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?

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.

Priorities and Stuff

I just read the post on the MFA/MFYou blog about setting priorities in one's life, which is an issue I've been pondering a lot recently. As I get closer to landing a full-time teaching job, I've been daydreaming a lot about what my life will be like once I'm in that position. I had an interview a few days ago, and questions came up about my view of the term "professional development" and job duties outside of the classroom. I think I was able to answer those questions satisfactorily. I expressed interest in a variety of possibilities, such as serving on committees, working with student organizations, developing podcasts to supplement my coursework, attending professional development seminars, evaluating Advanced Placement exams, and so forth. Since the interview, I've thought even more about these things and have played out various scenarios for the future in which I take additional classes at the local university and complete an advanced writing teacher certification program or maybe another degree. I think of how I can make myself as attractive as possible for advancement and tenure or for other full time jobs down the road.

Now those are all good possibilities, but those are also things that take a lot of time and effort. So the question is whether I want to devote myself to those things at the possible expense of my writing. And this is really tough to evaluate.

One particular issue I've been considering is how I should best use my summers if I get a full-time job. It turns out that at the school I just interviewed, all full-timers are contracted for the regular school year, and any summer teaching is done for additional pay as adjuncts. This means that I could simply decide not to teach during the summer and take that time completely for my own writing. Or I could teach additional classes that perhaps I don't have the opportunity to do during the regular school year. Teaching extra classes would be a great way to expand my experience as well as make more money. The extra cash could go straight toward paying down my student loans or into savings. Choosing to teach extra classes would certainly have a lot of benefits. But I know it will be tough to write much during the school year when I'm teaching full time, so that extra time during the summer could be my primary way of maintaining an investment in my writing. But how do I weigh the various options against each other?

Part of me kind of feels like I need to reevaluate my writing goals significantly, that I need to sort of step back from how I think about writing and myself as a writer. I don't mean that I'm planning on giving up writing, but I sometimes feel like I let it dominate my thoughts too much. I think of myself as a writer. It's a major part of my identity. Therefore, when I don't find time or can't muster the effort to write, I feel like I'm unsure who I am, like I've lost part of myself and am living somebody else's life. Also, when I continue to get rejected when I send out my stories, I have trouble reconciling that failure with my image of myself as a writer, and rather than simply undermining my confidence in my abilities to do an activity I enjoy, it undermines my entire sense of self.

I'm mostly able to counter doubts and fears and whatever else by reminding myself that I'm still awfully young. It's unusual for writers to achieve success by my age. So I often think that the best plan is to allow myself the extra time to continue developing my craft and hope that I can break through in the next decade or so. In general, I think this is a good attitude to take. But the difficulty I face is that in the past, so much of my dreams about the future and where my life will go have hinged on being successful as a writer. This isn't to indicate that I planned on making a living as a novelist (which I know is highly unlikely), but I figured that if I could publish enough to establish myself a bit in the literary world, then I could teach creative writing and likely teach a lighter load as a university professor than the five-five load of a community college teacher and, thus, have more time to write. The teaching and writing would go together and feed back on each other.

Recently I've been facing the notion that such a dream may never come about or that it could be years or decades before it does. And in the mean time, I still need a job. But do I want to have "just a job" or do I want to have a career? I'd like to be paid to do something I care about. That is one of the great things about teaching. Even as an adjunct, I get to do something that makes a difference. And the reality is that I would love to do it full time while making more money and having health insurance and so on. Yet the sacrifice that comes with full-time employment will be less time to write. But that is something I'm willing to trade, I think. I still hope to pursue my writing, but I know that, especially in the first years of a full-time position, it will be hard to find time for anything else. But I think that's a necessary trade off. And more and more, I'm thinking that it might be that I'll really have to set my writing goals aside for a few years, or relegate them more to hobby or side interest status.

I don't know. It's tough to accept that I might not realistically be able to write much while pursuing a teaching career, but I do suspect that that's pretty much the way things will work out. Part of the problem is really the issue of priorities. If I'm willing to slack as a teacher, then I can probably find more time to write, but I don't think that's fair to my students or the school that pays me. I think I should really make teaching a priority, even if it means downgrading writing. But I'm awfully conflicted about it.

Maybe it's still premature to fret over such things. I don't actually have a job offer on the table right now anyway. It's possible that the end result of all my stressing over applications and interviews will be that next fall I'll be doing the same adjuncting I've been doing for the past two years. If I don't get a full-time job, then much of what I've been obsessing over is moot. And maybe that will be truly beneficial. After having thought through the implications of full-time employment, perhaps I can take better advantage of a part-time situation for another year and spend as much extra time as possible writing. At the moment, I've only been offered three classes as an adjunct for the fall, which will mean a much tighter budget but more time to write. Then when the day comes that I have to shift my priorities further toward teaching, I at least will have had more time to work on my writing between now and then.

Submissions

I keep track of my submissions in a handy Excel file. I have the story, the journal I've submitted it to, when I submitted it, any other notes, and the date it's rejected or accepted. I think something along these lines is a must for anybody who is seriously trying to get published. It's easy enough to keep track of submissions this way, and I can quickly glance at it to see how many pieces I have currently making the rounds.

Right now, I have two stories that I'm sending out to journals. One I've been submitting for a few years. The other I've been submitting for less time. Both of these pieces have received personal responses from readers at various journals, ranging from the somewhat generic "the writing is good, but this isn't right for us right now" to more detailed critiques with explanations for why the journal doesn't want the piece. Both of these stories have undergone substantial revisions over a period of years, and both are, I feel, in pretty solid shape. Yet both also are still being submitted because they have not been accepted anywhere.

Ordinarily, I like to have each piece at about ten places. When I get a few rejections, I resubmit to a few more places so I have a steady flow of submissions and responses coming and going. But lately, I've been really bad about sending out new submissions. The rejections keep coming in every so often, and without new copies going out, my overall submission numbers keep going down. I got a rejection the other day, and when I logged it in the file, I noticed that I'm down to only a few places still considering my work.

It occurred to me, obviously, that I should send out a new batch of envelopes, but I didn't. Sometimes when I've received several rejections in a row, I think it's probably a good idea to review my work again and see if I might want to revise further. I think that's a good idea right now, since it's been several months with the current drafts, and still nobody has accepted these stories. But there's another reason I'm delaying submitting right now, and that has to do with the uncertainty of my future.

I don't know where I'll be living a few months from now. I might be in the same place I am now, or I might be living on the other side of the country. Of course, the post office can forward mail, and there are e-mails as well, but I still think it's easier to submit work with an accurate address. Plus, there are a lot of places that shut down or slow down during the summer months since they are affiliated with schools. So until I know where I'm going to be, I've decided not to submit anything new.

This is a practical decision, but it also has the benefit of allowing me time to go back over my pieces once more and do that additional revision. Clearly, the current drafts are not quite doing it, despite the positive feedback I've already received. So maybe more dramatic changes are in order. For instance, one story has a protagonist who is an English teacher. I've been thinking that perhaps this detail might work against the story's success since many writers are also English teachers, and it's likely that a lot of stories are written by wannabe writers featuring English teacher characters. So maybe making the character another type of teacher would help. He could be a physics teacher, perhaps, or a math teacher. And maybe something as small as that change could lift the story out of the slush where it's spent so much time in the past few years.

Waiting a few months to send out a new big batch of submissions also means that when I start submitting again next fall, I will (I hope) have a new piece or two to send out along with the old pieces. Unfortunately, I've really been slacking the past few months. I had great plans for this semester. I'm teaching four classes, which is a lot, but this is the first time since I've been adjuncting when I didn't have a second job on top of my teaching, so I figured I'd have plenty of extra writing time. I did make some decent use of that time early in the semester. I wrote regularly and made some decent progress on a short story rewrite. Then I left the story behind to work on a writing sample from my novel for a fellowship application. But then by the time I was ready to get back to the story, I was in the midst of the job application process, having been contacted about interviews.

I can't honestly say that preparing for interviews and going through the interview process took all of my extra time, but the anxiety surrounding those interviews sucked a lot of my energy and left with little ability to concentrate the past several weeks. So, basically, I've barely done any writing since February. But my hope is that in a few weeks, I'll know whether I've got a job lined up for the fall, and I can either plan a move or settle back into the life I've been living the past couple of years. And at that point, when the nerves have settled down, I'll return to that story that I haven't touched in weeks. And maybe by September, it will be ready to send out.

Routine II

The past couple of weeks have been kind of lovely. I now only work one job, and I'm finding the additional time to be fantastic. I only have to go to campus to teach two days a week, and the rest of the week I can do prep work and grading from home. So that means most of the time I have a very flexible schedule. I wouldn't go so far as to say I've developed a solid routine yet, though. It's really too early in the semester to declare that, but I have managed to get some good writing in.

Mondays and Wednesdays I leave the house about six in the morning and get home about six in the evening. Waking up early, driving a long commute, and then teaching four classes back to back wears me out and by the time I'm home in the evening, I'm pretty much ready to just watch a movie or something, so not much writing happens on those days. But the other days, I've been managing to get some writing done first thing in the morning. I get my coffee going and sit down and write for a couple of hours. Then later in the day I prepare for classes and do grading and so forth. It's been working out really well so far.

There are a couple of issues that could throw a wrench into the gears, however. One is that it's simply too early to declare this officially a routine at this point. It's been a nice couple of weeks; that's all I can really call it now. But a bigger issue is that I'm at the point in the semester now where I'm going to start collecting papers to grade, so that will take up much more of my time. In the early weeks of the semester (especially this semester when classes have been canceled a couple of times due to weather), the prep is pretty straightforward and there's little yet to grade. But in the coming week I'll have stacks of rough drafts to go over and comment on. I'm hoping that I'll still manage to develop my routine. I think I can still devote mornings to writing and then worry about grading later in the day, but we'll see how it works out.

Routine

One of the things I've found is effective for me as a writer, and just in life in general, is having a routine. The most productive I've ever been was a couple years ago, shortly after grad school before I started teaching as an adjunct. Two major things I had going on at that time were getting into shape and writing. And I was able to develop a routine for both, exercising regularly, reading, and writing each day. I think my ideal day would go something like this: get up around eight or nine, drink coffee and read for two to four hours, eat, read some more, exercise, write, eat again, and then write or read or maybe watch a movie later in the evening, and in bed by midnight or so. What a life that would be. And I pretty much had that for a few months, and in that time I lost about thirty-five pounds of extra fat, did substantial rewrites on a novel, worked on some stories, worked a bit on a screenplay, and wrote an entire rough draft of a children's novel. It was a fantastic life. But, of course, the need to actually pay rent, to buy food, and to pay back the debt I acquired while in grad school required that I get a job.

For the past year and a half, I've had a much different life. I've been working two jobs, teaching and retail. Some days I would work both jobs back to back, leaving at seven in the morning and getting home at ten at night. Other days I would grade papers at home before going to the store in the evening. And while my classes were on the same schedule for a semester at a time, my retail job required me to work a variety of hours each week. I still somehow found some writing time, but not nearly as much as I'd like, and I could never develop a solid routine. If I wanted to make Friday a writing day, that might work one week, but then the next week I'd be at the store all day. Often I worked seven days a week and then when I'd get a day off I just wanted to completely zone out in front of the TV. The lack of a consistent routine really makes finding time to write a challenge.

But I'm beginning a new stage right now. The bookstore is closing down. Tuesday is the last day it will be open, and by Thursday, it will be completely empty. Although I'm sad for the people who are losing their jobs, this works out perfectly for me. I had been considering quitting for a while since I started teaching more classes and making more money from the college. This semester I got a raise and will now make about as much just from teaching as I made last semester from the two jobs combined. And the thing I'm most looking forward to about only having the one job is that I can now develop a steady routine.

I will only be teaching two days a week this semester, Mondays and Wednesdays. I have four classes back to back and then office hours as well as my hour-plus commute to campus, so they will be long days. Then, of course, I'll have to prep for classes and grade papers at home during the rest of the week. But I can now schedule my time much more accurately since there won't be an unpredictable variable anymore. So I plan on devoting the extra time each week when I had been working at the bookstore to writing. I can schedule my time myself and set aside the same regular hours. I can develop my own routine. Of course, it takes a while to get into a groove with a routine. The store is only now closing, and I plan on visiting family soon before I'm too bogged down in the semester to take a weekend off. But starting in a couple of weeks, I plan on instituting a new routine, setting specific goals for my time, and using this semester to full advantage.

One final thought on this subject: I found out recently that I'm going to get to go to the Advanced Placement English Reading this summer to evaluate AP English exams. It's one week in June and pays an honorarium equivalent to one of my regular teaching paychecks. That extra money, on top of what I intend to save throughout the semester, should be plenty to get me through the summer and up to the point where I'm paid again in September even if I have no other source of summer income. So that means that if I don't teach a summer class or get another part time summer job, I could devote about three months this summer to writing. I could have the ideal life once again, get a solid routine in place, and be incredibly productive. What a lovely thought that is.

Another Fellowship

I recently found another fellowship opportunity that looks awesome. This one is for people with an MFA or PhD in creative writing who haven't published a book yet. It is a one year deal to teach a creative writing class each semester and work on a book, and it pays $27,000 for that year. This is the type of thing that would be a huge boost to a CV in helping to land teaching jobs down the road, it would provide a lot of time to write, and it would provide creative writing teaching experience. This one is almost more appealing than the Stegner Fellowship I applied for because it involves teaching creative writing, which I really want to do, it's in Wisconsin, which seems more like my kind of place than California, and I'm betting it's less competitive because it doesn't have quite as big a name and is probably not as geographically appealing to a lot of people. Anyway, it looks awesome, so I'm definitely going to get my paperwork together and apply for it. I'm in the process now of applying for full time teaching jobs for the coming school year as well, and I feel very hopeful that maybe I'll manage to land something great this year.

Making a Living

One thing that I suspect many of us don't fully appreciate when we head off to grad school to study writing is how difficult it can be to actually make a living. I knew that it would be tough or unlikely that I would manage to pay rent and buy food and essentials solely from writing, but I more or less assumed that once I completed my graduate degrees I would be able to land a full time teaching job. Even when I was directly told that wasn't necessarily the case, I don't think it fully sunk in. Now I realize just how difficult it is. I've read statistics that even a majority of folks with Ph.D.s in English cannot find full time professorships. As I look for jobs, I realize that I don't even meet the minimum requirements for most full time positions.

At the university level, they want substantial publication credits, which I don't have yet, or a Ph.D., which I don't have. Many universities require a Ph.D. even to teach the basic composition courses. At the community college level, they want experience. I'm currently in my seventh year of teaching, but the first five years were in grad school, which I've come to understand doesn't count for much. The key number at the community college level seems to be three to five years, and I'm in my second year at the community college. The notion that I will someday have a full time job is not unrealistic. I suspect it's within the next five years. But that's much longer than I expected it would take when I was in grad school.

I remember a professor in grad school who was talking about being a professor and what a noble calling it was and how nobody should pursue that life just for the money because there are so many other jobs out there where one can make much more money. I thought at the time he was full of it, and I still do. Those of us who spend years in grad school essentially don't have other marketable skills. Sure, I can work retail, but that pays far worse than teaching. It's not like my MFA qualifies me to work on Wall Street. The reality is that many of us who earn MFAs need to teach for a living because we don't really have other reasonable options.

But the nice thing is that even though I don't have a full time job and adjunct teaching doesn't really pay a professional wage in proportion to my level of education and experience, it's still a decent paying part time job, or at least it can be (I guess I'm lucky enough to have landed a position that pays toward the high end of the adjunct scale). For 2009, I will have made more money than I've ever made in my life. My taxable income will be about double what it's ever previously been. So that's not all bad (of course, I've essentially been on or below the poverty line my entire adult life). But even so, it still feels like I'm getting a bit ripped off. I teach four classes a semester. Full timers at my school teach five. If I had a full time position, I'd make close to double what I make now, plus I'd have benefits like insurance. That's a ridiculous difference. Plus, there's the factor that I'm technically part time, but teaching isn't like other part time jobs. I have to take my work home with me. I'm emotionally invested in the progress of my students. I work weekends. I stay up late at night grading papers. But the reality is this: what other choice do I have?

I think there are a couple of ways to think about this pickle. One is to realize that my efforts now will (I hope) pay off in a few years. It often sucks to be an adjunct. But in a few years, when I land a full time job, I'll be in a much better position. If I were to abandon teaching in favor of a better paying low-level office job, I could do that and probably make more money right now. But there wouldn't be much future in that. If I were to get a $10 an hour job filing paperwork or answering phones, I'd be okay, but ten years from now, I'd still only be making $11 an hour or something. But if I put up with the hassles of being an adjunct for a couple more years, I could be making double what I make now, maybe triple or quadruple. My professor was totally wrong: it does make sense to get into teaching for the money. Although the money isn't great now, I'm sowing the seeds that will grow in the future.

The second thing I think I have to consider is that it might be useful to reevaluate my efforts. I'm working a part time job. A full time professor at my school is expected to teach five classes, advise students, attend faculty meetings and so forth. I'm only expected to teach four classes. So if a full time position is forty hours per week, then my job should be less than thirty. I'm at school in the classroom or office hours about eighteen hours a week. So I shouldn't reasonably spend more than about ten additional hours grading papers or doing prep work. If I spend more time than that, then I'm really a bit of a sucker, working on my own time rather than the time I get paid for. But that is how I've regularly worked. I ordinarily spend much more time than that because I care about my students and I want them to succeed, and how much they get out of my class depends on how much work I put into the class. But is that fair? Should I care? Is it reasonable to expect me to put out that much effort for the amount I'm being compensated? I honestly think I should do less work. Maybe what this means is that I should collect fewer drafts of papers so I have less work to do at home. I should write fewer notes on students' work and adopt a simpler rubric for grading, where all I have to do is check a few boxes. The advantage to me would be obvious, yet I feel like my students would suffer. But then again, If I reduced my efforts I think my students would probably get a comparable experience to what they get from other teachers. I've often had grateful students say how nice it is to get such detailed feedback from me, which leads me to believe they aren't getting that elsewhere, and I've had students say that in their other writing courses, the teacher's expectations seem to be nothing more than that a student hand in a paper that is typed, that the quality of thought and skill are not full evaluated. If I lowered my standards and made my life easier, I think I would then be a fairly average teacher. Maybe being average is fine. After all, I'm not being paid to be above average.

I don't know. I can probably do some of that, streamline my process a bit to make my life easier. But I don't know if I could ever fully detach myself from my students. I really wish I could. It would be nice not to think or care about them. But I do care.

Anyway, back to the main point. The need to make a living is a giant obstacle that has to be overcome. The greatest thing a writer needs is time to write, but when one is trying to pay bills, it becomes tough to find enough time. Maybe the issue really is just that I have to put up with the unfortunate situation now and things will be easier down the line. If I can manage to publish enough in the next few years, then maybe I'll actually land a full time creative writing professorship some day. And then I'll be able to teach fewer classes, make enough money just from teaching where I won't have to worry about additional income in the breaks between semesters, and basically it will feel like I've got tons of time to write. But actually reaching that point is tough.

I think one of the toughest things for me to accept about the dreaded real world that we all must enter when we leave school is how hard it is at the beginning. I always figured it would be easier at the start and would get harder as one went throughout life, but I actually think it's the opposite. When one is young, one still has all the expenses of an adult life, but one has less ability to make an income that will fully cover those expenses. I figure my basic needs won't substantially change in the next ten or twenty years, except that I have loans to pay off now that will be paid off then, so basically I need more money now than I will need in ten years. Yet my earning ability will likely be far higher in the future than it is now. Right now I'm barely scraping by, but if I have a full time professorship in ten years, I'll have more money than I need. It just seems unfair that I can't swap out my situations and make that money now and then comfortably live on less then.

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."

Youth

I was thinking the other day about youth and inexperience. Mainly this was in regards to my novel about twenty-somethings. I was trying to figure out how to compose an engaging query letter that will snag an agent's attention, but it just seems like an impossible task. Is this because my book is simply not that good? I don't think so. Although I imagine it's not the greatest book ever or the best thing I'll ever write, I still feel pretty pleased with it. I've gotten good feedback from trusted readers. Even when it was at an earlier stage a few drafts ago, I got good responses. A couple people had the same major issue with it in their critique, which was simply that they wanted more of it, to spend more time with the characters. Hurray, right? But how do I distill what is decent about it into an engaging hook? There doesn't really seem to be a hook. Every time I tried to figure out what the conflict is at the heart of the book, what the major struggles are for the characters I was left feeling like it doesn't sound all that interesting. It's partly the high concept issue I discussed last time, but there's something else there, too. And that, I think, is the problem of youth.

I've written a book about twenty-something characters struggling with twenty-something problems. My hope is that those issues translate to other readers, that older folks could read the book and remember back to when they were younger. But maybe they wouldn't care much. They're past that stage of life and would rather move forward. Or another way of thinking about it is that for young characters there's an inherent lack of high stakes. Although the conflicts and struggles are very real and important to those characters experiencing them, they might not matter to an older reader. I'm not so many years removed from my characters, and already I'm starting to think that. I'm sure another ten or twenty years down the line and I'll have even less interest in young people. I remember a girl at the bookstore where I work was telling me why I should read the Twilight series of books. She said they aren't simply about vampires, but they're more about teen angst and young love. And I thought that was the perfect reason for me to not read those books. I might have some interest in reading about vampires, but teen angst and young love rank pretty low on my list of things that engage me.

So is my book then doomed? What interested me about that story when I started it a few years ago seems less significant to me now. But there's a good chance that my newer ideas will stay interesting to me for a while. Really, the kicker came when I was trying to come up with a hook opening line for a query, and I was thinking about what it is that my main character really wants and what the challenge is for him. He's a young writer who hasn't experienced enough life yet to have much worth writing about. But if that's the case, and the book is a metafictional work that he is writing, then doesn't it follow that there's not much worth reading there? Not entirely. By the time the character starts writing the story, more has happened to him. Yet, I can't quite crack how to explain that in a snappy few sentences. I just kept getting into the mind of an agent and reading a query letter that describes a novel by a young novelist about a young novelist with little life experience struggling to write a novel. How could that be anything but an automatic rejection? Even if it's good (which I think my book is), it seems so clichéd and self-referential. The chances of that kind of book being very decent and having much appeal to a wide audience seem pretty remote. If I can't imagine me requesting the manuscript as an agent, how could I expect an actual agent to want to look at it? But that's not to suggest writing it wasn't valuable even if nobody else ever reads it.

So when it got me thinking about youth, I started reflecting on young I still really am. I dreaded my last birthday when I hit 30. That seemed so old to me. It was depressing to reach that point and have so little to show for my life, to not even have a full time job. But when I think much about it, thirty is awfully young for a writer. How many writers do much that's any good by that age? Sure, there are the handful of Hemingways and Shelleys out there, but most don't get going until much later. Even Philip Roth, who made a splashy debut in his twenties, didn't hit hit his stride for about another decade, and then he arguably didn't climax for another three or four decades. It takes so much practice to get good at writing that the chances of getting in enough practice by age thirty are pretty slim. So for now I'll keep practicing and living, and eventually I'll have plenty to write about and the skills with which to write effectively.

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.