I have some bad news about writing. The bad news is that you can save your money and quit a Very Good Job to write, only to discover there is no money in writing. And you more or less knew that, so it’s okay, the important thing is that you have lots of free time to write. Except free time is a vacuum that will fill up with almost anything except writing — including part-time work — because it’s really hard to concentrate on writing with concerns about money gnawing at you constantly.
And you’ll soon discover that the thing you’re not lacking is talent, but discipline. And that’s a pity because discipline and persistence are more important than talent. And discipline is a muscle that you have to flex daily to build, and if you haven’t built it up by the time you’re a certain age, you’re going to need at least two years of trying and failing and scheduling and self-help books and pity parties and reminders and mantras to get you to a place where you can sit down and write, dammit, write.
And while you’re trying and failing to finish something project ideas are going to be flying at you fast and furious, shiny things that you want to grab out of the air and stick on paper. They’re going to seem easier to write than the thing you’re working on now, because sitting down to write is hard, and writing is hard, and although you’ve read thousands of books you can’t seem to put together exactly how other authors pulled off those magic tricks of character development and setting and pacing. This is really infuriating, because you know that you’re good, well, pretty good, but you’re just not quite there and what’s the point of writing something that takes this long if you’re not quite there. Meanwhile, while you’re grinding away at the same novel for a year, entire other novels are going to appear full-formed and perfectly plotted in the back of your head, and the only thing that keeps you going is remembering that this project, too, felt that way before you picked up your crayons and starting scribbling. And there doesn’t seem to be any point to the thing you’re pushing through except finishing it because you said you would.
And while you’re doing this you’re going to see other authors lapping you, online or in your life, some more talented than you, all more disciplined than you, announcing publishing deals and awards and other accomplishments and you’re going to feel like you’re drowning because nothing you’ve written is good enough to put out in the world, not yet, not yet. And your loved ones and friends will ask you how the book is coming and you’ll say something vague and optimistic because it’s going to be a long, long, long, long, long, long time before it’s ever discovered, purchased, bound and published. Maybe not ever.
And maybe you’ll finish your novel in the middle of an unprecedented worldwide pandemic and it will feel like…something…after that risk you took. At least you finished it. It will feel good and you’ll think it’s good and you’ll do what Stephen King suggests and stick it in a drawer for a while until it’s time to rewrite it. And maybe in the meantime your life will fall apart like a wet paper bag and your brother will die and your mother will get sick and you’ll finish revising the novel next to her hospital bed. It sounds callous but you do it to make her happy, because she never likes anyone to be inconvenienced by her needs.
“Oh good, you’ve got your laptop,” she’ll say before drifting back to sleep.
You send the novel to a professional editor and write them a check in a blur.
And when the cancer takes her everything will grind to a halt for a while, because that’s the way it should be. You won’t work or write or do anything, because there is a lot of other things to do in grief, people to tell and plans to make, and it is exhausting. You are learning this about grief – it merits rest, so much rest. Rest is the only way through.
And the novel comes back from the professional editor, who thanks you for the job and calls the novel “interesting,” which means that it’s shit but what are you going to do?
When you’re done resting you take the whole thing, pull the best chapter and turn it into the first chapter and write it all over again from the start. Third draft, and it feels so much better, smoother, like it’s coming together. You take out whole chapters and suddenly it’s down to 50,000 words, just a little longer than your average novella. And you read it over again. And you let someone you trust read it and wait for his assessment and he says, “You’re really good at describing things.”
It’s still not there. The third draft of the novel is better, but it’s still…thin…somehow. Even the best parts are not what a novel should be, and you can’t exactly explain why, and you definitely can’t write yourself out of it. You don’t know how to explain this to him, now that you’re down to the bottom of your savings after two years of writing and procrastinating and caregiving and grieving and resting and working part-time to keep writing more. You’re not going to starve, but it’s time to start swimming. You know this. You’re sitting on an island with your piece-of-shit novel that won’t float and it’s time to start swimming to shore.
You create a list of 100 agents. Your friends ask how the book is coming.
“I’m going to send it to 100 agents,” you say. “And if I get rejected 100 times, I’m going to self-publish it.”
You send it to exactly one agent. Reading the synopsis makes you sad. Reading the chapter headings makes you sad. Remembering the stupid last line of the book makes you sad. Writing the title of the book on your to-do lists makes you sad. It’s all exhausting and sad and pointless and you’re embarrassed you ever started this stupid thing.
You start working on a different novel, half-heartedly. You start jogging. You start looking for a full-time job.
And then, four months later, you get the courage to pull it out of your file cabinet and look at it again. You’re visiting your father in the country and the dark comes early. You read the first four chapters by kerosene lamplight and take notes. It’s still threadbare, but for some reason now you can pick out the pattern, the essential threads. The town you created is now a real town, you can see its streets and its districts, the ugly rotting wharf next to the polluted river. The villain is now a real villain, complex and certain in her motives. The main character opens her mouth and you can hear her voice, really hear her voice, the profanity and disappointment and fear. You read those few chapters before bed and sometime in the night the answer comes to you, the only way to write it.
So here it is again, now a fourth draft, written over from scratch. The title is different, the hero’s name is different, the plot, stretching before you, also different but in new and necessary ways. And because you’ve had these two years of flexing your muscles you know what you have to do. And when you pick it up, again and again that way it begins to feel effortless and good, the way you thought it would be from the start. And you try not to think about all the things you know must come next, the editing and the deciding whether or not you want to query it, and how long it might take from the time you finish it to the time someone you love will read it. It should feel so much worse, like a defeat, but it doesn’t.
And this, finally, is the bad news about writing. It’s a job that doesn’t pay, almost never pays, until it does. You’re going to work that job your entire life and you may never get promoted. Because writing won’t let you quit it. Your ideas will follow you around kicking your ass until you get back to work, and when you get back to work your work might be shit. And you’re going to have to put that shit out there, over and over again, and get rejected over and over again and wince about it over and over again. What a job. What a fucking job.