I’m in a place in my writing career now where other people are looking to me as a mentor, and invariably they tell me, “I started writing seriously X years ago” where X < 5.
And I want to die a little. Why did I take so long to get here? I started submitting for publication thirty years ago. I had “write every day” as my New Year’s Resolution every year from 1985 to 2015. I’d logged over 300 rejections when I finally sold my first story in 2006. (And I had only started logging the rejections in 2004.)
How did I work so hard for so long to fail so consistently?
The more I think about it, the more I realize it was impatience. I was trying to build cathedrals when I hadn’t yet mastered a good dog house.
I didn’t just want to be a writer, I wanted to be a GREAT writer. I wanted to crack open the world of fiction and transform it somehow. I set out from the start thinking things like “I can’t use anything that’s already been done.”
I rejected my own ideas as “too obvious.” I looked for the most convoluted plot twists, the most bizarre premises. Forget comfort zones, I was avoiding them! When all else failed, I decided to be vague and hope the reader imagined something greater than I could produce. It was a bizarre mixture of not trusting myself and reaching too far.
All of it fueled by internal panic. Even after I sold my first story. My immediate reaction after that was: No more slacking! I’m on the clock! I had to sell another one NOW NOW NOW or I would be a FLASH IN THE PAN. A FLUKE. THIS WAS MY ONLY CHANCE TO BUILD ON THIS SUCCESS.
In a way it’s good that I didn’t sell another story until 2013. It taught me I could survive that. (Of course, I felt the same panic again after that sale. Now I was at Clarion! I had to seize the power of “I went to Clarion” before it tarnished with time!)
In 2014 I sold three stories and the panic only ratcheted up. I had to beat that record in 2015 or I was truly a failure!!
I didn’t. I sold one story in 2015, and spent much of the year in the hospital, which made me reconsider how stupid I was being.
Ultimately, success came when I stopped panicking and started to think of the work as work, as Just Doing The Work. I gave myself permission to use simple plots. To steal plots from other works, even. To write the things I wanted to write which I thought were too pedestrian, too normal, too ‘been done.’ Because innovation isn’t a whole-cloth thing. You can say something new about robots, even today. You can say something old about humanity, with a robot, and it’ll be new because you’re saying it in your way.
I tossed out my cathedrals and I started building dog houses. I got pretty good at dog houses, and then I looked at the cathedrals and found they were all gingerbread surfaces with nothing but cobwebs holding them together. The gingerbread, I found, looked just as good on a dog house.
So maybe it takes about thirty years to learn patience.
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