. Can you remember the adrenaline rush that one gave you (or will give you, if that milestone is still hovering somewhere in your future)? The first story “acceptance” I received was from an online journal whose editor, I very quickly found out, accepts almost everything that gets submitted to her. I felt, for maybe a day or two, like I could finally say that I was a “real” writer, until I figured out that all getting published by that site proves is that I know how to attach a word document to an email.

But that’s just an extreme example of the very common false starts we all experience. My first real acceptance was equally exciting, although the issue of the journal came and went and for all I know, nobody ever even read the story once it was published. My first acceptance by a paying journal was another of those false starts. It felt huge to me to actually be getting paid for something I had written, although since then I’ve sold a handful of stories for actual money, and I’ve learned that the paying markets aren’t necessarily any more well regarded or widely read than the non-paying ones, and the money never really adds up to much.

First manuscript request from an agent, that one felt huge at the time. Prior to that I firmly believed that if I could just get an agent to read my book, he or she would see how good it was and it wouldn’t be long after that before the book was published. That first post-manuscript request rejection was a reality check, let me tell you. As was the first (and so far only) time I was contacted by a literary agency asking me to query them. The result? The assistant requested a partial and then sent a polite rejection, saying that the novel was very well written but the story didn’t suck her in enough.

Pushcart nomination—yeah, but I didn’t win. Semi-finalist for Leapfrog Press’s fiction contest—again, I didn’t win, and that book is still unpublished and collecting virtual dust on my jump drive.

Don’t get me wrong, these small milestones still get me excited every time. I have this image of a writing career as a nightmarishly long ladder. It takes such effort to get one rung higher that it’s impossible not to be excited when you do, but then you look up and realize that there are still so many rungs to go that you can’t even see the top yet (probably because, in fact, there isn’t one, but don’t let your mind linger too long on that truth). And then you look down and realize that while you have made it a few rungs up, you’re really not that high yet. You could easily jump back down to the ground and not hurt yourself.

False starts? Yes, sometimes it feels like there’s nothing but false starts. But maybe the best thing to do is to focus on the writing itself and not worry about where you’re headed. What’s that old saying? It takes thirty years to make an overnight success? The truth is, individual wins and losses don’t amount to much in the end. In the end all that matters is that you never gave up.

(In case you’re wondering: Almond, Steve. “Self Publishing Steve Part 2: Making the Dream a Reality.” Poets and Writers July/August 2010: 67-70.)

The Big Picture

I spent last weekend in a state of delighted excitement. That Friday I had gotten word that a short story collection I had submitted to a book publication contest had been chosen as a semi-finalist. Only the winning book will be published, but it was inexplicably exhilarating to have come so close. This semi-finalist ranking came fairly close on the heels of my finding out that I had been nominated for a Pushcart this year, and I spent the weekend feeling like I had broken through to some new plane as a writer. I still hadn’t published a book, but I felt like it wasn’t unrealistic to think that book publication might not be too far off in my future.

Somehow I managed to pull myself back down from the clouds and get my grading done for the weekend. At the start of the new week, during the drive to work, something very interesting hit me: it didn’t really matter in any significant way. Not the pushcart nomination nor the semi-finalist ranking nor even the feeling that I had moved up a bit in my career as a writer. Even if I had actually won the contest, if I had successfully landed my first book contract, I would still have been in the car at that moment, on my way to teach. The basic facts of my life would have remained the same.

In fact, one of the finalists in the contest is a full time professor at Ohio University, in my husband Damien’s creative writing graduate program. She’s had several books published already and won several awards and contests, but she teaches to make a living. Most writers do, or they do something else to make money. Not many writers can actually live off of writing alone.

It’s not like this was news to me. I’ve long known that writing will never be my full time career. I’ve known I will always have to have a day job. But as I sat in the car on my way to teach that day, it really registered with me how little success as a writer actually means in the big picture.

While some writers might find that idea depressing, I find it oddly reassuring. There’s something both humbling and comforting about the thought that acceptances – and that means rejections, also – aren’t really that important in the grand scheme of things. Writing can add meaning to your life, but I think it’s important to stay grounded, too, in the fact that it’s not the end of the world if you don’t get something published, nor is it world changing if and when you do.

There’s a Time for Us

Ah, those timeless, fabulous, Stephen Sondheim lyrics. You all know the song, what the Dire Straits referred to as “the Movie Song.” The reason why the West Side Story song “Somewhere” is such a powerful piece of music is because we all know the story of Romeo and Juliet; we all know that Maria and Tony will never find that place, that time. There is no time for “us.”

The same could be said, if you really want to be realistic with yourself, of writing. We all probably have at one point in time entertained fantasies of landing a five book deal that ensures us six figures a year, plus obscene royalties since naturally our books will each land on the bestseller list. Right. But even as we all have allowed, at times, our minds to wander to these totally unrealistic dreams, we all (I hope) are well aware that such dreams will never come true. There will never come a day when we will make a cushy income off of writing and writing alone, when we wake up each morning with nothing else on the schedule but to write. There is not, as it were, a time for us.

What this means is that when we look at our busy lives, when we quantify our busy schedules and try to calculate out how much time we could reasonably spend writing, when we do all this and we see that the answer is very little, the solution to the problem is not to look forward to some indeterminate future in which we will have the time. You’ll write tomorrow, or when things slow down at work, or when your kids start school. You’ll write when you have time.

The truth is that you will never have time. What you’re really doing when you tell yourself you will write “someday” is lulling yourself into a sense of false security. Justifying the fact that you’re not willing to work it out. Denying the fact that you are not a writer, at least, you are not behaving like one right now.

Once you accept that there will never be time, you’re left with only two real options. You can give up and decide that you’re just not going to make it as a writer, or you can realize that most successful writers don’t really have time to write, yet they’ve all found a way to make it work; why can’t you?

I’ve been telling myself for the past few months that one day I’ll land a full time job as a college English instructor – hopefully even as a Creative Writing instructor – and when that day comes I’ll have summers and winters off and plenty of time to write. Oh, it gets me through the bad days, this is true, but there are a couple of problems with this line of thought.

For one thing, in order to really be competitive for such a job I first need to get a book or two published, and in order to do that I need to keep writing as much as I can. I can’t tell myself that it’s okay if I can’t find the time to write right now; if I don’t find the time now then that dream job will always remain out of reach. And then of course there’s the fact that even though I might tell myself now that if/when I get a full time instructor job, time to write will naturally follow, the truth is that I will probably always have other things I could and should be doing with my time. There will always be reasons not to write.

So step one: Accept that there will never be time. Step two: Figure out a way to make the time, already! I’ve been getting up a half hour early every day this month so that I can write a little bit before work. A half hour isn’t enough to get a lot of quality work done, but it’s enough to get me pumped about whatever project I’m working on, and then I’m more likely to figure out a way to squeeze time out later in the day, or to get up even earlier the next day to have more time. (It’s also, by the way, a nice antidepressant. I feel much happier when I’m writing every day, and it really sets the tone for the day if I get some writing done first thing.)

So no, there is no time for us, Tony and Maria, not unless we make the time, but we have to make it right now. Today. This minute. Now.

A Spoonful of Sugar

There are a few ways I’ve found to take the sting off of rejections that I wanted to share. The thing about rejections (as I know I’ve said before) is that they are an important part of being a writer. If you’re not receiving rejections, then you’re probably not really even in the game. It’s important, then, that we try to look at rejections in a sort of positive light, that we try to be happy about receiving rejections because they’re a good sign, really. They mean you’re sending things out there. They mean you’re doing the things a writer has to do. I’ve talked before about using rejections as a motivational tool, but I think it’s also important that we see the rejections themselves as a positive thing. After all, if you were not receiving rejections that would mean you were not submitting.

Recently, my husband Damien and I started using a rewards system, which we put together from a composite of other writers systems that we had heard about and liked. Our system goes like this: for every one hundred points that you earn, you get a $25 Amazon gift card. Every response you ever receive to your work earns at least one point. A journal acceptance is worth ten points, a manuscript or partial manuscript request is worth five, a personal rejection is worth two points, and a form rejection – those puny little half-slips of paper that so effortlessly make our hearts sink – are worth one point. No matter what response you just received, you’re still that much closer to your reward.

I like this system because it reminds us that even the most basic form rejection is still worth something in the grand scheme of the writing life. Yes, I’d rather get a personal rejection (two points) and of course I’d rather get an acceptance (ten points!), but notice that the divide between points is not that astronomical. An acceptance is worth ten times more than a rejection, but you’d still need to get ten acceptances before you made it to your reward. Really, the way to get to that reward is to have a steady stream of responses coming in– it doesn’t really matter that much what the responses are, as long as you’re sending your work out there and getting something back.

There are two other things that I’ve found make rejections not feel so bad. One is to be perpetually engaged in other writing projects. If you’re anything like me, you tend to feel like whatever current new piece you’re writing is the best thing you’ve ever written. This is a good feeling, and it makes rejections for the older stuff, the stuff you had already finished and started sending around, feel less significant. No big deal, you think. Just wait until I finish this story/poem/book and start sending it out!

The other thing that helps is to send out sim subs to multiple different venues. When I first started submitting, I was kind of nervous about sim subs. More and more places these days accept (even encourage!) simultaneous submissions, but I was worried that if I did get an acceptance, it might be time consuming to track down the contact info for the other journals I had sent that story to. The truth is that yes, it’s kind of time consuming (and sometimes a journal or two will apparently not receive the withdrawal when you send it in), but when you get an acceptance you don’t really care. You’re so excited that X journal will be publishing X piece, you’re more than willing to slog through the withdrawal process.

And the thing is, if you get a rejection for a piece that, let’s say, you’d sent out to twenty different journals, that one rejection doesn’t really bother you because one of those other nineteen might still accept it. In my experience, the same exact piece can receive a “Dear Author” form rejection from one journal and an enthusiastic acceptance from another. If you only send out to one place at a time, if/when that place rejects it, that rejection is going to feel much heavier than if there were several places who were still considering that piece.

So there you have it. Not only are rejections not such a bad thing, really they’re a good thing, in my opinion. Send your work out there, and be happy when you get those little half-slips back. A half-slip, “Dear Author, Thanks but no thanks,” response is still something. Everything you ever do as a writer is always worth something.

Why We Write

Think back – far, far back and farther still. Think back to the time before the time you knew you wanted to be a writer. Yes, I realize this may feel like asking you to think back to life inside the womb, but humor me for a second, will you?, and try.

Do you remember where this desire came from? Do you remember where it all began? Do you remember that feeling of excitement, that thrill, that would overcome your senses when you would sit down and scribble your stories or poems or plays? Do you remember, specifically, the difference between that time – the time when you wrote with no expectation for reward, no thought that this thing might some day get published or that you might some day be recognized for the exceptional talent that you are – and this time – a time when everything seems to hinge on acceptances and rejections?

I’ve often said that I believe if you’re writing solely for the purpose of publication or because you hope that one day you might make a living off of this, you are doing it for the wrong reasons. This, of course, is unfair. Everybody has the right to their own secret purposes in life. My point, however, when I make a broad statement like that, is that you’re probably setting yourself up for failure if this is why you write. It seems like a waste, to me, to spend so much time and energy and effort, if you’re only doing it because you think it will bring you things that may never come. Publication, whether small scale or large, seems like an achievable goal for anybody who keeps at it, but the chances that you will one day make a living off of writing are extremely slim, no matter how good you are, and they seem to be getting slimmer with the changing technologies and DIY trends in today’s publication industry.

In addition, I believe that your chances of reaching any measurable level of success as a writer are greatly diminished if success alone is your driving force. Here’s why: rejections will always be more plentiful than acceptances. Period. You may have to live through years of rejections before you even get an acceptance at all, and that first acceptance will probably be for a very small journal that is mostly (or perhaps even only) read by other contributors. (I don’t mean to suggest that such an acceptance should be taken lightly. I’m a firm advocate for small journals, as an editor of an online journal myself, and I believe that getting anything accepted anywhere is a big deal. However, a small journal acceptance certainly is a smaller triumph than, say, if you were to get something published in the Paris Review or Granta.)

If success alone is what’s driving you, it seems unlikely that you will be able to bear through the years and years of scratching your way up to finally reach a level of success that someone other than you might be impressed by. That is to say, I believe that writers who write to get published will, most of them, eventually give up. It just isn’t worth it.

But if you write because you love to write – if you write because it gives you pleasure, because it adds meaning to your life, because it helps you to understand and interpret the world around you – if, in other words, you write now for the same reasons you wrote back then, in that forgotten time so long ago, then none of the rest of it matters at all: not the acceptances or the rejections, not the money or the recognition (neither of which are ever likely to amount to much, anyway). The only thing that matters is the feeling you get when you write. The only thing that matters is the writing, itself.

Rejections: The Greatest All Time Motivational Tool?

I asked a couple of people recently what I should write my next blog about and they said rejections as a motivational tool. OK, and in what way are rejections motivating? They make you want to get out there and try again. They make you feel like a real writer because a “No” response is still better than no response. Yeah, these things are true . . . but rejections are still kind of discouraging, aren’t they?

The topic has been stewing in my mind since then, and I’ve been trying to decide what rejections are better at: encouraging you to try, try again, or making you feel like you’ve been fooling yourself all along. All writers, if they’re going to stick with it long enough to actually reach any kind of steady stream of acceptances, have to develop a thick skin about rejections. We all get rejected. All of us. A lot. Your favorite writer has been rejected. Your favorite writer, come to think of it, probably still has people who don’t like his or her work. This is a subjective business.

My current agent search has shed a bit of light on the topic of rejections for me. So far I’ve sent out about twenty five queries. I’ve gotten a few form rejections, about an equal number of personal rejections, about an equal number of no response (yet?)s, and two requests for partials, which eventually ended in rejections. Of the personal rejections and the rejections from the agents who requested partials, the response has remained pretty similar across the board: This is interesting. This is well written. This sort of book is very hard to sell (or sometimes, “But I’m just not the right agent for this book”).

While I would be lying if I said these rejections haven’t been discouraging, there has been a very motivating element to them. For one thing, I’ve been encouraged by the fact that I’ve gotten a fair amount of personal responses, and those responses have been very positive about my writing. The writing itself.

The topic of this particular novel, on the other hand . . . well I knew this book might be hard to market. It’s literary fiction, which is difficult to sell to begin with, and it’s about a somewhat controversial issue. It’s frustrating to have worked on a book for three years and finally realize that it might be inherently unmarketable, but these responses really have pushed me to get back to work, serious work, on my next novel.

I wrote the first draft of my next novel in a feverish writing spree when I was inbetween drafts of my thesis (the novel I’m currently shopping around). I got back to work on it after I decided that my thesis was ready to start sending to agents, but I wasn’t able to quite get back into the groove of it. I rewrote the first twenty five pages or so, then spent a bunch of time mapping out the events that would follow them, then decided that this first twenty five pages that I had just rewritten wouldn’t work and so went back to page one and started over . . .

But these recent agent rejections have made me realize two linked things. One is that my first novel (this was actually not the first novel I ever wrote, by the way, but it’s the first one I actually thought might be publishable) will probably not get published, at least, not as my first novel. That is to say that I think it’s a good book and I still believe that it’s publishable, but I don’t think that anybody’s going to take a chance on it when I don’t have any other book credits to my name. This sort of book, as some of these agents have told me, is, by its very nature, simply hard to sell. If I had a stronger track record I think I’d stand a better chance, but as of right now, I don’t think it’s going to happen.

The other realization that came quickly on that one’s heels was that I needed to get back to work on that next novel. I needed to take it seriously and actually get that next draft written. My thesis probably won’t be “the one,” which means if I want to make it, I need to get another one finished, and perhaps another after that. I need to keep trudging onward and writing new and better books if I ever expect one of them to make it past the slushpile, past the partial request, past the full manuscript request, and finally – finally! – sold to a publishing house.

The Spice of the Writing Life

I’ve been having a lot of trouble keeping up with my writing goals for the past several months. I still write, and I think I write a fair amount when I compare it to how much time many other starting-out writers spend writing, but I still can’t seem to meet my measly little one hour a day goal. Oh I come close, but I haven’t quite hit the mark in some time, and it’s frustrating because an average of one hour day doesn’t seem like much to ask of myself.

This has been throwing my whole world off balance, if you want to know the truth. My entire sense of identity, and my sense of what makes life worth living, they’re both entangled with my image of myself as somebody who writes often. Somebody who writes not just because she thinks she’s going to hit it big one day, or because she has this pretentious image of herself as “artiste,” but because she really genuinely loves to write. But if I haven’t been writing much, if I haven’t even been hitting an average of an hour a day, it makes me stop and wonder: is that really who I am? Have I been fooling myself this whole time?

To try to get to the bottom of this problem, I sat down and analyzed my life as a writer for the past few years. Before going to grad school, I wrote often – probably not every single day but on the days I did write, it would usually be for at least a couple of hours, and some days I would spend the better part of a full day writing. My guess is that I was clocking not much less than an hour a day if averaged over the course of each full year.

My first semester in grad school I pretty much stopped writing altogether. I wrote a few new stories . . . for workshop . . . because I had to, and that was it. That winter I got extremely depressed, asked myself what I was doing in grad school if I wasn’t even going to write, and made some hardcore resolutions that ended up sticking. From that point forward I wrote . . . a lot. When I actually did start logging my time spent writing, I found that I was spending a little less than an average of two hours a day writing.

Now, after grad school, I seem to be back where I started before I went to grad school. So what gives? Well, beside the fact that I certainly had more time to spend on writing when I was a student (the real world’s a bitch, you guys, I’m telling you!), there is one key factor that I think might be at the core of the problem. Variety.

I’m going to extend a metaphor to the breaking point here, so bear with me for a minute. When you’re trying to lose weight, you might go out and find a new diet plan that seems interesting and appealing and will give you the results you want. You start the diet plan and usually stick with it pretty well for the first little while. Encouraged by your results, you plow through for a few weeks, maybe even a few months. Somewhere along the line, though, you start slipping. You splurge. You tell yourself you’ve had a bad day and deserve this donut or that cookie. Eventually you realize you’re basically not on the diet at all anymore. Then what happens, at least to the true weight loss fanatic, is that you find another diet plan and start all over again.

Yo-yo dieting is a common and oft-made fun of phenomenon, but the thing is, what I believe is at the heart of this jumping from fad diet to fad diet is our need for variety in life. We get excited by new things. We feel encouraged when we’re starting some new program, embarking on a new resolution. But after we’ve been doing something for a while, even if we’re seeing positive results, it just starts to feel stale. We start to feel less motivated. I think that when I made up my mind to overhaul my writing life, it had much the same effect as being an overweight person who hits rock bottom with that one last piece of cake and makes the decision to start a new diet program.

That is to say, it worked. It worked wonders, at least for a little while. Then somewhere along the line, I added logging hours into the mix: a new addition to my “diet” program that kept it fresh for a while longer. But I think what’s happening now is that the freshness has gone out of it a bit. It isn’t that I don’t love writing – I do! – and it isn’t that I can’t somehow steal an hour to write each day - I can, I know I can – but I think what’s happening is that I need something new – a new sort of goal, a new type of resolution – to keep me motivated and keep me feeling like I’m working towards something, like I’m moving forward and not just spinning endlessly in a circle.

Keeping Track

As I was planning out my writing goals for this year, I looked through my process blog entries for last year to see what I’ve been doing and which goals I have and haven’t met. It really hit me how helpful it is to keep these kinds of records of what I’ve been working on. It’s helpful at the time, because just by the simple act of writing it down I’m holding myself accountable for what I do and do not get done, and keeping a record like this helps later on, too, so that I can have accurate documentation to review and analyze.

When I write my monthly posts for my process blog, I include not only whether or not I met my goals for that month, but also what the circumstances were that may have prevented me from meeting them. On the conscious level I’ve been including this information to explain what happened, you could say as an excuse, but looking at those explanations now, and likewise, looking at my entries for the times when I met or exceeded my goals, has helped me to evaluate myself as a writer. It’s helped me to understand how I work, what works for me and what doesn’t, what occurrences or situations in life seem to slow me down, and what settings seem to be ideal for my writing output.

It’s also been really useful for me to keep track of what projects I’ve been working on, as well as how much I got done and on which days. Sometimes I feel like I’ve done a lot more than I actually have, and sometimes I feel like I’ve done nothing when in fact I spent hours upon hours working on a close revision of one particular project. But being honest with myself, knowing on a conscious level what I have and have not been doing, is, for me, one of the best forms of motivation. Once I realize that I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like, I definitely push myself to work harder, and if I have been performing at the level I want myself to perform, I feel encouraged to keep the streak going.

I think it’s a good idea for writers to keep track of their work. It’s a given that you should log your submissions, but I believe that writers should also log what they’ve been working on. This may mean different things for different people. You may be the sort of writer who counts words, you may quantify your work in terms of time, or you may think about what you’ve been doing in terms of specific projects. It doesn’t matter. Whatever works. I think it’s well worth the time it takes to do it, and you’ll probably find that you start pushing yourself just that much harder just by knowing that you’re going to write these things down and look back on them later.

The Reading Muse

I’ve been having a lot of trouble getting my writing momentum back up after moving over the summer. For the first couple of months here, I was preoccupied with finding a job, getting unpacked, and learning my way around a new town. Then I was preoccupied (and stressed) with getting adjusted to a new job. Then with adjusting to another new job. Then with quitting the second job. Then figuring out how we were going to scrape by on my income from only the one job. . . .

So for the past few months I’ve been trying different things to get myself engaged with writing. Some of them have worked – well, sort of – like jogging my brain with a writing prompt to get those creative juices flowing and then immediately shifting my attention to another, more important (to me) project. Some of them have failed miserably, like trying to draft in my head while I’m making the hour and a half commute to work, and then expecting that once I get to a computer I will be bursting with ideas that I just can’t wait to write down.

What I didn’t try, and I now realize may have been the most successful of all, was picking out a book that would match the sort of writing project I felt like working on, and then simply reading that book and letting it be my muse.

I’ve been struggling my way through reading a collection of short stories for something like a month and a half – has it really been that long? A month and a half spent reading one single book! It isn’t that the short stories in the collection are bad. In fact, I like the stories quite a lot; I like the writing style; I like this writer’s dry sense of humor, her poetic voice. But I haven’t been in a short story kind of mood. Well, it turns out that my reading mood matches my writing mood. I haven’t felt like writing short stories, and I haven’t felt like reading them, either. That’s why I spent so much time just trying to force myself through one book.

I’ve been trying to decide between working on the, oh I don’t know, let’s say one millionth draft of a children’s book of mine and a second draft of a novel. I’ll settle on one, open up the file and try to immerse myself in the story, and very quickly my mind will start to wander to one of the many other things I probably should be doing – I just don’t feel inspired. But any seasoned writer will tell you that it’s not a question of waiting for inspiration. If you wait for inspiration you might never write a thing, or you might write so sporadically that you’ll never really improve.

At any rate, I finished the story collection the other day and decided that I felt like reading a children’s book next. I picked up a book I’ve been dying to read for some time now and was almost instantly sucked into a whimsical adventure story. And you know what else? I started getting excited about my children’s book all over again. Delving, as a reader, into the sort of book that I want to write inspired me to get back to work on my own book.

It makes sense. I mean, isn’t that why we become writers to begin with? Because we are avid readers, and because the things we read inspire us? We don’t create in a sort of vacuum; everything that we read and have read informs each new piece that we write. And the things that we read that really engage us send our minds reeling with limitless possibilities, limitless new ideas just waiting to be written.

Being and Writingness

I heard somewhere recently that when we visualize ourselves reaching whatever ultimate goal we have – whatever sort of success we are looking for in life – we are setting ourselves up for failure. This, of course, is an overstatement, and it’s also not really that innovative of an idea, either. But we do hear motivational speakers and self help books rely on this somewhat wrongheaded approach: if you keep your mind in this fantasy world of where you want to go, it will motivate you to take the proper steps to get there.

What I heard recently is that, in fact, we should be visualizing ourselves taking the small steps that will lead the way to whatever that larger goal is. That we shouldn’t distract ourselves from the practical, concrete things we need to do by fantasizing about ourselves in some dream version of the future, which may or may not come to pass. This, of course, is just another self help nugget – and self help nuggets, as a rule, are not very helpful – but I think there is more truth to this idea than this visualizing yourself having reached the ultimate goal hooey.

This idea is essentially the same method as making small, attainable goals that will lead you in the direction of where you want to go – and feeling good about yourself when you reach each of those small goals. The big problem with the other method is that you can reach small goal after small goal and actually be doing quite well, but still be years away from reaching that ultimate goal that you’ve been dreaming about. The result is that you might feel discouraged, might feel like these small steps aren’t getting you anywhere, might just give up altogether.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I had these elaborate fantasies of myself becoming rich and famous off of my writing. I would think about how great life would be one day, when I wouldn’t have to have another job outside of writing (and filmmaking, which was my other big dream at the time), and when I would have regular meetings with an agent and with editors. When I would have plenty of money to live comfortably and live well and, more importantly, make my living off of an activity that I enjoyed doing, anyway.

Here’s how it would go: I would sit down to write, be at it for maybe half an hour, give or take, and then I would start thinking about how good I believed this thing that I was writing was. How this was definitely going to get accepted somewhere. How this was going to set me on that path I had been desperately trying to find the entrance to: that fabled path to success. And then I would start thinking about what would happen next, and what would happen after that, and where it would all lead – that final image of myself as a successful professional writer.

I was one of the biggest writing clichés: the person who wants to have written rather than to write. I wanted to skip all those steps inbetween and just get to the point where I would wake up in the morning with nothing that I had to do but write. But of course, I had time to write; I was wasting it fantasizing about success. Those steps that I wanted to skip? Those were the steps where you actually, you know, write things.

I have this theory that most of us – maybe all of us – enter into that stage somewhere early on in our development as writers. We begin writing, of course, because we enjoy it, but once we start to realize that we’re kind of good at it, and that there are people out there who make a living off of being good at it, well that’s when the trouble begins. The important thing is that we move past that stage.

I’ve reached a point now where I pretty much just assume that I won’t ever get a book published by a major publisher, that I won’t ever make enough money to live off of writing. And the surprising thing is that this is actually a very freeing realization, because now my focus is on meeting these small goals I set for myself. Writing for X amount of time every day. Submitting to X number of journals each month. Getting the kinks worked out of Y story and better developing Z character. Now I actually feel like I’m sort of living the life I want to . . . right now. I don’t have to fantasize about a future that will probably never happen because the point is that I want to write, and as long as I squeeze time out of my days to do this, I would say I’m living the dream. I am a writer.

Momentum Revisited

I’ve talked about momentum before and I’ll probably talk about it again but I’m going to talk about it today, too, because it is, in my opinion, the most important ingredient for success in writing – and most anything else you could ever do. After having spent the past couple of months focusing mostly on scholarly writing, moving, and finding a new job, this month I’ve been focusing on trying to get my momentum back up as a creative writer.

I liken my experience this week to the episode of The Simpsons when Homer decides he wants to be an inventor like Thomas Edison. Homer quits his job and clears his schedule and sets up an office for himself in the basement. He writes “Inventions” at the top of a notepad and then sits there tapping his pencil against the pad, waiting for the brilliant ideas to come flooding in. And of course, they don’t.

You can set aside a block of time, you can arrange an office for yourself or set up your computer just so, you can put your cat outside and send your husband or wife to the store, you can tell yourself “today I am going to write that story/poem/essay I’ve been wanting to write about bla bla bla,” and still, still, you find yourself sitting there in front of a blank computer screen, feeling despondent.

I know this seems in contradiction to what I always say about how it isn’t an acceptable excuse to say you don’t have time to write – the time is there you just have to decide to spend it writing. It’s true that I’m a big proponent for knocking out the excuses and just writing; I don’t believe you should call yourself a writer if you don’t write and write often. But I do admit that there’s more to it than just deciding that you’re going to spend the next hour writing. And that more, I believe, comes down to momentum.

I used to spend an average of about two hours a day writing, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, and it never felt the way it feels right now when I sit down to log in my time – like I’m forcing it. But the thing is, I’ve lost my momentum and until I get that momentum back up I’m probably going to feel like Homer tapping his “Inventions” notepad and waiting for the ideas to come. But if I don’t stick with it, if I don’t keep sitting down to write everyday for at least an hour, I’ll never get the momentum back.

Already I can feel it getting easier. Two mornings ago I woke up with a break through about a story I was working on – third person! I need to change the perspective from first to third! – and I rushed downstairs to get cracking on it. Yesterday I suddenly had a flash about something I should add to my novel and even though my husband was home, The Simpsons was blasting from our living room TV, and it wasn’t time I had specifically set aside to write, I turned on my computer and excitedly worked the new idea into the novel.

I’ll be teaching this fall and the quarter begins in two weeks. I fully expect that as long as I keep sitting down to write everyday by the time school begins and my schedule gets busy again, my momentum will be going strong as a creative writer and I will be able to comfortably juggle both teaching and writing. It would be easy to give up, to tell myself “well, you just can’t force it” or “I’m just not inspired right now” and do something else instead, but I think it’s important to stick to it until you’ve trained your mind into lingering in that writer mode. Then, and only then, will I feel like a real “writer” again.

The Finish Line

Well I’ve officially finished my MFA program. This past week was finals week and I turned my stuff in for the workshop I was taking and posted my grades for the class I was teaching and now I’m left with the peculiar feeling of having done everything I was supposed to do and yet knowing, still, that there’s so much more left to do.

I’ve heard people speak of the anticlimactic feeling of finishing but I would say that, although it doesn’t feel as monumental as I might have imagined three years ago, finishing does feel climactic to me. I’ve been thinking a lot the past few weeks about how sheltered I’ve been in the program and how nice it is to be part of such a sheltered community of writers. Finishing, then, really does feel like the end of an era, the final chapter of a book.

It’s scary to think about going out into “the real world,” scary to think about (probably) getting a regular job, outside of academia, where my life will no longer revolve around sharing work and talking about writing with fellow writers. I’ve made some writer friends here, and hopefully I’ll make writer friends where we’re headed, too, so that I’ll always have people with whom to share work and talk about craft. But that stuff will be pushed off into the background, now, just like writing itself will have to be. Because first you have to worry about survival – feeding your family and paying your bills.

It sort of feels like moving out of your parents house that first time. All your life they’ve clothed you, fed you, put a roof over your head, fostered your development, (hopefully) encouraged you to become what you want to become, and now they’re stepping out of the picture. For better or worse, you’re on your own. And now you have to take over the responsibilities of taking care of yourself, something you didn’t realize was such a task when somebody else was doing it for you.

But even though it’s scary, even though it feels like I’ve reached the end of a book I very much enjoyed, the light shimmering around the clouds is that I get to pick right up with a new book, and who’s to say it won’t be just as good? Who’s to say it won’t be better? Just like moving out on your own the first time, leaving an MFA program is also exciting – it feels like the start of a new adventure. Now I can put all that stuff I learned and practiced in the program to use. Now I can put myself to the test, see if I really have what it takes.

And as scared as I am right now, I still say: BRING IT!

You’re Fabulous Kid but Seriously . . . Don’t Quit Your Day Job

One of the most interesting misconceptions that I think people have about creative writing is that it’s a career. Certainly, it can be. There are a few (very few!) lucky creative writers who have either kept their expenses minimal enough or really hit the jackpot on the New York Times Bestseller List so that they are able to make a living off of writing. But most writers have a separate source of income to keep them going and creative writing is the thing they do to add meaning to their life – not to add money to it.

This is really visible in an MFA program, where you are surrounded by successful writers in the faculty - writers with several books published, writers who have won prestigious awards, writers who really know the business. And yet they all have day jobs as teachers.

In my own progress as a writer, I feel the point where I officially stepped over the line separating the wanna-be writers from the actual writers was the moment I realized that writing isn’t a career, that I absolutely was not going to make a living off of it, and at the same time I realized that I didn’t care and that I wanted to really commit myself to it anyway.

One thing that I often feel (wrongfully!) frustrated about in my MFA program is that there is no time spent on the business. We don’t get instruction or advice on finding an agent, on crafting a good cover or query letter, on how to tell whether your project is in line with current market trends. But the truth is this is just as it should be – because creative writing is an art, not a career. I call it a hobby and some people that I know sort of cringe when I say it, like it belittles what we’ve all devoted our lives to. But really, studying in an MFA program doesn’t prepare you for a career as a writer – at best, it prepares you for a career as a teacher, if that’s the route you choose to go. And it helps you hone your craft, your art.

If you’re not writing because you love to write - if you’re doing it because you believe it’s going to make you rich and famous or because you think it would be more fun than getting a “real” job – you’ve probably got some disappointment on the road ahead.

On Submissions

Reflecting on a recent story acceptance I got from The Ampersand Review, I realized two very interesting things.

First, I realized something about rejections. This story is one that I just finished revising at the end of December and had only just started submitting it around when I already got the acceptance. I submitted it to seven places and got it accepted by one of them within a few weeks. It made me go back and reflect on the other acceptances I’ve gotten, and they’ve all been similar situations. Every story I’ve ever gotten accepted has been accepted quickly, after receiving no more than a few rejections before somebody accepts it. It occurs to me that, while I still firmly believe that rejections can be a result of many more factors than simply that the story isn’t publishable, it may be safe to say that if a story gets rejected by ten journals, it probably needs more revision.

I’ve heard of writers who use this as a rule. They submit a piece ten times, and if it gets rejected all ten, they stop submitting it and go back to work on it. But I was never too sure about that idea, since I know full well that a rejection might mean nothing more than that the editor didn’t even read more than the first sentence or two and was reading even that much just looking for a reason to reject. But since my record seems to suggest that maybe if a piece is actually ready, it will find a home fairly quickly, I’m re-evaluating my thoughts on this general rule.

I think I’m going to adopt this rule myself. If a story gets rejected in the first round of sim-subs, and I usually send out to around 10 places in one batch, I’ll go back and read through it again. Really closely look for what might be causing these editors to say no. It could be that the first sentence isn’t engaging enough, or something as simple as a missed typo early on which may be causing the editors to quickly lose faith in my professionalism. Or there may be more serious craft or plot problems that, for whatever reason, I didn’t notice the first time I decided it was ready.

The second thing I realized was that a lot of my fellow MFA students are simply not submitting. I had some conversations with a few different people about submissions recently, and it seems to be the case that many, maybe even most, of my peers in the program here at UAF rarely submit at all. This is so sad to me because you obviously can’t get accepted if you don’t submit and acceptances are an important part of encouraging you to keep at it. Over and over again I’m simply blown away by the excellent writing that my peers here are doing, and yet many of them have never even been published at all . . . because they don’t submit!

I really wish that MFA programs helped train people for the business side of writing. How to craft cover and query letters. How to approach agents. How to revise your stories not just to make them as good as possible for somebody who has already committed to reading them all the way through, but also to make your stories engage a reader (like an editor or agent!) early on who may not actually have the time to read every story they come across all the way through. And just as important as all those things is the simple act of submitting. Regularly.

But MFA programs don’t usually focus on these things and so it’s important for each writer, as an individual, to do it for him or herself. I think it’s a good idea to set goals for everything in writing, but even more so for submissions. Force yourself to submit to a certain number of places each month. Keep track of your rejections and don’t be ashamed of them, they’re an important part of being a writer. A fellow MFAer at UAF is collecting her submissions and counting toward the magic number 100, at which point she’s going to go out and treat herself for all the hard work she’s put in. I think that’s an awesome idea because after all rejections are just as much a part of being a writer as acceptances are. I say if you’re not getting rejected regularly that means you’re not submitting enough!

On the Importance of Momentum

It’s easy sometimes to forget the role momentum plays in our everyday lives. We talk about addictive behavior, or habits, or even decisions based on a sense of identity, but often what we’re really talking about is just continuing to head in the same direction we’re already headed, for better or worse, because we’ve built up a certain momentum.

I’ve really noticed the value of momentum as a writer lately. The past several months, close to the past year, really, I’ve had a really good momentum going as a writer. First I was working on my thesis, then I set that aside to work on revisions of a children’s book I had written previously, then I went back and forth between my thesis and several short stories, then short stories and the first draft of a new novel . . .

I’ve kept myself busy with a lot of different projects and never went more than a day or two without writing, and if I did for some reason miss a full day or two, I’d make up that lost time as soon as possible. Writing gets to be so automatic, when you’ve got that momentum going, that you no longer feel like you have to find time to write, it gets to a point where you have to find time for your real life. Writing is always the first thing on your mind, everything else feels secondary.

So secondary, in fact, that this past semester I spent so much time writing and daydreaming about my stories and novel that when crunch time hit I was wholly unprepared. I realized that writing had become almost like a bad habit, an addiction that was getting in the way of the things that were actually mandatory in my life (grading papers, writing papers, oh, I don’t know, feeding myself and my husband???) I figured that I had to stop writing for that last couple of weeks so I could finish up my school stuff --- but of course, that wasn’t possible. I was too addicted.

I managed to get everything done, and keep writing on the side, but once the semester officially ended, I turned in all my final stuff, posted my students’ final grades, and completely shut down. I had to do my Christmas shopping (after all, Christmas was only two days away by that point), and I needed to put together the first issue of MFA/MFYou. So I decided that just for, say, a week, I would stop writing and instead I would sleep in during the mornings, play video games, read comic books (and regular books, too). Just relax.

Now that I feel rested up, though, I’ve been having a bit of trouble getting back into my groove. It’s funny how quickly that momentum can dissipate. I didn’t end up taking the whole week off, instead I took two days off, wrote one day, then took two days off again. But the trouble is, I went from writing almost every day for close to two hours (and never, as a result, having my stories very far from my mind), to writing in one small two hour block in the middle of a five day stretch. And now all the stories that used to bounce around in my head all day every day are much vaguer to me; they’re more like distant memories than the crisp, vivid, detailed things they once were.

I’m already starting to get that momentum back up, but I can’t help but take it as a lesson on how much we rely on momentum to get things done. Maybe the truth is what makes us writers is that we’ve allowed ourselves to become addicted to writing, the same way some people are addicted to chocolate or to TV. And while some addictions may be “healthier” than others, we have to find the right balance in life, and, once we find that balance, we’ve got to keep that momentum going.

Reckonings and Resolutions

As 2008 draws to a close and winter break gets into full swing, I’m weighing up where I’m at right now, what I’ve done this past semester and year, and where I’d like to go from here. This is one of the things that I like the most about being involved in an MFA program: every semester there is an end, the perfect opportunity to really look at yourself as a writer, figure out where you are, where you’d like to be, and set goals to get yourself from here to there.

This past semester was an off and on productive one for me. I got a new draft done of my thesis, and one that I think is finally fairly close to where I want this novel to end up. I got some new stories written, some old ones revised, and I spent some serious time on improving myself as an academic writer, something that may not be important to all writers out there but if you want to be a teacher it’s not a bad idea to work towards getting papers published as well as whatever sort of creative writing you do.

But there are a lot of things that I’m looking back and shaking my head at, too. Recently, I started tracking how many hours a day I write with the hopes that I would discover that I write two to three hours a day on average. It turns out that, on average, I write a little less than two hours a day. Which is okay, I guess, surely a lot more than a lot of would-be-writers write, but it’s not as much as I thought I was writing. It’s useful for me to be aware of this, I realize, even though it’s a little disappointing.

I don’t know that this is a number I can reasonably change too dramatically, between being a wife and a cat-mom and a student and a teacher and let’s be honest, it’s important, as a writer, to read a lot, too . . . But I think it’s useful to be aware of how much time you actually do spend writing, and if the number is surprisingly low, it’s something worth working on. I’m going to set a sort of resolution for myself that for the year 2009 I’ll spend an average of at least two hours a day writing. I may or may not be able to do it, but I think that just by having that as a goal and by keeping track of it, I’ll be more likely to push myself that extra little bit.

The other thing I’ve realized I need to push myself more on is seeking out feedback from fellow writers. This semester with workshop and as I worked with the head of my thesis committee on my novel, I really realized the value of having people outside of yourself look at your work and give you honest feedback. This has been on my mind a lot lately because I’ll be graduating next semester and, if all goes as planned, I’ll probably be moving on to a graduate program in literature instead of creative writing and, who knows, I may never take another workshop class again.

I think it’s really important to be involved, one way or another, in a community of writers who you can learn from and grow with and who, if nothing else, can look at your work from unbiased eyes. I notice a lot of my fellow MFAs exchange work and give each other feedback outside of workshop, and it’s something I need to be more brave about taking part in, myself. I tend to be shy about it. I feel like I’m burdening other people if I ask them to read something and give me feedback, but I think it’s important and, especially once I graduate next semester, it’ll be something I’ll simply have to force myself to do since I’ll no longer have a workshop and thesis committee to share my work with.

And with that, I’ll sign off for the year 2008. Check mfamfyou.com on January first, when the first issue of MFA/MFYou will be up.

Prioritize!

I’ve been thinking a lot about priorities, since with the end of the semester I had to meet those final deadlines as both a student and a teacher, and I had to set my writing aside to make sure I was spending time on the appropriate things (this is very much on my mind right now because I had hoped to get some work done on a specific story this weekend but I ended up having to A, do laundry, B, grade papers and submit my final grades, and then C, spend time with my husband). The end of the semester always makes me think about how we set priorities and how we squeeze writing into our otherwise busy schedules.

Of course, one of the major draws to an MFA program is that it forces you to set your creative writing as a top priority. If you work full time as a – whatever – and your writing is a sort of a hobby on the side (by hobby I don’t mean to belittle creative writing, but instead classify it based on how it fits in to our lives…) you have to take the initiative to decide to write instead of doing whatever else you could be doing. As an MFA student, of course, there’s also some choice in it (you can choose not to do your homework, as many of us know full well) but it IS expected of you that you will be writing regularly.

But whether you’re an MFA student or not, where we go as writers all comes down to how we set our priorities, and what we set as our priorities. Sometimes I’m not very good with prioritizing, as my not-so-clean-right-now cabin can prove. But whether you’re good with prioritizing or not, if you want to make it as a writer, you have to learn to set writing as a top priority, and an MFA program can be used as a kind of fool-proof way of doing that. Sure, you can slack off as a student, you can procrastinate and not take it very seriously, but either you spend at least some time on writing, or you won’t make it through the program. Period.

And the higher you can set writing on your priority list, the better writer you’ll be.

Commitment

Probably the most useful thing you get out of an MFA program (in my opinion, at least) is that you are forced to set aside any illusions you had about writers being born with the skill, or that some people are just literary geniuses (and what goes along with that, unless you’re REALLY self deluded, is that you have to accept that this means you are not a genius, either).

This can be very difficult at first. I know it was for me. It wasn’t that I came into the program thinking of myself as a literary genius, not in those terms, certainly. But I did believe that some people were just naturally gifted, that writing was something you were either good at or you weren’t, and I, I believed, was one of the good ones.

But I almost immediately learned that the reason I had gotten to the level I was at was because I had spent my entire life, since I was old enough to spell, practicing; I just didn’t think of it as practice. And on top of that, the level I was at wasn’t good enough. I still had a long way to go.

These lessons sort of bombarded me, what with all of my peers in the program who were all just as good as me (and many of them were better), the quite large number of high quality submissions that got rejected from our literary journal, the amount of work I expected my students to put into their academic writing, watching how much those students would improve when they did put in the work (and how the ones who believed they were already perfect and refused to put the work in didn’t improve at all and often ended up behind the other students by the end of the semester) . . .

By the end of my first semester I knew two things for absolutely sure: that nobody was just born with the gift of writing, and that to become a good writer you have to work, work, work!

It’s hard work; it means spending a lot of time and effort on your writing and it means making sacrifices. Whether or not you are willing to put in that work (and especially after you realize that any ideas you may have had of one day making a living off of writing were also illusions, too, but I’ll talk about that some other time) is entirely up to you.

But the beauty of the MFA program is that, at least in my experience, you realize pretty quickly that making it as a writer is going to take work and that you have to commit to it or else you’re just wasting your time. And once you make that commitment, your life will never be the same.

Slowly Climbing Up the Ladder

On Sunday night of this past week, I said to Damien that I was beginning to feel discouraged. I had, the day before, received three different rejections on the same day, and for the past few weeks I’ve been receiving a fairly steady stream of rejections in the mail. By now, I’m so used to rejections they don’t bother me at all . . . unless, it turns out, I open up my PO Box and find a full stack of them waiting for me.

As someone who has toiled on both sides of the literary journal machine (as one who reads submissions and as one who writes and submits them), I have a pretty thorough understanding of how little rejections often mean. It could be as simple as the editor skipped breakfast that morning and wasn’t able to concentrate as they half-assedly read your piece, or maybe that the topic you’re exploring is one that the editor is just not personally interested in. Rejections, as I said, don’t bother me.

But three in one day . . .

I was beginning to wonder if I was deluding myself. If, in my case, the rejections did mean something more. If my stuff was any good wouldn’t someone somewhere want to publish it? On Sunday night I mentioned to Damien that it was a good thing I set a monthly goal to send 10 submissions each month, otherwise I was likely to give up, for the time being, on submitting at all.

Onward and upward and all that, Damien told me. Chin up and have faith and I like your stuff.

And the next day I received an acceptance, and not just any acceptance, my first acceptance from a paying journal. I can actually say I sold a story. For money. Someone liked my story enough to pay me for the right to print it.

This is a small but important step, just like getting that first acceptance from a small, non-paying journal was. Just like getting an acceptance from a larger journal with a bigger circulation will be. And just like (one day) getting an acceptance from a more prestigious journal, a national journal, a journal that you can tell your folks to pick up at their local bookstore.

It may seem like a small thing (let’s be honest, I’m only getting like $30 plus contributor’s copies and a free subscription), but it is a big small thing, an important one. I’m another rung up the ladder, now, and I feel like I’m making progress. I’m slowly but surely moving up and I feel (perhaps temporarily but hey, it still counts) reinvigorated to keep working at it, keep striving, so I can work towards moving that next short rung up.