Letting Go
Aug. 29th, 2004 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pjthompsonSo I hit a wall today. It's a good wall, though, and I think I may smash myself against it a few more times until I'm sure the lesson has taken hold. It's about letting go. But because it's me, I'll probably take a roundabout way to explain what I mean.
I went marathoning this weekend—no, not in Athens. I locked the door on a crappy week Friday night and didn't open it again until this afternoon. I holed up and marathoned on my novel, working hard on the sentence-level stuff. I cut either 1750 word or just over 2500, depending on which word count method you use—and I only got through chapter 7. I managed to accomplish that without doing harm to my very complex plot structure.
A little of that reduction was fudging the document format so it's closer to 60/250, but most of it was just cutting extra words, streamlining, getting rid of relics from the rewrite process. So the novel is still too long, but I'm hopeful it won't be quite as long by the time I'm ready to send it out. Getting it below 150k would feel like a major accomplishment. It's just under 152k now.
At some part in the process, though, I started to be plagued by doubts. (Because it's me, it would have been more unusual if I wasn't plagued by doubts.) My doubts went something along this line: it's too long, they're never going to buy it, I've done all this work and it's all going to come to nothing. You know, the usual.
I took a break and surfed the net. I came across an interview with Anne Perry, the mystery writer. She talked about how long it took her to break in—twenty years. She said, "The Cater Street Hangman, the first of my books to be accepted for publication, came out in 1979. I don't know how many books I wrote before that." (My italics.)
At first, this just fed my funk. Twenty years...many books rejected...oy vey. At some point, though, when I'd gotten over myself a bit, I realized this was a good news story, not a bad. Twenty years, several books, but she finally did break in. Not only that, but she's consistently on the bestseller lists. I'm sure each of those rejections disappointed her, but the point is, she didn't give up. She kept trying and she broke in.
That's when I took the next step in that journey. It occurred to me that my current novel may be destined for rejection. I may not be able to sell it. But you know what? I've written three novels, but I've got a lot more novels in me—some of them partially done, some just forming up—but all just waiting for their turn, their shot. My job is to give them that shot and not give up, even though sometimes that's really hard to do. As I've maintained many times, the work is always the remedy, even when sometimes it's the cause of the malady. I have to keep writing.
So I let go of my doubts and worries. Worrying about whether or not my novel was too long, whether or not it was going to sell was doing me no good. The work was doing me good, the effort to make the novel better was doing me good. The thought of finishing and shipping it off to its fate...well, that was giving me some heebie jeebies, but eventually when I do ship it out, that will do me a lot of good. Because I'll be letting go and moving on to the next work. It doesn't mean I think any less of it, that I won't work hard to make it the best work I can, or I that won't be really disappointed if it doesn't find it's way. But I know that I cannot afford to put all my hopes into one basket. At some point I have to let go and move on.
It eased my mind considerably when I got to this place. It isn't about the success. It's about the work. It's always been about the work. The success would be nice. I definitely want me some. I'll keep trying, doing the smart thing when I can, playing the game as much as I'm able. But sometimes I've got to let go of that, too, and concentrate on the only thing I really have any control over. I've got to keep writing.
I went marathoning this weekend—no, not in Athens. I locked the door on a crappy week Friday night and didn't open it again until this afternoon. I holed up and marathoned on my novel, working hard on the sentence-level stuff. I cut either 1750 word or just over 2500, depending on which word count method you use—and I only got through chapter 7. I managed to accomplish that without doing harm to my very complex plot structure.
A little of that reduction was fudging the document format so it's closer to 60/250, but most of it was just cutting extra words, streamlining, getting rid of relics from the rewrite process. So the novel is still too long, but I'm hopeful it won't be quite as long by the time I'm ready to send it out. Getting it below 150k would feel like a major accomplishment. It's just under 152k now.
At some part in the process, though, I started to be plagued by doubts. (Because it's me, it would have been more unusual if I wasn't plagued by doubts.) My doubts went something along this line: it's too long, they're never going to buy it, I've done all this work and it's all going to come to nothing. You know, the usual.
I took a break and surfed the net. I came across an interview with Anne Perry, the mystery writer. She talked about how long it took her to break in—twenty years. She said, "The Cater Street Hangman, the first of my books to be accepted for publication, came out in 1979. I don't know how many books I wrote before that." (My italics.)
At first, this just fed my funk. Twenty years...many books rejected...oy vey. At some point, though, when I'd gotten over myself a bit, I realized this was a good news story, not a bad. Twenty years, several books, but she finally did break in. Not only that, but she's consistently on the bestseller lists. I'm sure each of those rejections disappointed her, but the point is, she didn't give up. She kept trying and she broke in.
That's when I took the next step in that journey. It occurred to me that my current novel may be destined for rejection. I may not be able to sell it. But you know what? I've written three novels, but I've got a lot more novels in me—some of them partially done, some just forming up—but all just waiting for their turn, their shot. My job is to give them that shot and not give up, even though sometimes that's really hard to do. As I've maintained many times, the work is always the remedy, even when sometimes it's the cause of the malady. I have to keep writing.
So I let go of my doubts and worries. Worrying about whether or not my novel was too long, whether or not it was going to sell was doing me no good. The work was doing me good, the effort to make the novel better was doing me good. The thought of finishing and shipping it off to its fate...well, that was giving me some heebie jeebies, but eventually when I do ship it out, that will do me a lot of good. Because I'll be letting go and moving on to the next work. It doesn't mean I think any less of it, that I won't work hard to make it the best work I can, or I that won't be really disappointed if it doesn't find it's way. But I know that I cannot afford to put all my hopes into one basket. At some point I have to let go and move on.
It eased my mind considerably when I got to this place. It isn't about the success. It's about the work. It's always been about the work. The success would be nice. I definitely want me some. I'll keep trying, doing the smart thing when I can, playing the game as much as I'm able. But sometimes I've got to let go of that, too, and concentrate on the only thing I really have any control over. I've got to keep writing.
no subject
Date: 2004-08-30 10:18 am (UTC)And yours is a particularly pretty one :-)
no subject
Date: 2004-08-30 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-30 09:18 pm (UTC)So it's all worth writing, in the same sense that every step to your next destination is worth taking even if most of them aren't the ones that get you 'there.'
no subject
Date: 2004-08-30 10:55 pm (UTC)