I don’t think I’ve ever been involved in any other activity that required more perseverance than the quest for publication. There are so many barriers you have to overcome, it hardly seems worth it. First, you have to write your book, which is no small task itself. Then comes revision, which can be even more difficult to face. At least when you wrote you book, you were in the honeymoon period; getting to know each other and being surprised by what you discover as your relationship progresses. Revision, though, is when the honeymoon is over and you are fighting each other at every step. Then comes the quest of finding an agent or publisher, which means dealing with rejection and long waits, which can drive you mad if you aren’t writing something else in the meantime.
I think the only way a writer can persevere is to keep writing, and to do so is critical. The hard part is maintaining your enthusiasm for writing new books while you wait for the submission process to play out with your existing manuscripts. This can be really hard to do, because waiting fuels that little voice in your head that tells you you're no good and you should just give up.
There are times when I wonder if I should just quit. But a person who is truly a writer at heart can’t simply quit. Even when I allow myself to take a week or two break, I get depressed, cranky and irritable. So, quitting is not an option, at least if I want to stay married.
So when I find myself getting depressed, I think of Hilari Bell, a wonderful and successful writer. I heard her speak on this very topic at a conference. In her case, she wrote 14 books before one of them was acquired for publication. After that, she sold most of the others in quick succession. Think of it as building inventory. The more you have in your inventory, the more you can sell.
Perseverance, while not my favorite word, is a necessary companion on the path to publication. As Samuel Johnson said over 200 years ago “Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.”
So don’t quit. Focus on the one part of the publication process you have control over and keep writing. If you persevere, the rest will follow.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Fear- Life's Greatest (first posted April 2007)
Starting a new novel is much harder than it sounds. This will be my fourth novel, not counting a couple that were never finished, and I keep thinking it will get easier each time. But this time it’s harder. Maybe because this time I know someone else besides my wife will be reading it.
When I told my critique group members that one of the emotions I was feeling after getting signed by an agent was fear, no one was more surprised than myself. Why on earth would reaching this milestone cause fear? You’d think fear would lessen as my career progressed. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said “fear defeats more people than anything else in the world..” I couldn’t agree more. Fear kept me from having children until I finally mustered up the courage to become a father. Maybe the upside is that I’m a better father because of waiting, but it also means one of my children never got to meet their paternal grandmother, and the other was only two months old before she died. Fear robbed me of the joy of watching them together.
It’s much the same story with writing. Fear kept me from seriously attempting to write a book for several years. Once I beat that, it prevented me from sending my work out for a couple of more years. And now that I’m making real progress, it’s rearing it’s ugly head again. It’s a clever thing, fear. It knows what scares you. It knows just what to say to get you out of that chair and do almost anything else rather than allow you to live up to your full potential. Whether or not you believe in the devil himself, there is indeed something assailing our spirit, holding us back at every step.
So last night, I sat down at the computer and forced my fingers to start to work. I typed “Chapter one” and wrote a paragraph. It wasn’t a bad paragraph either. It’s nothing that would set the literary world on fire. But it was decent. More importantly, it was progress. With each key stroke, that awful little voice that tells us we are nothing, that we are crazy for believing anyone would ever want to read something we wrote, that we aren’t worth being loved, or that we can’t lose weight, or that we can get a better job… that voice grew quieter.
Fear will always be there, lurking in the dark parts of our soul. But there is one remedy: courage. And how do we find our courage? Courage is, quite simply, choosing not to listen to fear. It is action, whereas Fear is inaction. So, face it head on by doing exactly what it doesn’t want you to do.
I doubt that I will ever be able to eliminate fear, but I can do the next best thing. I can rob of its power, until it becomes a laughing stock, a faint shadow of a once great and terrible monster. John Quincy Adams wrote that courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air. The beautiful thing is, that talisman exists in each and every one of us, just waiting for us to find it.
When I told my critique group members that one of the emotions I was feeling after getting signed by an agent was fear, no one was more surprised than myself. Why on earth would reaching this milestone cause fear? You’d think fear would lessen as my career progressed. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said “fear defeats more people than anything else in the world..” I couldn’t agree more. Fear kept me from having children until I finally mustered up the courage to become a father. Maybe the upside is that I’m a better father because of waiting, but it also means one of my children never got to meet their paternal grandmother, and the other was only two months old before she died. Fear robbed me of the joy of watching them together.
It’s much the same story with writing. Fear kept me from seriously attempting to write a book for several years. Once I beat that, it prevented me from sending my work out for a couple of more years. And now that I’m making real progress, it’s rearing it’s ugly head again. It’s a clever thing, fear. It knows what scares you. It knows just what to say to get you out of that chair and do almost anything else rather than allow you to live up to your full potential. Whether or not you believe in the devil himself, there is indeed something assailing our spirit, holding us back at every step.
So last night, I sat down at the computer and forced my fingers to start to work. I typed “Chapter one” and wrote a paragraph. It wasn’t a bad paragraph either. It’s nothing that would set the literary world on fire. But it was decent. More importantly, it was progress. With each key stroke, that awful little voice that tells us we are nothing, that we are crazy for believing anyone would ever want to read something we wrote, that we aren’t worth being loved, or that we can’t lose weight, or that we can get a better job… that voice grew quieter.
Fear will always be there, lurking in the dark parts of our soul. But there is one remedy: courage. And how do we find our courage? Courage is, quite simply, choosing not to listen to fear. It is action, whereas Fear is inaction. So, face it head on by doing exactly what it doesn’t want you to do.
I doubt that I will ever be able to eliminate fear, but I can do the next best thing. I can rob of its power, until it becomes a laughing stock, a faint shadow of a once great and terrible monster. John Quincy Adams wrote that courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air. The beautiful thing is, that talisman exists in each and every one of us, just waiting for us to find it.
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