Deciding When a Draft is "Final"

One difficulty I have with writing and publishing is figuring out when I'm done, when after multiple drafts I've reached the "final" draft.

I typically work on something until I feel it's as good as I can make it (at least at the moment) and then start submitting. If it gets accepted, I must have been right that it was ready (I've had a couple of pieces get accepted on the very first try, which is an amazing feeling). If it gets rejected (which happens almost all the time), I want to reconsider whether it's "finished."

If I get nothing but form rejections, I have to consider carefully that the piece may not be as good as I thought. But if I get positive rejections, with comments about how my piece made the shortlist or was seriously considered or whatever, then I know that the piece is good, but I have to consider two possibilities: 1) the piece is ready and I haven't found the right journal, or 2) the piece is very close to being ready and I still need to revise more.

Looking back over something one more time is usually a good idea, but it's still really tough to figure out when it's done. I've had pieces I was sure were as good as I could get them only to revisit them a year later and see a bunch of changes I can make. Or I have other pieces that have been rejected over and over, but I look back over them only to still believe that they are good and ready to submit.

Eventually, if a piece is never accepted, I stop sending it out. Except, I have trouble retiring something if part of me still believes in it. Sometimes I'll go years without looking at it but then decide to go back to it one more time (my most recent publication was a situation like this where it had been rejected dozens of times over a period of close to a decade and then after yet one more revision, it got accepted).

So I'm curious if anyone else has thoughts on how do you know when you're done? When do you decide something is ready to send out? Or when do you decide to give up on something if it keeps getting rejected?

Book Contests

Last week, I saw a Tweet promoting the Brighthorse Books Prizes with a submission deadline of Sunday (yesterday). I was particularly interested in this contest for a few reasons:

1. The deadline worked out.
2. The small press is young.
3. The press has three contests: one for poetry, one for short fiction, and one for novels. 

1. The deadline. As mentioned in my last post, I had failed to meet the earlier summer deadline I'd set for myself with this revision. That happens to me often. Summer after summer, I set large writing goals and wind up falling behind my schedule. But having this new goal worked to motivate me. I completed the revision on Friday, went back through for a final proofread, and submitted my manuscript to the contest Sunday afternoon

2. A young press. I imagine fewer people submit to a contest that is not well known with a long history. A famous press with a long-established contest surely gets hundreds or even thousands of entries each year. But with a press only in its second year, some writers will not have heard or it or will be hesitant. Of course, there is good reason to be hesitant. You don't want to fall for a scam and throw away money on entry fees or to think you're getting your book published by a reputable place only to discover it's a vanity press. From what I can tell from some very limited research, this place seems above board. So while it is small and young, I still feel like I would be happy having my book published with them. Bottom line: better odds with fewer submissions.

3. Multiple contests. Finally, the three separate contests also may increase my odds of winning. Many such contests have a a prize for short stories but not for novels. Or they have a single fiction prize for any book-length works of fiction, including combinations of short stories, novellas, and novels. When those categories are divided up, there are likely fewer submissions in each one.

Also, my impression is that there are fewer contests for novels than for short stories. I think this may be because novels are still seen as the realm of big presses. Short story collections are tough to sell, so small presses have taken up the charge of helping to get those out into the world. Novels can still fight for themselves. But what about smaller, literary novels? Those that won't find a home at a big New York publishing house? Those still need the world of small presses. Certainly there are many small presses publishing those novels, but this type of contest is a great entry into the small press world and from what I've seen, such novel contests are still rarer than short story contests.

I feel good about having submitted my novel. I have no idea what the odds are of winning. What I do know, however, is that people do win such contests. I have friends in my age group who have won contests like this before. It really is a great way to get a book out into the world when it would be hard to find a match with a publisher through the slush pile or when the literary size and scope of the book would likely not be big enough to attract an agent. I still assume the odds are against me. Even if this contest has fewer submissions than some of the big ones, that may mean that they get a hundred submissions instead of a thousand, which would mean only one percent win.

But whatever happens next with this particular contest, I feel good about my book as it currently stands. And the next time I read about a contest or a small press looking for submissions, I'm ready to submit.

Goal

I finished up my semester last week, and I have two weeks until I have to specifically do anything. At some point in that time, I need to plan for my summer classes, but basically I'm on vacation time, which means I have ample opportunity to get some serious progress done on a writing project or projects. As it happens, the piece that is at the forefront of my mind (which I wrote about last time) seems like the ideal piece to devote about two weeks to.

I think I might actually have a novella on my hands rather than just a short story. I wrote a rough draft last year that was in the ten page range. Then as I reworked it, it expanded, and I didn't finish a second draft because I realized the whole structure and approach needed reworking. So I've been outlining and structuring the whole thing, and I think it's going to be much longer than the initial short story. So I'm close to ready to begin writing what could be considered the third draft of the story or the first draft of the novella.

I've never written a novella before, so I don't know exactly how long it might take, but when I have so much time available to write, I should be able to get a significant amount done each day. The fastest pace I ever achieved was a couple years ago when I wrote a rough draft of a kids book in about three weeks. That was about 60,000 words, which is in the range of a novel rather than a novella. I'm guessing that this novella I'm writing now will be maybe in the 20,000 word range. So if I could write 60,000 words in three weeks, I should be able to write 20,000 in two weeks. That's less than 2,000 words a day, and 2,000 words a day isn't a crazy ambitious goal; I've often kept up that pace. And if I have a solid outline where I know where I'm going and how I want to proceed from sequence to sequence, I think the writing should flow as easily as a rough draft ever tends to flow.

So we'll see how it goes. I feel good about it. I think I might actually manage to produce something solid by the time I go out of town in two weeks.

Structure

I've been working on a story recently and really wrestling with how to put the thing together. I wrote the rough draft nearly a year ago, and I've been playing with a revision for months, but I keep hitting a wall in my progress. The initial inspiration for the story was just a character and a situation, which I let play out in front of me. Then as I rewrote, I figured out more back story, and now I have a lot more material that I want to include, and I think the newer version will be much more interesting and complex than the rough draft where I was just figuring out basic elements of the story. But my current trouble is that I'm not sure how to put all the material into a new draft.

I started rewriting where I began at the same point as last time, just before the big event that sets the present story in action, but as I wrote and wrote, it became obvious that this structure results in a couple of paragraphs followed by pages of flashback before eventually returning to the present story, a structure that doesn't typically work well. Flashbacks are best kept to a minimum.

I could structure the story in the absolute most straightforward way, where I begin with the very first element and then play it out in order. But this would mean starting with the character as a child and then going through years of events until I reach the big scene that was the original inspiration for the story, which also feels like a mistake since it would take pages and pages before reaching the hook, the exciting event that really sets the action in progress.

Another approach would be to start with the hook and then insert mini-flashbacks throughout the whole story, interweaving memories into the present action. But this seems like a set up for a schizophrenic story that fails to ever be quite one thing or another.

Part of the problem is that any of these structures CAN work. Writers have done them well before and will continue to do them well in the future. But they all have drawbacks and weaknesses. And sometimes the pitfalls appear so large that there seems to be almost nowhere safe to step.

So I've been wracking my brain, trying to remember what I learned in grad school about how to find an appropriate structure for a work of fiction, and the sad truth is that I don't think this issue was covered very well. Part of the problem is that the teacher I had for the class that should have covered this material was simply not a good teacher. Instead of learning about structure in the fiction class, I learned about structure in the screenwriting class, and that's now what I'm falling back on.

One major structural point in the screenwriting class was the inciting incident, the action that sets the plot moving, which, in a screenplay with a standard three act structure, comes in the first act, typically fifteen to twenty minutes into the film, after the world of the film has been established. Before the inciting incident occurs, the audience needs to understand the world and who the major character is, so when the inciting incident occurs and the character makes a choice about what is going to happen, we understand what is at stake. I'm not sure a short story necessarily has the exact same structure as a screenplay and whether I can plot out my story in the same exact fashion, but I think this concept of the inciting incident is probably useful to keep in mind.

So the question I've been asking myself is whether the hook, the event I began with as the original idea for the story, is the inciting incident or something else. I tried something to help me sort through the material: I wrote down each separate event, which could be an entire scene or simply a memory that is represented in a single sentence, and I wrote down each one on a note card. Currently, I have forty-two cards. I looked at these events and tried to determine which one has the most potential to be an inciting incident, which one results in the character making a choice that affects his life and sends him down a new path. And I've tentatively concluded that the original spark for the story is actually more of a plot point later. It's a complication from the second act (if I'm thinking of a three act screenplay structure), and the inciting incident is something that occurs much earlier. So what I need to do is not necessarily begin at the very beginning, but begin shortly before the true inciting incident, the action that occurs that sets my protagonist on his path that leads him to where he is when the big event occurs, setting up the final action down the line.

Anyway, I'm still struggling with it. I'm also trying to figure out whether I have a short story on my hands or a novella, so I'll probably write another post here soon where I hash out my ideas on length as I keep working on this.

Writing Sample II

I sent off my fellowship application for the Wisconsin fellowship today. It's amazing how long it takes to put together a packet like that. I wanted to make sure my writing sample was as strong as possible, obviously, so I spent many hours over the past couple of weeks working on it. I got some feedback from trusted early readers to help me decide which sample to use. I was leaning toward the current beginning of my novel, which I feel is some of the strongest writing I've ever done, but I knew that I was way too close to it to evaluate it properly, so a couple of other people looked it over and, sure enough, agreed with me that the new beginning to the novel is in good shape. I got that feedback several days ago, but I still wanted to go over the material a couple more times. Plus, I wanted to include the second chapter as well, which still needed a bit of tweaking.

So I continued editing and polishing the sample. Yesterday I typed changes into the second chapter off of a marked up hard copy and then read over the entire thing today. Just this week I lectured my classes on the importance of polishing their work before turning it in, doing that final read through (preferably aloud and preferably off a hard copy instead of just on the computer) before declaring their work complete. So I did that today, and sure enough found a bunch more little things I wanted to tweak: a phrase here, a preposition there. I read the whole piece out loud, marked with my trusty red pen, typed up those final changes and then printed everything out. I've probably spent twenty-some hours on this writing sample in the past couple weeks. But I got it in the mail today, and I feel really good about it.

As I did the final read-through today, I couldn't help feeling that my work is at a great place. I've grown so much in the past few years that I think I'm either reaching or on the edge of reaching a new level. If I keep producing work at the quality that I'm currently producing, then I think it's really only a matter of time before I break into some significant journals with some stories and maybe even wind up finding a place (a small press or contest perhaps) for my novel in the next few years. Or if not this novel, then maybe the next one.

It's nice to be at a point where I feel genuinely positive about what I'm doing and confident that I am actually moving forward and not merely spinning my wheels or deluding myself.

Writing Sample

Lately, I've been working on multiple projects at the same time, or rather I'm going back and forth between projects. I've got a story I'm working on that I started last summer. I wrote the rough draft and then have been tossing it about in my head and jotting down notes on where I want to go with it for months. Now I'm writing the next draft of it. Then I'm also in the process of revising my MFA novel again. That's a similar situation. I wrote it years ago, of course. I defended it as my thesis, continued to revise for months afterward, thought I was done, did more revision, really thought I was done, started into the query process, thought maybe I wasn't done, and so on and so forth. I've been jotting down additional notes and planning out a revised structure for the novel for a while now and slowly sitting down to rewrite. I'm tackling the opening of the book first because that's where the most substantial changes are coming in. Some of the new beginning is coming from previous drafts and simply being shifted from later in the book to earlier, but some of it is brand new. So, anyway, I had been working on the novel for a while and then felt more like tackling the story, and I worked on that for several days, but then I felt obligated to work on the novel again.

Obligated is not the right word there. It's not that I feel like I should work on the novel and it's a hassle or something like that. I want to work on the novel. But at the moment I'm thinking about a fellowship I'm going to apply for. I have to get my application packet in this month, and, of course, a writing sample is the major component of the application. And I'm stuck on what to include as my writing sample. If I land the fellowship, this novel is the primary project I want to work on during the fellowship year, so I think it would make sense to include an excerpt from it as my writing sample. Yet which part should I excerpt? The obvious answer is the beginning, but that's the section of the book that is in the most disarray right now because I'm completely reworking it. But if I send a later section, that might indicate to those evaluating the applications that I don't feel confident in the beginning of my book. I've read several places that when querying agents and such and including sample pages, one should include the opening of the book rather than a section from the middle for that very reason. However, applying for a fellowship is not the same as querying an agent; the assumption here is that I have a project that I will continue to work on, not that I have a finished manuscript ready for publication.

Another option is to forget about including an excerpt from the novel as my writing sample and just use a short story (the application doesn't indicate that the writing sample has to be from the project I would be working on). That would show what my writing is like as well as be a complete piece. That might be to my advantage because it's often difficult to judge a part of something by itself. I used to bring in chapters of my novel to workshops in grad school, and a good deal of the time it seemed like my peers didn't know how to comment on it because they had no idea how this one section fit in with the larger story or really what that larger story was. Sometimes when I read the fiction published in the New Yorker I have that problem. They publish short stories, but they also publish excerpts from forthcoming novels, but they don't clearly identify which a given piece is, and sometimes I'll read it and then feel a bit baffled because it was well written but doesn't feel complete at all; then, later I discover that it was the first chapter that wasn't supposed to work on its own. So, for a fellowship application, would it be wise to try to entice them with a slice of something larger or to give them something complete so they can get a better sense of my ability to not just write a nice sequence but to write an entire story?

Anyway, what I've been doing the past few days is working on the beginning section. I figure that if that comes together really well and I feel confident in it, then that would be the best thing to send. But I only have a couple of weeks before I need to send the application off, which is not much time to get a new piece of writing into polished form. So in the likelihood that the opening isn't ready, I have to decide what else to send. I'm leaning toward an excerpt from the novel that works on its own as a story. But that leads to one more question. Do I refer to it as a novel excerpt or as a story? If sending a novel excerpt, I can include up to thirty pages, which would be about two chapters. If sending a story, I can only include one story. I think maybe I'd be better off sending one story by itself (again, that way there are no issues of trying to figure out how the excerpt works in terms of the larger piece), but that means I'd only be using half the amount of space available to represent myself. Would they look down on my application if they only get fifteen pages instead of thirty? Or do they really know after two pages whether they like the writing?

I'm probably over thinking this and would be better off just picking a piece I think is good and representative of my abilities and sending off the application already.

Saying Something

Once again, I'm contemplating the purpose of writing fiction. I think fiction should primarily entertain. I don't remember which book it was (Stein On Writing by Sol Stein or one of John Gardner's books?) that made the observation that reading a piece of fiction should provide an experience more interesting than not reading it. Or something like that. And I agree. I think there's nothing wrong with simply entertaining. In fact, if a book isn't entertaining, then no matter how much it plays with form or touches on important subjects, it fails. For me, one of the great examples of this problem is Toni Morrison. Of course she's a best-selling writer and a Nobel laureate, and Beloved was voted by a group of publishing professionals to be the greatest American novel of the end of the twentieth century/beginning of the twenty-first. I have read two or three Morrison novels, and although I can analyze them for a literature course or admire the innovative way she tells a story, I simply don't enjoy reading her work. It's an entirely intellectual exercise for me with no emotional connection; the work doesn't resonate and excite me the way reading Hemingway or Roth or Salinger or Carver or so many others does. Of course, this is where the largely subjective nature of the whole thing comes in, and I recognize that regarding Morrison, my opinion is in the minority.

Anyway. The first objective is to engage, to entertain, to provide a dream that is superior to sitting around not reading. But that isn't necessarily enough, unless one is writing genre fiction. Simply being entertaining is fine for a mystery or an adventure story, and even in those cases, I think the best works have some additional resonance, some thematic elements that raise them above merely being a diverting way to spend several hours in another world. For example, The Shining is about the effects of alcoholism and abuse on a family; The Silence of the Lambs is largely about feminist ideals. But if one is writing something that is realistic, that isn't driven by high conflict or enormous events, if one is dealing with the small, the mundane, then I think by necessity the work must offer more than the experience of reading; it must have a lasting impact, leave the reader contemplating ideas. Right?

Here's part of my thinking. I wrote a story years ago about a lonely man who encounters a girl in a coffee shop and the experience affects his life; I brought it in to a grad school workshop, and my professor was able to succinctly express why it wasn't a great story: "Salinger did it first and did it better." Within the past year or so I received a rejection from a literary journal for a story about a young man contemplating having an affair; the rejection itself was a personal note rather than a form rejection slip. The editors informed me that although they wouldn't be publishing the story, they liked my writing and would happily consider more work from me. The problem with the piece I submitted is that it didn't "contribute anything new to a familiar situation." And, like my professor, these editors were exactly right. My story was well written, but it's nothing unique.

I'm not especially interested in experimenting with form and doing anything wildly different. So how do I make my work significant? How do I add something worth paying attention to? If offered a choice between my story and Salinger's, I would recommend that a reader pass over mine in favor of the master's. I'm also not interested in writing plot-driven genre fiction. So, if my work isn't gripping because of the high tension and it isn't reinventing what a story does, why should a reader bother with it? I think the answer might lie in having something worth writing about, some observations about the world that make a reader feel like perhaps they've experienced what it's like to be somebody else or to reconsider experience from another perspective. I think I have to have some sort of intellectual angle or theme that elevates my fiction.

And that is the challenge.

I've recently been working on a short story that I began last summer. When I started it, I had no idea what it was "about." I just had an image of a character in my head and then something happened, and then something else happened; another character came into the scene, and eventually I had a rough draft. I've reconsidered and reevaluated and reconfigured the plot and characters, and I'm at the point now of rewriting the story so that it will likely have little resemblance to the initial version I wrote a few months ago. But the issue I'm struggling with is this: what the hell is the thing is about? I think I've got some interesting plot details and some reasonably engaging characters, but I'm still not sure that the story has anything to say. I have some rough themes that the story touches on--death, loneliness, attempting to make connections with others, the unceasing progress of life--but I'm not sure that I'm actually saying anything about anything. Touching on a theme is not the same as actually having a position. Is it? I remember Stephen King commenting in his On Writing that theme is overrated and tends to come on its own without the writer having to stress over it too much. I suspect he's right, but he also had the advantage of writing plot-driven high tension pieces where theme can elevate the piece but isn't necessarily required to give it its purpose.

So what I wonder, what I've been wondering about more and more for the past year or two, is whether I have anything worth saying to the world. Maybe the best I can hope for is that I'll write stories that others before me have written better. Maybe I'll have one decent story that's basically a Salinger ripoff and another that is a pale version of a Carver story. Is that enough? Can one ever truly hope to add anything new? Is that a completely unrealistic goal that is best abandoned sooner rather than later? I used to shake my head at fellow students who talked about being original because I long felt it was an unattainable objective. I also felt, and still do, that having the goal of making a difference, of changing the world or changing people's minds through one's art is ludicrous to the point of nearly being delusional. Yet somehow, despite knowing that for a long time, I'm still struck by the difficulty of facing that reality. If I truly accept that I can't contribute anything new, then what am I actually trying to do? Is it enough to do something old and do it well? I hope so, but I don't know.

Further revisions

I have in front of me a story manuscript with many slashes and new words written in red pen as well as some others in blue. On my computer desktop is an open file with a copy of this story and the number "nine," as in the ninth saved draft. Now, I don't always save every new draft as I revise. I try to only save substantial changes as completely new documents. I like to be able to go back occasionally and see previous versions, but it seems excessive to save every adjustment as a new file. So, although this is now the ninth draft, it could well be the fifteenth or twentieth thirty-eight time I've reworked this story, and that's not counting all the drafts from before I separated the piece from the surrounding novel to see if it can stand up on its own.

So I sit down with my marked up manuscript and go to type up changes. Although I only have a few marks indicated on my hard copy for the first sentence, I'm not satisfied with the sentence as I read it over. It's not bad, exactly. But it doesn't flow. It doesn't pop. It suggests a bit of what the story is about, but it doesn't resonate. So I start a new sentence. I begin with a new first word. I change the order. I try three short simple sentences instead of one complex sentence. I alter that again and try two simple, one complex, and a compound sentence. I fiddle and twist. I replace words that seem dull and lifeless with others that have multiple connotations. I consider the story's themes and try to insert phrases or terms into this first sentence that will subtly suggest the themes immediately, or if a reader doesn't pick up on them right away, they will be there on a second reading. I delete and rewrite. I add and subtract. I cut and paste. Finally, I'm a little bit happier. I think there's something reasonably decent there. I have a start to the piece that might encourage a reader to keep going, to think, "maybe this will be interesting; I want to see where this writer takes me."

Twenty minutes, and I have a stronger batch of sixty-four words. Now all I need to do is continue on to the other four thousand, nine hundred. And then return to these sixty-four to find I don't much care for them anymore.

What It's About

I've been thinking recently about the difference between craft--that is being able to convey things well and interestingly through good diction, style, structure, etc.--and actually having something to say. In particular I was reflecting on the benefits of studying writing in a formal program and what one learns there compared with what one doesn't learn there. I feel that my experience in graduate school was useful in developing my craft abilities as a writer. I have no doubts that I am a better writer today than I was five years ago. And, in a strange way, writing is harder for me today than it was then because I know of so many various factors to pay attention to now (when I'm rewriting, I can spend a couple of hours and only get through a paragraph). I've studied craft and, I think, become a decent craftsman.

However, one thing that isn't really addressed, and I don't know if it's possible to address, in an MFA program is content. It's great if one can write well, but if one has nothing to say, then what's the point? And I think that's one of the problems I'm encountering at the moment. I feel like I can write well (of course I've still got more to learn and more developing to do, but basically I write well), but I'm increasingly unconvinced that at age thirty I have anything worth writing about. When I start to develop the ideas I have, I usually become excited about a new prospect and start to think through the implications of the idea only to become discouraged because it's nothing very original or different. Now I don't think this is strictly a problem that I have. I think most writers probably have this basic problem. Great writers have been producing work for so long, how can we, now, add anything new to the discussions? That isn't necessarily a problem. Approaching something old from a new angle can work. Or even doing something old, but doing it well, can be solid. The problem for a young writer, though, is that sometimes the ideas that seem fresh are actually old. Or if I recognize that an idea is old, but I think I can still do it well, that might not be enough. Why would an editor want to publish some old idea from some young nobody? I recently received a very nice letter accompanying a rejection. The letter said that my story was well written, but essentially takes on an old idea and adds nothing new. And I couldn't disagree with their critique.

I read a blog today about a similar issue, and that is whether one gains better experience from the "real world" than from the academic world. In essence, that's part of my concern. I'm thirty years old. I spent my entire childhood up to age twenty-two in school. Then after only a short break, I returned to school for almost the entire remainder of my twenties. Now I'm out of school as a student but still in that world as a teacher. Most of my life experience is from that world. I like that world. It's a good world. But it does leave me feeling limited in my understanding of humanity. When I interact with my students, who are largely from very different socio-economic, cultural, and intellectual backgrounds than me, I feel perplexed by their attitudes and behaviors. Likewise, I feel that I might not be able to properly imagine other situations and lives. I've heard that a writer doesn't need any real experience because it's all about imagination, so the great writer has learned everything they need to know about humanity by age seven or so, and from then on it's a matter of making up stories. This contrasts with the other view, that a writer would be better off spending years on a failed marriage than on an MFA. My sensibilities lean toward the imagination camp, and yet I'm not sure if that actually works.

The difficulty for me is that I fear my own views of the world, or something about the way my mind works, might be different enough from the average that my work doesn't quite resonate with others. On more than one occasion I've written fiction where characters were created from my understanding of how people think and act, and the reaction of my readers was puzzlement as to why the character acts and thinks as he does. Or I've had the reverse experience as a reader, where I read a story and find the motivations of the characters completely baffling, but the others around me see those characters as everyman types that anyone can relate to and understand. Maybe it's a matter of life experience, that I simply haven't done enough to understand the world around me as much as I'd like to. Sometimes I think that the best plan of action would be to sort of set aside the immediate goals of publication and so on and to simply live life for a while longer to try to come up with something worth writing about. I could continue to work on my craft to keep my skills up, but maybe I simply won't have any stories worth sharing with the world for another ten or twenty years, if then. I don't know.

The downside of a plan like that is that, essentially, I've never felt that I was very good at living life. Many of the basic experiences that people have and that then produce the inspiration for good writing are beyond my experience or understanding. And I don't know that there's any way to have those experiences merely for the sake of having them. I don't think life works that way. When I was younger, I sort of attempted such a thing. I had never really dated before, and I suspected that it would not be a good idea to date this one particular girl who was interested in me. However, part of what convinced me to do it was that it would provide good life experience for me as a writer. The relationship ended as I always knew it would. I've long felt that the anxiety of the experience while it was happening followed by the depression when it was over was plenty of reason to avoid the experience to begin with and I should have followed my rational brain that told me not to do it. But at least I now had this life experience that is a rite of passage for most people. I had experienced a young romance and could now write about it. But it turns out, the way I experienced that was not similar to how most others experience such a thing. I wrote about it, and people felt like my character was an enigmatic freak.

I don't know that there's any way to overcome this obstacle. My inclination is to hope that continued living will somehow magically transform me into someone with greater understanding and more significant ideas to put into my writing, but I also suspect that there's a lot of truth to the notion that one learns the essentials by age seven, and somehow I just never quite learned them the way others do.

Acceptance

I finally got an acceptance this past week. For the past couple years, I've been submitting to magazines. Since my main interest is in the novel rather than shorter pieces, I don't have a lot that I've been sending out. I've written a handful of stories over the past decade or so, but only one of them do I consider to be very good. I have a chapter from a novel that I feel works as a short story, so I've been submitting that for a few months. And I had one other piece, a personal essay I began writing in the nonfiction class in grad school, that I felt pretty decent about. The essay had received perhaps the best feedback of anything I ever brought into workshop, and following many revisions, it seemed strong. When I started sending it out, I quickly got hand written notes on my rejection slips. One journal even sent me a full letter with a critique of the piece, explaining why they didn't feel it was quite right despite being strong writing. I continued to rewrite the piece and resubmit, rewrite and resubmit. More notes, but no acceptance. Then a few months ago I was going over the piece again and just felt like it wasn't coming together. I saw new problems I hadn't noticed in past drafts, but I couldn't figure out how to solve the problems. So after a couple years of submitting it, I retired the piece. I felt like it was generally strong but not quite working, and I didn't know how to fix it. Those journals where the essay was still being considered sent me rejections, and I stopped thinking about it.

Then this past week I got an e-mail that a journal wants to publish it. This was the only journal I had not heard from; they had been considering the essay for nearly a year. Of course I was thrilled to finally have a piece accepted. But there was also ambivalence there. After all, this was a piece that I already decided wasn't working. Did I want it published at all if I'm not quite happy with it? For a moment I considered sending a reply to the journal, saying I'd rather pull it from consideration. But I couldn't. The editor wrote that she enjoyed the piece and it stood out from the stack of submissions. Maybe I'm simply too critical about it when I feel it's not working. And, ultimately, I need to get published.

On the one hand, having my work published is a great boost to the ego. No matter how many times my mom says I'm a good writer, it's nice to get some affirmation from another source. But beyond that, I need to get published for the sake of my career. I'm now finishing the last weeks of my first year as an adjunct teacher. There are definitely things I like about the teaching, but on a whole it can be frustrating and I feel that I can't do it forever. I can't work with beginning students for the next thirty years. I'll burn out. But in order to do something else, to teach creative writing, I need to publish. And to increase my chances of publishing, it's useful to be published. Having the stamp of approval from one editor could tip the balance in my favor when my work is being considered by another editor. So, of course, I wrote back saying I'd love to have my essay published.

And maybe it's better than I think it is. Maybe I'm looking too critically at my writing and seeing flaws that others won't notice or that aren't necessarily even there. But the bottom line is that I have two options. One: have it published, get the credit on my resume, possibly boost my chances of publishing more, and increase my credentials for full-time teaching positions. Or two: let the essay sit untouched on my computer.

So I'm getting published.

Writing is Easy!

What's that old quote about writing? It's easy: you just stare at the blank page until drops of blood form on your forehead. Something like that. I could look up it, but I'm lazy. Anyway, the idea is clear. Recently I've grown a new appreciation for the difficulty of writing. It's weird that this should come to me now, since I've been writing seriously the past several years. It's the one thing I've been devoting the majority of my adult life to, and yet it seems harder now than it used to. Maybe it's that old thing about if one really knew how difficult it is, one would never attempt it in the first place.

I don't even know that hard or difficult or tough or whatever is exactly right. The thing that has struck me most recently is simply how long it takes to write well. How slow it is. I've been rewriting my kids book, and, admittedly, some of my slow pace in proceeding through the pages comes from not spending as much time bleeding from my forehead as I could. Instead of writing, I do other things: I watch TV, I work in a bookstore, I read, I grade papers, I prepare quizzes about punctuation, I apply for full time jobs, I do things related to writing like sending out stories to magazines or applying for grants. Sure, all that stuff eats away at my time and some of it is unnecessary or could be eliminated from my schedule so I write more. But that's not even what I mean when I mention that my writing is slow.

When I am actually sitting down working on my novel, I move at a slower pace than I remember in the past. I take more time sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. The result is good. I think the new draft of this book is coming together really well. When I finish this second draft, I think it will be closer to the strength of a third or fourth or even fifth draft of my past work. I'm now focusing more on the issues of language, the specific details that make the story pop. Perhaps part of the reason I can do this already with my first revision is that I pretty well worked out the story in the rough draft (which was the fastest I've ever written), and now I don't have to go through and sift out the actual story from the mass of material to quite the extent that I often do after finishing a rough draft. This isn't to say that I'm not also doing this. I know there are things that need to be cut or added. I know that some chapters go on too long or end in the wrong place or that characters come and go haphazardly. But as I read through and rework what I have, I feel pretty confident that much of the piece, the skeleton, is strong and solid and will hold up. So rather than moving around major items and transplanting passages of text, I'm doing the cosmetic surgery already and analyzing the language in detail and attempting to convey the story as efficiently and effectively as I can. And that is damn slow going.

I sit and stare at sentences and think about how I can put images and sounds and smells into the reader's head. I try to eliminate clichés or alter details that are vague. I read over paragraphs to see if the words flow, if I'm repeating myself, if the sequence is solid or if I'm forecasting events that should come further down the page. I'm concentrating on what I do at every moment (or at least as much as I can). And although I'm so far quite pleased with what I'm producing, I wish I had more pages in my file marked "Draft 2."

Some Disconnected and Random Thoughts

1. Once again, I've been evaluating the essay I was working on. After many more hours reading it, editing, reorganizing, composing new material, cutting out old stuff, and so on, I'm still dissatisfied and unsure that it will ever be quite what I want it to be. I've concluded that writing creative nonfiction is incredibly difficult, much more so than I had originally appreciated. There's such a freedom with fiction to manipulate the characters and situation to make it all work, but nonfiction is limited by reality. And reality is messy and without clear themes or conclusions. I had envisioned my essay as having a sort of pivotal epiphany moment, but that's simply not how things happen, at least not for me. Life isn't full of epiphanies. Life is a slow process; changes happen slowly if at all. So condensing that process into a ten or fifteen page essay is a daunting prospect. When I steer the facts--including some details and leave out others--I feel like I'm being dishonest and turning the facts into fiction. I don't know. Maybe that's what all nonfiction writers do. I suppose truth is an impossibility.

2. My next novel has been pushing its way more and more into the forefront of my brain. It's an idea I came up with a few years ago and started a couple years ago as a short story, but after writing it I realized I really wanted to continue on and discover what else happens, where the characters go from the point I'd left them at the end of the story, and that this would wind up as a complete novel idea for me. I had planned on writing this one after my MFA thesis novel, but then I became more interested in writing my kids' book, so I did that first. But now I'm still really early on in the kids' book process--I have a complete draft but have barely started on an initial revision. So I'm left with this question: Do I put the kids' book on hold while I move on to a story that is more pressing on my mind or do I leave the new book alone to keep working on the kids' book? Well, unable to quite decide between the two of those choices, I've opted for the middle ground. I'm going to begin drafting the new one while rewriting the old one. I'm not sure yet whether this is a smart move, but I'll give it a try and see how it goes. My fear is that I won't fully sink into either world and I'll end up doing both poorly, but who knows?

3. With my new novel I'm proceeding in a different manner than I have in the past. Typically I have a basic story idea in mind and start writing even if I'm unsure where exactly it's going. I make a lot of notes as I draft and usually before I'm very far along I have some sort of rough outline of the entire project so I can see where I'm heading even though the route changes as I go and find detours or shortcuts. With my MFA thesis I began writing out of order, originally composing one piece as a short story then another as a separate story until I concluded that rather than a series of linked stories I really was writing a novel. It turned out the early pieces wound up (in rather different forms) as the end of the book. But by the time I had drafted the first few chapters I had a very rough form of the entire book outlined.

Right now I'm lacking that clear vision of my new book, but rather than beginning with chapter one and seeing where it goes, I'm starting before the beginning of the book. I'm doing character sketches that are more extensive than I've done in the past. Previously I've jotted down key details of characters so I can keep them straight as I go or whatever, but I haven't worried too much about fleshing out their pasts and motivations and so forth since those things tend to come up as I write and I know I'll discover those details by the time I get through a couple of drafts. But now I feel like I won't be quite sure how to proceed with each new section of the story until I have a solid understanding of each character and why they are motivated to do the things they do. So I've written several pages about the lives of the two main characters and have yet to reach the point where the book actually starts. It's really fun to explore the back story like this, and I'm hoping it proves helpful as I move forward. In part I felt compelled to do this because the first big plot point relies on a somewhat absurd turn of events, and I feel like I have to justify those events in order for the story to work. That was one of the problems with the short story version I attempted a couple years ago. I didn't have enough time to make the unlikely event seem plausible. So I need to really understand the character in order for his bizarre action to seem like something he would genuinely do under the circumstances.

Another significant factor with this new novel (that I've commented on before here I believe) is that the story and characters move much further away from my own experiences and characteristics, which in part means I don't have as thorough an understanding of the characters and their motivations. My first novel, my MA thesis, drew heavily on my own traits for the main character: he thought much like I do, had the same tastes and interests, and so on. I didn't have to worry too much about how he would react to different situations because I could simply imagine how I myself would react. My second novel, my MFA thesis, moved further away from myself but still had a lot of me in the characters. While the first book had a stand-in for me, the second one used different aspects of me in different characters, an exaggerated version of characteristic X here, characteristic Y there. None of the main characters were me, but I still felt like I understood them fairly intuitively, that it wasn't a major shift to step into their shoes and discover how they would react in different circumstances. The third book, the kids' book, was a whole different thing, so it doesn't really enter this discussion. With the new novel, though, I don't think any of the characters I've come up with so far have a whole lot in common with me, so it's going to be more of a challenge to figure out exactly how and why they do what they do and then to also make it seem reasonable to a reader that these characters would indeed do what they do. It's fun and exciting to take this new step away from what I've done before.

4. Comedy. I've been reflecting recently on comedy. It's weird, I used to be pretty good at comedy. The major piece of writing I did that convinced me I definitely wanted to devote my life to writing was a one-act farce. I wrote it in college and it was accepted into a festival of one-act plays on campus. Seeing an audience laugh so hard at my words was thrilling. But since that point I've become less and less comic in my writing. I see my new novel as being highly comic. In my mind it's on the lines of A Confederacy of Dunces or Candide, a sprawling episodic novel, maybe picaresque, where a number of characters pursue different goals and keep falling flat and perhaps there's a bit of Camus's absurd thrown into the mix where things fail to turn out as the characters expect. I have a strong sense of the feeling I'd like the novel to have, but I'm a bit doubtful that I'll be able to achieve the right balance. And I realized that the major obstacle in my way is a weird one: empathy.

What's that? Empathy? Why would that be a problem? Well, here's why. I've heard a definition of the difference between comedy and tragedy attributed to Mel Brooks: "Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die; tragedy is when I get a paper cut." There's definitely something to that. Comedy has a distance between the audience and the characters so we feel fine laughing at them. Yes, we often like the characters, but I think we still don't fully empathize. If we did, would we be so callous as to laugh at their misfortunes? Dramatic stories are all about empathy, feeling that torment of the characters. And I feel like over the past decade or so I've shifted somewhat in my level of empathy with my fellow human beings. I formerly identified myself only half-jokingly as a misanthrope, and with a misanthropic view of humanity it's easy to laugh. But more and more I feel a sense of the basic worth and individual suffering and joys of every person, and with that kind of connection, it becomes harder to laugh. So then when creating characters for a story, I want them to be real, to be empathetic, to have people care about them, but then how can I also make them funny? I don't know. I haven't sorted it all out yet. I've heard comedy is all about the head and drama about the heart, and I think my heart has become a bigger part of me than it used to be.

writing is rewriting is rewriting is rewriting

Almost three years ago I began a short personal essay for a class. It turned out okay. It satisfied the requirement for the class and I earned an A, but I knew it had more work before it was something really good. So I set it aside and came back to it months later. I extensively rewrote it and submitted it to a workshop course. There it received some of the most positive feedback of anything I submitted during my time in the MFA program. I rewrote again and entered the new version in a contest at the university. It came in third. I rewrote again. I started submitting it for publication to journals. Although I've been submitting things for years, this was the first piece to receive regular personal notes instead of only form rejections. Most of the notes were simple hand-written comments along the lines of "please consider submitting again in the future" at the bottom of the form letter. However, one journal actually included a full letter with specific critiques explaining why despite the essay's strengths they didn't feel it was quite right for them. So even though I was getting consistently positive feedback, it still wasn't accepted, so I took another look at it and rewrote again.

Months went by with no change. Encouraging comments, but no acceptances. So again I decided to look it over and try to see how else I might improve it. And unlike my past evaluations of it, I didn't think the essay was that good. It had definite strengths, but it also had what now struck me as glaring weaknesses. The momentum of the piece fell flat about halfway through, so the essay itself simply didn't work. I thought about it but couldn't figure out how to fix the problem. So more than two years after I first started writing it, and more than a year after I began submitting it, I set the piece aside and decided to stop submitting it until I could solve its structural problems. I did this suspecting that the essay was simply a failure, something that comes close without ever quite working right.

Another couple of months passed, and I picked it up again, curious if I might see anything now that I missed the last time. And sure enough, some new ideas came to mind. The essay's faltering momentum seemed as evident as before, but now I could envision a new structure, a complete renovation, that might fix it. I'm not yet done with this new rewrite, but I feel excited about the essay again and think it might finally reach its potential.

Advice On When To Move On

The topic of finishing, knowing when you're done, is something I've obviously been thinking about and wrote about last time. So to help me consider the issue, I've been reflecting on advice I've received from teachers over the years.

I've studied under some good writers who have given different types of instruction and advice. Perhaps my favorite writer I took a class with had a process very different from mine. He spent months thinking about his stories. He would jot down notes, but basically do draft after draft in his head until he had figured the whole thing out and even polished the language. Then he would write it down, and essentially the first written draft was the final draft. I could never work that way. I simply couldn't keep it all in my head. Also, this professor was a great short story writer and not a novelist. I doubt his process would work on a novel due to the larger scope and the difficulty of keeping so much in one's head. Basically the way he ran his workshop classes was to examine the pieces students submitted, to look at the structure, the techniques, and analyze them. We often got into abstract discussion of about how literature works and why, but often that came at the expense of specific critique of the pieces themselves. Although I feel I learned some things in that class, those things were larger theoretical concepts, and I'm not sure the stories I submitted benefited a whole lot. Probably my professor didn't have much to suggest for how to change a story because once his were written, they were done, so he wasn't much for changing them after that point.

Another professor I studied under was an accomplished novelist. She had published five or six novels and many short stories over the years. One of the specific pieces of advice I remember from her was directly in response to the question of knowing when you're done. She said that is, of course, one of the toughest questions to answer and her best take on that issue was to quit rewriting when she felt like she was starting to make the piece worse. It's been a few years since she mentioned that, and I still reflect back on it as I rewrite, and the tricky thing is that when I approach a piece I haven't looked at for a while, I usually spot things to improve. I have one story I've been working on for over four years, and I revised it again as recently as a month ago, and I think I was still improving it. So on the one hand I think I should continue to work on it since I haven't started completely messing it up yet, but on the other hand I think at some point I have to move on, retire it, and work on future pieces. I don't know that I've reached that point yet with this particular story. Most of the stories I've written over the years ultimately were nothing more than learning exercises, but I still feel this one is good and will be published eventually.

I asked another professor about his thoughts on the issue of when do you know you're done. I suggested that maybe you can tell you're finished when somebody finally publishes something. And he said that even then, it's not that clear. He was at that time editing a short story collection. The stories had previously been published in magazines, and the collection had been accepted for publication. Even so, as he went back through it, he found some stories he still wanted to rework beyond simple edits. I recently read an interview with Tobias Wolff about his new story collection, which includes revised versions of stories he published years ago. And he's certainly not the only writer to keep returning to the past and revising it. So I don't know. I guess the difficulty is to avoid winding up like the writer in Albert Camus's The Plague: he keeps rewriting the opening passage of his novel, trying to get it perfect, and since he never moves on from the beginning, he never completes anything.

I guess I'd rather move forward and accept that some of my past work isn't as good as it ultimately could be, but in the end produce more. If I wind up writing a great novel, but it's my seventh novel and the first six were learning experiences, I still think I'd be happier with that than if I spent twenty years to produce one novel that was ultimately great.

In part my desire to move forward comes from some other piece of advice whose source I don't remember. I think it's important to move on when the passion dies. This is a difficult continuum, however. There are writers who write a passion-fueled rough draft, can't stand to rewrite and so they quit there. That doesn't seem like a good way to go. But if I write, rewrite, revise, rewrite, revise, edit, polish, rewrite, edit, etc., etc. and I've gotten the piece far, but I've reached the point where, despite liking it as a story and feeling it's good, I'm getting sick of it, well I think that's the time to move on. If I'm at that stage with one piece and another piece is taking over my mind more and more, I think it's best to move on to that next piece. Now it's certainly possible that the earlier piece will force it's way back into the passion part of my brain and I'll return to it down the line, but still, it's not necessarily the most productive to rehash the same thing forever.

One final thought on this issue is closely related to that previous idea: as I improve as a writer, I think my ideas get better. I wrote my first novel between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-six. I have no regrets about writing it. I learned a lot from the experience of drafting, rewriting, submitting it to workshops and a writers' group, and ultimately defending it as my MA thesis. But the basic story was not necessarily the most interesting thing in the world. As with many first novels, it drew heavily on my own experiences, and it had the kind of plot that might simply be too minimal to ever be of much appeal to most readers. If I were to continue working on that novel until it reached the level of being a great novel, I suspect it would have to change so much that it would barely resemble the original. So if the final version is going to be so different, why not actually do something different? Rather than being burdened with that history, it's better to start fresh. My second novel moved further from my own experiences, but still has some limited scope. I think this book is good, and I hope to see it published, but I know the story is limited and will not appeal to many readers. But I have other ideas for future novels that have the kind of premises that I think have much more potential to bloom into something great. And I think it's because as I head into my thirties, my views of the world are larger and more interesting than they were when I was in my early and mid twenties. So that's one more reason to keep moving forward, to progress to the next piece instead of rehashing the old ones forever.

Finishing: Yeah Right

So I set a deadline for myself to have an additional revision done in time to enter a contest. I need to have my manuscript finished and in the mail by November first. I've been doing revisions on the computer, printing out the new pages and then going over them once more with a red pen in an effort to catch all the little issues. Last night I got all the way to the end of my book, and so I'm ready to print out the remaining pages and do the final read through and then input the additional edits. I still have a week before the contest deadline, and it definitely looks like I'll make it in time. And the timing couldn't be better.

Unfortunately, my life is squeezing me so I'll soon have even less time to work on my writing. I'm being promoted at the book store, which is great in that I'll make an extra twenty-five cents per hour (Hooray! My income this year might even hit five figures!) and will even soon be eligible for some minimal health care benefits, but I'll also be working more. Rather than being at the book store twenty to thirty hours, I'll be there thirty hours a week minimum. On weeks when I don't have student papers to grade, I'll still be working about fifty hours a week. When I do have papers to grade, it'll be sixty plus hours. This coming week I'm working seven days. And that means the little time I currently find to write will be even scarcer.

Anyway, the sound of violins behind me is distracting. Where was I going? Oh, yeah. Finishing yet another revision. I don't know if I'm actually done. Is it ever possible to be done? I'm sure there are improvements I could make. My newest draft is the tightest, and shortest, version of my book. The length concerns me a little bit. Although it's still a three hundred page novel, double the minimum length for what would be called a novel as opposed to a novella, it's still not a long book. And I have had a few of my early readers who felt like they wanted more, that they would like to spend additional time with the characters. That, of course, is one of the greatest compliments I could hope for, but it also makes me wonder if it should be longer. Basically I have three separate story lines following three major characters, so although the book is one cohesive piece, it's in a way three linked novellas. So I can understand that a reader might want more of each. I have a few ideas for additional chapters I could include, but I'm reluctant to keep writing more. For one thing, I've been working on this for years already and just want to move on. But, more importantly, I feel like the book is tight. Even though it's not a plot-driven book, the major plot points work together pretty succinctly without major digressions and insignificant details. I'd like to think I've got on my hands the type of novel somebody might pick up and feel compelled to keep reading and finish in a couple sittings.

But anyway, I think I might have begun writing this post with some sort of point in mind, though I'm not entirely sure what that point was. It might have had something to do with the old issue of having trouble finishing. I'm pretty sure it was something like that. And the final thought for the moment is this: although I'm sure I could keep working on this book, keep writing new bits and pieces, keep editing for the clearest, most engaging prose, reconsider and evaluate every decision I made along the way, I'm not going to. I'll enter this new version in that contest, look for other such contests, check into small presses who might be interested in a first literary novel, query agents who probably won't be interested in a first literary novel, and move forward with the next novel.

Many times over the years I've had students approach me asking if they could revise a paper an additional time after the final draft in order to improve their grade. For my own sake, I can't keep grading draft after draft; I obviously don't have the time for that. But for their sake as well, I recommend moving on. Instead of trying to juggle one more revision while also writing the first draft of their next paper, it's better to learn from the previous essay and apply those lessons to the next one. And that's what I need to do as well. It might be that my book still isn't where it needs to be, isn't tight enough or long enough or whatever enough to get published. But rather than spending another year on it, I'd rather move forward. I'm a better writer now than I was when I started this book, and the next thing I write should be better than this one. It's possible (although depressing to dwell on) that I'll have four or five novels written before one makes it out into the world. But that's how it is.

Finding Time

As I'm sure any amateur writer can relate, it's tough to find time to write. Not to suggest that my situation is tougher than other people's, but my situation is tougher than other people's. Just joshing. Actually, I think it's in some ways easier to find time to write now than it was back in grad school. It's weird. In grad school, I was there to write. That was the whole point, and yet there were so many other things going on. I was teaching and tutoring, reading and studying for classes, reading and studying for the comps exam, reading and commenting on other writers' work for workshop, grading papers, preparing for classes. With all of that going on at once, it often became a struggle to find spare moments to actually do the thing that supposedly was the point of being there. I mean I still did. I wrote a whole novel and rewrote it and workshopped parts of it and revised and showed it to faculty and revised and defended it as my thesis. I did a lot of writing, more than many of my fellow students in fact. But it still felt hard.

Now I'm in a situation that could also be described as tough to find writing time. I teach as adjunct faculty at a community college, and I work at a bookstore. I'm either in class or in office hours about eight hours a week, plus I spend probably another ten or so at home doing prep work, and that's when I don't have papers to grade or in class assignments to read over, which most of the time I do. So my teaching job is probably somewhere in the range of a twenty t0 thirty hour a week part time position. Then I also work at a bookstore twenty to thirty hours a week. So basically, although I don't have a full time job with the better pay and benefits that come with such employment, I work at least forty hours a week, usually more like fifty or sixty hours a week. Plus, both jobs require a half hour plus commute from home. I sometimes manage to have one day a week where I don't actually have to GO to work, but then even if I stay home, there's teaching stuff to take care of, so it's not really the same as a real day off.

Yet, despite all this, as I wrote above, I feel like I have more time to write. The trick seems to be in using the time I have. For instance, today I taught in the morning, had office hours, and then I have a couple hours before working an eight hour shift at the bookstore. So in that break, I'm obviously writing this blog, but then when I'm done I'm going to sit and go over my novel with a red pen. I've been squeezing in a bit of revising on the computer in the evenings or on afternoons before or after teaching, whenever I have some spare moments and I'm actually at home. Then I print those revised pages and take them with me so I can do even just a few pages at a time on my half hour lunch break. When I take advantage of that free minutes, even when they're few, I can still get work done.

I set the goal for myself to have my novel revised once more by the end of the month. I'm more than two thirds of the way through now, so I think I'll meet that goal in the next few days. It's a tough life, but whose life isn't? Part of what helps me plow through is the thought that time spent writing isn't merely something fun I do for myself (although it is), and it's not only a dream of achieving something that might connect with people (although it's that too), but on a pure practical level, it's a way to advance my career. Right now I'm working this hard because I don't have much option in the way of full time employment. I can't get a steady job, so I have to do what I'm doing. But if I work hard on my writing and get published, new doors will open for me, and I'll be able to land a good full time teaching job that currently I'm not qualified for. So it can be hard to sit down after a long day of working two jobs, or after spending hours grading freshman essays, or simply after sitting in my car driving through freeway traffic, but if I want to be in a position in the future where I don't have to do those things, I have to sit down and do the extra work now. So far I'm doing it. Here's hoping I can keep it up as long as it takes.

As Always: Revision

So It's been a busy few weeks for me that involved not much writing. I moved cross country, settled into my new home, succeeded in finding two part time jobs that provide more hours with less pay than full time work and no benefits. So I have not made a ton of progress toward getting my newly drafted YA fantasy into the next stage. However, I did manage to revise a short story for the nth time, making it that slight bit better where I hope it will now go from getting hand written notes on the rejection slips to actually getting acceptances. I also did my initial read through of the fantasy novel, and I feel although it is of course rough, it has a solid base to it. The skeleton of the story is working, and now I'm ready for the hard work of fleshing out the characters further, making the world pop, and doing all the other stuff that takes so much time and effort but can't be ignored. However, before I get to that, I have something else that I've moved to the front burner again.

I finished what I thought was the final revision of my previous novel several months ago. I'd been working on it pretty steadily for about two years when I defended it as my MFA thesis. From there I moved into working on an additional revision, then all the nitty gritty polishing stuff for three more months or so. I had it where I felt it was ready to put out into the world and even started querying agents. Then I had one of my trusted early readers take a look. She hadn't had the time to read a draft up until that point. And fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, she had some great notes for me. For one thing, she found a number of small typo errors that I could have sworn I'd eliminated but somehow still survived. But also, she had some really good suggestions of some places to tighten, some scenes that were redundant, some questions that arose about certain characterizations and so on. Anytime I get good feedback I'm grateful to the person who provides it, but it can also be discouraging because it means my work isn't over. So after talking with her I knew I needed to attack my manuscript again, but I just couldn't seem to find the energy and force myself to sit down and do it. After all, I'd already spent years and reached the point where I was supposed to be done. But one of the differences between being a guy who enjoys fiddling with writing in my spare time and somebody who truly is a writer is in the ability to sit down again and again and find more things to improve.

So I knew I had work still in front of me, but I put it off. I knew I wasn't ready to send it out to more agents or anything until I addressed the new concerns, but I also lacked the heart to do the hard work. But finally I've kicked my butt into gear and said, "Self, you need to do this." But how to motivate myself. After all, it would be more fun to start in on rewrites of the new book. Plus, the old one is a challenging literary novel that even if I succeed in making it great has a limited chance of ever being published while the new one is more marketable and might be possible to actually become something other than a file on my computer or a stack of pages in my room. After some thought I decided I needed something specific and concrete to motivate me, some set deadline by which to finish the revision. It's easy enough to say I won't query any more agents until I fix these little problems and then simply never query any agents. So I decided the best motivating factor to provide a strict deadline for this (hopefully) final revision would be to find a nice contest to enter. And sure enough I found one. I'm planning on entering the novel in a contest for beginning writers who haven't previously published a book. The deadline is the beginning of November, so I have about a month to get it ready.

I don't really expect to win this contest. If I do, that would be great. Not only does the prize include a publishing contract, but the prestige would likely be enough to launch my academic career away from adjuncting and into full time work with a bit of security. But the important thing isn't to think about winning, but simply to think about making my book as good as it can be through one more draft. Then I can query more agents, send it out to small presses, and submit to more contests. And with a deadline hanging over my head, I think it should happen. I've spent many hours the past few days hacking through some problems in the book's opening, and now I've managed to address a number of issues in the first four chapters (including cutting out the false start that was the previous chapter one). I feel confident that even though I'm working twenty-some hours a week at a bookstore, have about forty student papers to grade and two classes to prepare for, I'll have a well-polished manuscript in the mail to that contest before the end of October.