Surrender in the Middle

Aloha, I’m Ashley. I write about life through the lens of love, beauty, and creativity. If you find value in the magical and inspiration in the messy middle, subscribe to join the journey. Your footprints will be celebrated.

Seven. That’s the number of years I’ve been working on my novel. Laini Taylor1 recently asked us how old our WIPs2 would be if they were a person. 

I have a first-grader. 

Some people had teenagers. Some had college grads that won’t move out of the house. 

Comparing myself to them doesn’t make me feel better. Comparison doesn’t help at all. It doesn’t help when I’m in the middle of a read-through and know I have to cut 20,000 words3 from the manuscript and it feels slow and sticky and I don’t know how to fix it yet.

It doesn’t help when those around me are experiencing success at every stop on the publishing metro, and I am in my fourth (or is it fifth?) edit. Comparison only feeds fear, that hungry beast.    

I’ve dipped my toe into querying this novel twice now. Once in March 2020. Ha, haha. Unsurprisingly, the world was on its head, and nobody cared about a debut book that was not the least bit ready. Then again, in July 2023.

For those of you who don’t know the gauntlet of traditional publishing, here’s the short version. For fiction, you finish, edit, and polish your entire novel. You write a query letter with a hook that needs to catch the attention of over-extended agent eyeballs, send your first few pages (this varies), and they either a) don’t respond, b) send you a form rejection, or very rarely a personalized one, c) ask for the full or partial manuscript. Then you wait a couple to a few months, and they either offer representation or pass. Like dating, it’s not unheard of to query a hundred agents before you meet one who wants to link arms with you. Once you sign with an agent, you edit your book again before they send it out on submission to publishing house editors, where it may or may not be bought. If it’s bought, you’ll receive an advance of indeterminate size, often paid out in three installments, and you have another year or two before it becomes a physical book. 

Why the actual fuck would anyone go through this? 

Good question. 

I’m in the middle, so I’m lacking that over-the-shoulder perspective, but I believe we do it because stories are worth the effort and telling them is a gift. 

Until this week, I hadn’t touched my novel since July of 2023. An opening, like a great clearing in the woods of my life, appeared, and I took it. What I didn’t expect amongst the absolute joy of reading and working on this piece was the complete scramble it would make of my insides — the overwhelming fear that rose unbidden from the mists. Or the way curling over a 350-page printed manuscript for a week would make a mess of my musculature, which I can absolutely handle. The fear and the irritation, the crawling out of my skin sensation? That I did not expect. 

Hence the question: How do you surrender an outcome when you’re in the middle and working hard towards it? 

I wasn’t able to let go of the outcome when we were trying to conceive. I wasn’t able to fully surrender that until we tried everything and it didn’t work. 

Thankfully, writing doesn’t have a biological cut-off, but I’ll not say it’s easy to spend years working toward something without any guarantee, and I’d rather not have to abandon it in order to feel relief. I’d rather feel the joy of the process.

There are no guarantees. Ever. That’s life. There aren’t even probabilities because it’s random as shit, sort of. I know that I need to cut the word count of the story for it even to be considered by an agent. I know that there are places where it’s boring and so cutting should be easy (it’s not).

The only part I can control is the moving through it — the making and working and honing the thing without allowing shame to walk beside me. Shame that it’s “taking this long”. Shame that I’ve been working on the same thing for ages, it must be terrible. The fear of what if. What if its fate is to join the bones of stories buried deep in the backyard? The fear of Time. Wasted. These are nobody else’s voices but my own. Although I have heard quite a few times, finish it already and move on. Not. Especially. Helpful.  

I have a friend who wants to fall in love with her life partner. Wants it in her bones. I have zero doubt this will happen for her, but it absolutely will not if she doesn’t date. Dating is the work. Editing a too-long manuscript that sags in places is the work. Life is full of parallels; the circumstances only make you think we’re different. 

I’ve loved every minute I’ve worked on this book: the 3:30 am starts to write before I went on tour because I knew I’d be spent when I came home, the writing studio I built specifically to finish this book, the many, many hours of reading, tweaking, editing. All that effort is in these pages, which could be quite the pressure cooker if I choose a lamentable perspective. But when I focus on the words and the story and putting it together in a way that makes my heart flutter and my skin sing, then it doesn’t matter what happens to it. Not really. The longing is for the writing. 

As soon as I jump forward to what I want this book to become, the fear floods in, and it stops being enjoyable. It’s a tightrope we walk. It’s much “easier” to ignore the thing you want so badly and avoid doing the work that may or may not culminate in the manifestation of your desire, but ignoring it hollows me in a way. I never feel more alive than when I’m writing. 

I don’t have the answer about how to surrender a much-desired outcome while you’re walking the path to it. I think it’s a lot of little choices along the way. It’s a lot of noticing and being present instead of numbing out. Like the other evening when I wanted to crawl out of my skin and not even the Gilmore Girls soothed that irritation, so I went for a walk until dark instead.

Mostly I think it’s returning back to the thing again and again, trying and working and learning and growing and allowing fear to rise, because it will, and doing the work anyway. It’s trying to protect me, that fear. It’s trying to prevent any discomfort. It’s trying to keep me safe.

But when it comes to writing, I don’t want to be safe; I want to be working. So I’ll take the discomfort that comes along with it and probably some killer calves for all the walks I’ll need to take. 

What in your life are you walking towards? Do you feel surrender and joy in it, or is fear lurking, ready to spring at any opportunity?