The Joys of Acceptance

Just as a rejection might send you into fits of depression, anger, or despair, the arrival of an acceptance notification generates a degree of bliss not to be matched.  You might smile, dance a jig, hoot and holler, mention it (aka "bragging") to a friend, or fire off one or more social blasts to let the world know that; YES, YES, YES; you are a writer and an editor actually likes your work. Soon the entire world will see what you have produced.  Your joy is unbounded.

But publication is never immediate so there comes the impatient wait for publication, an agonizing delay of weeks or months - even years for novelists - as the manuscript is turned into whatever mode the publication needs.  The days drag by, you nervously fret that they've somehow screwed things up, the editor's had second thoughts, or that the publication will fold, dooming your story to the trash can.  Even the galley review hasn't curbed your impatience.  When is the damn thing going to appear, you ask?

Then the fateful day arrives. Once again you flood your social medium with links and beg your friends to glance at it.  If it is a print publication your cherish your precious author's copies, place them on your brag shelf, or maybe even read your words once more, savoring each exquisitely turn of phrase.  You might go to the local bookstand and hang out by the display, waiting for someone to pick up the magazine and wondering if you will be brazen enough to say "Hey, I've got a story in there.  Want me to autograph it?"  This thought fades after a few unproductive hours of waiting and getting suspicious glances from the security guard and a few young mothers who worry about you are standing so close to the teen magazines.

Finally, as all writers must, you return to your wordsmithing anvil to forge yet another tale, a few more pages of the novel, or improve a passage in something you have in seemingly perpetual draft.  The acceptance lies now in your past; an acknowledgement that you had accomplished something wonderful or, if you are more modest, acceptable.

You now know that you are a writer.

The Truth about Rejections

They'll tell you that a rejection isn't personal, that the editor is only rejecting the story, not you.

But deep inside your writerly core, the secret place that contains your hopes and dreams, you know that is untrue.  Any rejection feels like an arrow piecing your heart, its barbs inflicting deep wounds that will leave tender scars  on your psyche. A rejection is a personal affront, it's saying that you are not worthy of being published and all of the hours you sweated to polish that story to perfection are as nothing. In a word, rejection feels like failure.

So, what can you do? You can bite your lip, bitch and moan about the unfairness of it all to anyone nearby, curse the editor as a philistine, and even decide to never, ever submit to them again (a promise I've never been able to keep.) you can even mumble "I'll show that %^$# editor," as you submit it elsewhere and continue to create.

Doing any or all of that is fine, but it doesn't change the fact that you have been cast aside.

Rejection hurts!

Quitting at Last

This is what bothers me:  After nearly twenty years of writing short stories and occasionally selling one or two, I have to face the prospect that perhaps I've overstayed my welcome, that perhaps my talent has at last played out, that my race is run, the tide is going out, the dark night approaches and all of those other literary allusions that are trite and boring when endlessly repeated redundantly over and over ... well, you get the idea.

The bitter fact that writers have limited periods of productivity, that they eventually outlive their fan base or face a dearth of ideas, which is a particularly horrid fate for the short story writer who depends on expressing ideas engagingly as opposed to story, came to my mind as I read a pair of related blogs by Sarah Hoyt and Kay Kenyon dealing with similar issues. Apparently I am not the only one who is bothered by these inner voices of doubt and fear of failure.

This is not the first time I've dealt with the problem of writerly mortality.  In fact, I think of this at least three times a week, more often when the brain stutters and spits, seeking a word that will just not materialize to complete the sentence or when the plot wanders aimlessly off the reservation into areas I hadn't intended or when a character suddenly changes from a brilliant puppet into a wooden soldier who is unable to squeeze a single emotion from his all too solid frame. Yeah, that's when the doubts arise.  

So I ask myself when might be a good time to call it quits, to fold the tent and ... no, no, no - I won't go there again or we'll all die of metaphoric or analogical metastasis. 

I honestly don't know when you can tell that it's a good time to quit - after a year of no sales, after the four hundredth rejection, or after the ideas stop exciting you awake in the night? What are the signs that you are finished? Can you tell? Will anyone whisper it to you at some obscure little con - the only ones that seem to welcome you?  Is there a right time, a good time, a proper time to vacate the stage for those pesky young upstarts? 

I think the time might be right, but before quitting I have a few things to finish, such as the novel that I've nearly finished rewriting, the one I have half done and the other one sadly left in outline, not to mention the sixteen short stories in various draft stages, the ones in eternal circulation hell, and the nifty Sam Boone idea I sketched out this morning after coffee and ..... Crap, looks like I'll have to resign myself to keep pecking away at the keys until those few things are completed, that is, if something else doesn't come up.

And maybe not having "something else" is the sign when I'll know for certain that it's time to quit.

The Intrusive Muse

After a two week hiatus from writing I sat down to continue the slogging, tedious process of revising/rewriting/editing my novel - a task involving rephrasing about one sentence out of ten and changing the novel's singular point of view to the more reader-friendly third person.  As I said; tedious, but necessary: I do want to finish this piece once and for all.

So, after getting through another ten or twenty pages, a little idea for a story that had occurred to me while enjoying my breakfast coffee with a blueberry muffin in frigid Portland bubbled to the surface of my mind and demanded that I pay attention.  It was a mosquito bite of irritation; a gnat's itch that would not cease as I struggled to concentrate on the work at hand.  It was an insistent, demanding irritation that intruded into every thought.  I've know this itch before and what it portended.

In a recent interview Stephen King mentioned that he never wrote down his story ideas.  If an idea has merit,  he contended, it will rise for attention when needed.   Itch, itch, itch the little story idea continued to plague me for another page where I finally yielded.  I put the novel aside, brought up a blank screen with the idea of writing an outline, scene sketches as it were that I would put aside for later, after finishing the novel.

Blocking the scenes came so easily that I knew my muse must have been working at the plot, the emotional levels, and the settings without informing the my conscious mind.  That she was active while I was preoccupied became evident as the words, the descriptions, the incidents, people, dialogue, and characterizations rolled so effortlessly onto the screen.  Usually I struggle with plot and wrestle each paragraph to submission before endlessly editing and rewriting until I finally abandon the entire effort to submission.  Only on rare occasions does my muse allow me to write so flawlessly.  

Four hours later I had the entire story mapped out in ten scenes and had written three thousand words leading up to the key scene, where I stopped.  The flow of the narrative and evocation of scenes had been so painless that I could have continued to the end, but I wanted - needed - to do THAT scene with fresh eyes and a clear mind.

Ask me how this happened and I reply that the words flowed like liquid gold, pouring into the plot as the characters, dialogues, scenes, and incidents grew in cascading profusion and without effort.  It was as if someone apart was dictating to give birth to this story.  It is a process I cannot understand, feel exceptionally blessed when it happens, and wish I could evoke every time I sit down to write.

This story will probably be finished by this evening I'm sure and then it is back to the workbench to pound out another few pages, edit unfinished materials that are trying to get my attention, and do the mundane things life demands of us so I can continue to follow my bliss and write.

Dry Spell

There are times when the writing becomes tiresome, when the events of the day or of life in general become so wearing that the last thing you want to do it sit down and try to eke out a few words worth reading.

This is one of those times.

Master Class

Writing is a lonely business where each writer sits and tries to fill the screen with something worth saying. We each deal with our muse idiosyncratically, relying on our imaginations, education, and references to craft unique works. We labor like journeyman artisans prior to the industrial revolution, before knowledge of their master's methods became widespread. We are anchorites by nature and vocation, rarely meeting with others of our tribe, usually for critique sessions.

I've been in a critique group for several years whose members are professional writers of varying accomplishment. Although I'd enjoyed our sessions, in which we read and criticize our most current material, I began to feel that somehow we were missing something; that all this picking at one another's scribblings wasn't accomplishing any improvement in our craftsmanship but merely polishing the finish, as it were, on pieces that had already been forged.

What would happen, I wonder, if we talked instead of techniques, methods, processes, and the other writer's tools that line the backboards of our wordsmithing workbenches? Would we discover preferred ways of plot development or found that sorts of hooks work best? Would we explore the byways of flashbacks or realized where foreshadowing could be used most effectively? Would we agree on those elements that constitute an ideal scene? The list of possible discussions and discoveries goes on, ranging from "what works best for me?" to, simply, what works.

Would my dream assembly of accomplished writers form a master-level seminar where we could meaningfully discuss the how's and why's of the writing craft, without getting into the niggling trivia of a specific story, page, scene, or line of prose? What sort of dialogue would produce the best results? Which subjects would spark the most interest; perhaps development of the protagonist or would it be the meanderings of plot? How much discussion could there be about the traditional triad of character, setting, and time and whether writers necessarily need to appeal to sight, sound, smell, and the kinesthetic aspects in detail? So many questions, so much to be covered. The pressures of imagination and production probably mandate that there would never be enough time, people, and interest to hold such a discussion.

But I can dream.

Sources of the Nile

Some of the great explorations of history, such as those of Speake and Burton, were determining the sources of the Nile. Was it a spring bubbling in the Mountains of the Moon, perhaps it flowed from Lake Victoria in Kenya. or even in some hidden glen deep in the Nyungwe Forest in Rwanda?  Eventually it was determined that there was no single, definitive source, but that the Nile was the result of outpourings from smaller waterways spread over one and a quarter million miles or more of collection basin throughout central Africa.


I often wonder where my own ideas came from when I complete a story, or sometimes, even a single scene or passage.  Was it spurred by something I'd read in my earlier years, an event in my life, something mentioned in a casual conversation, or even something once read and then forgotten, only to emerge years later clothed in different expression?  There are a few stories that I can point to and say "Yes, this is where I got the idea," but truthfully that might only address the macguffin, the punch line, the setting, or the character's makeup, not all the other stuff that fills the pages - all the little ornamentation, snippets of conversation, and observations that well up unbidden and pour onto the page without my conscious control. 


In the end I ask myself where does the Muse, who inhabits me when I get into the fugue writing state, find these things, all these niggling details, all this color and sound and smell and action?  How does it happen?


An example:  In my story "Primrose & Thorn" the Jupiter sailboat and its environment came from careful research and the story's plot was carefully contrived in advance, but nowhere in my mind had the characters of Louella, the lusty, direct, and black female protagonist and Pascal, her french companion been formed.  As I was writing my Muse gave Louella birth and let her rise entire, like the Botticelli Venus, from the sea of unconsciousness and step into the story.  For certain her character and behavior grew out of the necessities of the story, obstensably a vehicle used to put my feelings about sailing in  a way the reader would enjoy, but she had her own personality formed from the type of challenges she'd faced.  I am certain that I've never known anyone like either Louella or Pascal, nor are they amalgamations of people I've met. So where did they come from?   


Perhaps, like the sources of the Nile, the content of my writing drains from the broad timescape of a lifetime of reading, experiencing, and discovering my world.  Perhaps it is something best not explored to discover the source, but only to marvel that it is there for the Muse to use.