As I’ve taken on some more freelance work, these posts will be (at best) fortnightly. If these posts generate more money so I can buy time, they’ll be more frequent.
As writers, we reach a period where we start to make problems for ourselves. I believe these problems are similar to when we have problems in our lives: they arrive either because of other people and our obligations and dissatisfaction with them (read: expectations) or when we think about the future. In writing, the latter mostly creeps up to strangle creativity when we think about publication. When I started out, I would hear some of my favourite writers talk about how being published was “a nice problem to have.” It made no sense to me then and even now the phrasing of it still bristles. However, I do understand that logic now. Nothing will hurt the writer more, leading to questioning every decision from what to write to whether to have social media despite their loathing for it (read: projection), than the expectation of being published. Not the reality which, in my experience, is as exciting as washing dishes but the fantasy of it and what it could lead to. How do we circumnavigate these natural feelings so we can keep writing? I have some thoughts:
Getting published is unrealistic. Imagine you are atop the Empire State Building. Down below is a shot glass of water. Naked, and afraid, you stand at the tippy-top of the building and jump believing you will not only live but you will successfully land in the shot glass of water. That’s getting published. There are some ways to improve your odds, turning your shot glass into a pint glass of water. How? Only submit to places which publish the kind of work you’re writing with the full knowledge that you will probably still not get published and submit often. Let’s push it a bit more and turn the pint glass into a barrel of water: study what is getting published within your chosen field of genre and form, then craft work which is on the razor blade of being repeatable (publishing is risk averse) and of being unique (but they want the new). Now, how can we give the writer on top of the building some swimming trunks and an Olympic swimming pool as their destination and, why not, a parachute and let’s make it a very calm day, no wind at all … at a push I would say write whatever is hot at the moment, stick your mug on social media and post all the time, and do make sure to write something interesting and page turning while also working in a very confined narrow box. Nothing wrong with doing any of that. It’s not for me, but if that’s what you’ve done and want to do - why not? There are many, many, many types of books out there that will not be read by many, many, many people. If publication is what most matters to you - chase your swimming pool. Sometimes it’s easy to work when you know what you want.
Go back to the start. Writing has a very low-level entry point. You can go down to your local library and take out the very best that has been thought and written (to a point though, as I’ve never found any Hubert Selby Jr. in a library), head to the pound shop for some paper and pens and for two quid you can start writing. Writers for hundreds of years didn’t need degrees nor writing groups to get started (although, masters were found, just as they are now, in books. Here the writer can have a glowing education). As both a former student and freelance teacher, there is a benefit to them both but they’re not critical to getting you started and, if you’re self-directed enough, committed and you don’t want to go into academia - perhaps unnecessary. By remembering where we started, what was needed, how we wrote words from nothing and to no one … we’re keeping it in the realms of play. We are, hush this now, falling in love again with the practice of writing when we forget about results.
Don’t rely on creativity alone. If creativity led to publication many wonderful writers I know would have been published by now. They’re not. Which is to the detriment of fiction as their work is incredible. Creativity is something we all possess. What we do with that though is up to the individual. To take that spark and keep going will require little to do with creativity but rather a combination of two things: persistence and enjoyment. Without both it’s like being stuck in a relationship going nowhere. You have an idea (if you don’t have many ideas - ask yourself why and blow up all the distractions in your life), you write it, you keep writing, you get to the end of a first draft, you edit, you edit again, multiple drafts later (and with, hopefully, some help from other writers to analyse what you can’t see) you have a finished work. You send it out. You send it out for years. Nothing comes of it and, furthermore, agents who declare they want new writers can only realistically court a very, very small few. Expecting an answer to why your work was refused? Think again. Which comes back to: persistence and enjoyment. Be persistent (write another work and go through it all again). Enjoy it (if you do—I mean really do—then why worry whether someone you might not even want to work with never got back to you). Does your creativity deserve an audience? If you’ve worked on it enough - absolutely. Will it find one? Narrow your idea of an audience and it will. Yesterday I wrote a poem about something very simple (a man I see out of my window) and, a few drafts later, read it to my wife. She enjoyed it. Hearing her laugh and tasting the connection that the writer has with their reader … I feel like fucking John Grisham.
PROMPT
Be brave. Submit some work this weekend.
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