writing progress

HARD SELL

/ janpriddyoregon / 7 Comments

“Of course, resilience matters. But given the dearth of practical support, ‘we need to understand that emotional resilience might not be enough,’ said Brian Hughes, a professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway, who specializes in the psychology of stress and crisis.”—from the In Her Words series of The New York Times, 18 February 2021 by Corinne Purtill

Purtill and Hughes are not talking about writing at all, but genuine hardship. Pandemic, hunger, unpaid bills. All I have to complain of just now is disappointment. A story rejection arrived via email the other day. I’d had hopes for the particular story and for publication in this particular journal, but no. I should be used to this by now. I tried taking it as a matter of course, but I really wanted to crawl under the bed and suck dust bunnies.

But Gary had vacuumed up the dust bunnies.

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READING OUT OF THE SHELL

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The student working on the research paper was well and truly stuck. He walked from the back table to where I sat at the front and asked me for help. “I am really far behind,” he said as if this were a permanent condition. He had the research. He had an idea of what he would say. He told me about what he knew and showed me the research. When I asked him questions about supporting information and about complications, about the opposition to him claims, he was able to answer.He had nothing written down. I helped him create a simple graphic of pros and cons. Then I gave him chocolate and 20 minutes and when I came back his page was completely blank. Time had passed and his fear stared him down.

Last year, when I suggested to a friend that reading for 10-15 minutes a day would result in reading a complete book every 3-4 weeks, she commented wryly, “You could say that about a lot of things.”

Well, yes, I could.

Let me put this another way. If you stayed off Facebook and your cell phone for 10-15 minutes a day, you would have time to exercise, write an actual letter, do some yoga, meditate, cook oatmeal for breakfast, make a salad . . . or read.

Making time is not so hard. It is impossible. Time is not created, it merely passes. How we pass with that time is choice. Recently I binged an Australian television series, walked the beach, played Scrabble with a friend, and laid awake worrying about family in the middle of the night. I wrote blog posts and helped a student with Geometry while volunteering in the local high school library and yesterday I helped a student with his Senior Research Paper. I made bread of bananas just in time, and each morning I read the news. I read novels and nonfiction. Just now there are two books on the shelf behind me.

I never begin a book I do not hope to love. Sometimes I am disappointed. More often I am amazed. Reading transports, instructs, teaches—if I am willing to allow that to happen, if I am willing to stretch and learn, to participate in a process. I am willing to invest the time to read.

A new post on the Brevity blog discusses time for change. The author and her husband have sold their house and are moving to a much smaller house in another state. It is a thoughtful essay about movement, both exterior movement and interior movement, about simplification and change, about making those choices to be somewhere and perhaps even someone new.

My sense is that significant change is almost entirely interior, that large or small house, New Mexico or Florida, and perhaps even near family or far away, we carry ourselves along as the primary baggage. Our capacity for becoming, for changing our lives, breaks down to our willingness to use time in new ways. That is less about external than internal geography.

No matter where we go, there we are.

In the mean time, I have avoided knitting and weaving and a story because I fear I will do projects badly. I have a plan but things are not looking promising. Last night while giving good advice and deadlines to a student, time passed. I experimented with point of view (tried third person thanks to Ursula) in fiction. He eventually had a list of paragraphs to be written and a start. That student had an introductory paragraph, I had 500 new words of a story. Like the student in the library, I had stared too long at my blank page, certain I was doomed.

I was not doomed, I was trying to wait out time. Time merely passes.

As he was leaving, the student said, “I have a month to finish it.” But he doesn’t have a month. He had that evening for an hour, and he needs to use an hour each day until he’s done. If he thinks of the month, he will wait to begin. He will slide along without progressing because there is a month, then three weeks, then less and less time left as he allows it to pass. Thinking like that will land him in the same spot he started yesterday evening, a blank page before him—the way we all end up staring at the same spot because we have an hour to start the work or a lifetime to begin a new life.

It is always there for the start.

 

DONE/NOT DONE

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Eight hours, then six hours the next afternoon, then a day off, then another seven hours revising my 2016 novel after working my paying job. I have queried it more times than I am willing to admit and under four different titles. (The husband of a friend suggested the title last week that I think has stuck.) I have written eleven drafts of this novel. It has drifted up and down between 75 and 82 thousand words. Two agencies are interested. I just queried another agent, and I have sent out 22 story submissions this year. In March, because clearly I have too much time on my hands, I committed to writing a 40-page novelette and a new poem each day in the month of April.

Ask me how that’s going.

I have a few lousy poem drafts and 21 pages of a science fiction short story that is already too long and does not want to be novelette. (We’ll call it the “pigeon” story, because it does actually have a pigeon in it for about a page.) I really do want to put the pigeon story aside because it gets more strange and complicated every time I think about it. And anyway, it’s done. Isn’t it? Sixty-five hundred words is long enough and I should stop. Shouldn’t I? Or maybe it’s only that I do not want to give it another 20 pages. It’s a lot more work for a story that is strange without being actually horrifying, and which no one will like, right? Maybe I am even afraid of what will happen if I do write more? That is entirely possible. I am not sure if there is a market for stories this long, and the story itself is creeping me out more than a little bit.

Like so much of what I write, this one, the pigeon story, starts with a story about birds. I have another creepy bird story that already wants work. It has crows. Maybe I can set this 21-page pigeon story aside and work on the crow story for a few days. The owl story is going to be published. I am afraid to look at it again. Heaven help me, I know I would begin to revise.

My husband and I went on our first actual vacation in fifteen years last month—all the way to Victoria in Canada. Both of us are familiar with Vancouver Island and Victoria from our youth. Gary had Unitarian friends there when he was a teenager and I used to show dogs and stay with friends on the Island.

We did not take a device capable of accessing the internet with us to Canada. For three nights and four days, we were out of touch. Even the flip phone did not work since we were out of the country.

I had been busy sending out work before we left and several pieces were being held—short-listed for further review. I did not think about them. We napped, walked, ate, looked in shops, talked, admired views, and napped some more. I finished reading two books, but I did not even write in my journal or take photographs. It was a lovely time, and I fell asleep in the car while my husband drove most of the way home.

As we neared home, I took over driving because the bridge over the Columbia River is four miles long and he Gary hates driving across. I confessed to him that if I did not have some sort of positive response to my writing when we got home, I was going to be sad. He replied with suitable gravity that he expected that.

While I was reviewing two hundred unread emails, I found the good news I hoped for. And while responding to acceptances of the owl story and the crow essay (not the crow story, which is something else), a request for a full manuscript of my novel arrived from an agent I have queried in the past.

Yes, a very good day. I was happy and I congratulated myself and my husband and I drank a full bottle of sparkling wine. Yes. Yes, we did.

And without in any way dismissing the glory of this good news, these three successes, I do not believe I “have turned a corner” in my writing life. Everything will not go well from now on. It may immediately go back to mostly unsuccessful. For example, no journal will choose to take the story that three journals are currently considering—even though each has held it twice as long as they usually hold work. (The longer they have it, the better—it means that a first reader liked it well enough to pass it on, and the second reader too.) It’s likely that all three of the editors thinking about liking my story will decide they do not like it enough to publish it. That happens all the time, often enough that a website online tracks not just the text of form rejections, but also the text of “higher tier” rejections. I mostly submit to journals and magazines with an acceptance rate somewhat below 1%. I am submitting to journals which show hundreds of submissions but no acceptances at all in the stats at Duotrope where I track my submissions. Yes, I could make it easier by sending work to smaller journals, but if I wanted easy, there are other things I could be doing rather than writing stories with birds in them.

Nothing is changed because I have recently had a story and an essay accepted. My mother always warned me about getting my hopes up. I have been up there before.

There was the year I won a Literary Arts grant, was accepted into an MFA program, and had a story published by Calyx. This was followed by hard work on my MFA and then . . . nothing. My mother died. I could not write at all but dwelt on one story day after day without making any progress. Three years passed.

There is no corner a writer can come around and find everything easy and neat. Writing is not like we might have hoped, like maybe the man in the White House thought everything would go his way, once he won the electoral college.

Real life, even if you get away with telling lies or you write fiction, is messy and out of control. If you told the truth or wrote nonfiction, it would still be messy. Poetry? Messy, messy, messy. Right up to the moment the poem sings.

This is what I know about success:

  • success does not last, but good writing does
  • acceptance is glorious—celebrate when it comes
  • nothing good can last, but neither will the bad
  • count rejections because they will come anyway (I already have 33 this year and my goal is to have 100 for 2018)
  • sometimes the “dream market” is the only one with readers smart enough to appreciate your best (A prize-winning story of mine was rejected by tiny journals before finding publication with a better one. This happened twice.)
  • failure was at the beginning and so it shall be at the end

Almost 400 years ago, Hobbes claimed life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Writing should not be like that. But the struggle is long and exhausting. Reward seldom comes when we need it most. People misunderstand, but I know for certain that I am never certain about what I am doing. The writing is messy and personal and haunts me awake and asleep.

In case it’s hard to tell, I am enjoying myself quite a bit just now.