Make That a Year

"I read a quote somewhere that said the first twelve years of a writing career are the hardest. This made me laugh, but it has the sharp jab of truth. It took about ten years of writing seriously before I was published (and that period was laden with rejection). Tenacity and persistence are the key to a writing career. Keep writing (regularly and seriously), and you will be published. You will get better. You will go deeper. That’s it."

-- Ann Napolitano

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I have no idea what "career year" I'm in--as like most fiction writers, I keep this career afloat alongside another--but I do believe I'm almost at 10 years of writing seriously. And today is the one-year anniversary of signing my contract with Sarah.

What a difference a year makes. The story has changed, a lot. Characters have come and gone. Past events have become present events. The story is better.

But a year! Wow. Have I really spent a year revising? Meanwhile, the books roll out from other authors (I know one YA author who cranks out one a year) and I feel, well, behind. Old. Stuck.

The wise part of me says we'll sell no book before it's time. Agent Rachelle Gardner had a similar message this year when she observed there's a glut of self-published books on our market, pushed out too soon. The need for speed, that American zeitgeist, does make me wonder if I'm so stupid to wait, so ridiculous to allow these months to pass, so behind the times.

But I know better. You don't get to your fourth decade of writing and still believe that art works on a timeline or that I crank things out like a machine.

There will always be this tension between the human and the machine. As we surround ourselves with more and more machines to do the past work of our memories (my iTouch pinging me with calendar dates, Wikipedia holding all the bits and bytes of data I once had to memorize) and as we raise the expectations on human output (you've got a computer, you can type faster, generate content faster, post faster), it's also tempting to think we can robot our way through a complex task. But it's an illusion. Art will remain stubbornly human--true art, that is, not cheap entertainment--and because of that, the impatient souls out there like me must accept that.

Some would argue that agents and publishers slow down the process, by at least 1-4 years, if not more, and they're right. But there's the other human part, the dialogue between two people who want to figure out how we can sell this thing, and then the committee of folks at a publishing house who will actually put it on the market.

I could also let go of the goal of selling. Some would argue that art is not for sale and artists ought to give it away for free. And if I'm not stuck on selling, then I could skip this whole process.

But I won't. I aim to sell this thing, someday.

If time is my obsession, and I'm flagellating myself for being "too slow," I need to take the long view.
I've written almost all my life, since I was seven, but the practice and craft (rather than the fun and play part) inform my daily life now. Sure, I've seen some success--the short pieces that gained publication, the novel excerpts and short stories that have won awards, they flicker like tiny dancing beams of light in a long dark night of rejection--but the novel, the thing that takes so much focus and patience and faith, it's "the thing" I can't let go till it sees publication. This is THE THING I MUST DO--the true sign of success. Therefore I'm in this for the long haul.

While the fourth draft sits in Sarah's hands, I'm building a detailed revision plan that looks like this--4 columns across--where I find out what the heck I've done.

CHAPTER    GENERAL DESCRIPTION     CONFLICT    SCENE GOAL

Ahead of me are several more days of revision, no matter what feedback I get. Because while I find the manuscript close, it's still got a few unresolved aspects that I want to improve.

I will get better. I will go deeper. That's it.

Grant Me This: Some Moolah

Boldly ask for what you wonder if you truly deserve. That must be the writer's mantra in requesting funding and submitting work.

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Just sent off an application to the Elizabeth George Foundation asking for a grant to fund writing time. I have better credentials this time--more awards, more milestones reached--but you always wonder, How dare I ask for money? Just sweat it out, honey. Work a 15-20 hour day and get 'er done. 

But artists have to get over their fears and guilt and self-hatred. If we want time to write, it must be either found at some expense to ourselves or funded by external sources--those are our options. While we all love the stories of those authors who lose sleep and friendships and sanity to write beyond the workday and commute and cleaning and cooking and supposed exercising, it's no way to live.

I recently saw Robert Olen Butler post on Facebook about his 14-hour marathon writing days and felt inadequate. (Well, in the face of his writing I will always feel inadequate, but that's another post.) Then I thought, I can't do that long and survive. Even if writing was my day job, I couldn't persist longer than eight hours of writing without developing some helpful addiction.

I have found that the first and early drafts of my novel were do-able with a stolen hour a day and many hours stolen on the weekends. But there comes a time when deep reading and focus is needed beyond an hour a day, and it's very hard to unravel a novel and re-knit it with your brain unable to dive into it deep on a regular basis.

So I need time, which means money. I don't care what the free culture says, what those who hate their day jobs say, those who resent artists for asking to do what they love all day--I say fund the arts and the artists.

Lately there's been a massive outcry and debate over Emily White's confession that she's never bought music--"I Never Owned Any Music to Begin With," and it's raised a whole host of responses, the best of which, I hear, is David Lowery's. His argument of why we ought to pay for the arts, specifically songs, but I'll extrapolate that to movies, books, plays, paintings, sculpture, dance--strikes right at what I see as American myth: that artists ought to sweat it out beyond the regular work day and somehow make beautiful things to entertain everyone else. If you (and by you I mean all of us) want to spend any time with entertainment, then don't just nod to the artist, thank an artist, but pay the artist. We need tips, we need patrons, we need grants. We need moolah as much as anyone else.

I have no more wisdom than this tonight except to keep applying for several more grants and see what happens. For women, check out A Room of Her Own Foundation's Gift of Freedom--a pretty amazing opportunity. A great storehouse of information is housed at Hope Clark's Funds for Writers website and in her weekly e-newsletters, so start surfing there to see what options are available.

And don't feel guilty about it. If you're not planning on wasting that money, if you've paid dues and plan to pay more, if you work damn hard and you're serious about your craft, that's enough to ask for some of the money that's out there.