Searching for answers

 word count: 233                          reading time: 1-2 mins

Australian writer Shane Maloney said, “Watching someone write is about as interesting as watching a mime feed hay to an invisible horse.” That horse has hollow legs and it takes many long hours to satisfy its appetite. So what is the perfect answer to the inevitable question, “How’s the writing going?”

In a society geared toward immediate gratification, there is an expectation of measurable results after weeks, months, and even years cloistered with a computer. Yes I know that writing fiction is just making stuff up but really that’s the easy part. Fitting tangents of imagination into a flowing story is the hard work. How many people really care that a scene was laboriously revised five times before finally being deleted because it just didn’t work? That’s not what friends are asking. They want to know how soon they will have a copy of your bestseller in their hands. They don’t realize how much hay that horse craves.

Maybe it’s this inexplicable nature of the effort that led Robert Heinlein to say, “Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”

How do you answer those questions about the state of your work-in-progress? Do you flip out your cell phone and mime astonishment at what’s on the screen? Oh look! It’s a message from the stable! My horse has run out of hay.

photos: Sad444

Getting there (I hope)

Word count: 252               Reading time: 1-2 mins.

“How long does getting thin take?” asked Pooh anxiously. He’s stuck in the door of Rabbit’s house and wants to be free.

I’m suspended in the land of commercially unpublished authors and I want to be free of this place. How long does getting published take? How long should it take?

 In the book Outliers Malcolm Gladwell asserts that acquiring greatness demands a huge investment of time, about 10,000 hours. Okay maybe I can’t aspire to greatness but I do want to create the very best fiction I can. Perhaps my apprenticeship isn’t complete yet.

Gladwell also points out that success "is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky.” Maybe 2012 will be the year when the planets will align in my favour.

When I am discouraged at how long the getting-published process takes, I search for perspective. The Crime Fiction Blog has a list of ironically-named overnight success stories that can take the edge off an emerging writer’s anxiety. Another source of comfort is reading rejection letters that were sent to famous authors. In the meantime I remind myself of Robert Heinlein's fifth rule of writing: keep it on the market until it is sold.

So I look to the shiny New Year with fresh hope and determination. Something’s got to give.

All you struggling apprentices out there, are you in it for the long haul? How do you handle those bruising rejection letters? 

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Artwork: E.H. Shepard