How the writing is going
Fighting inertia one word at a time
It’s been a while since I wrote about writing, and I’d like to get back to it today.
I’ve been keeping this here Substack running for around 18 months, which I’m proud of even though I recently slipped to posting every other week instead of weekly. Whatever! It’s something I do absolutely for free and it keeps me flexing a part of my brain I definitely don’t access at work. There isn’t much incentive to do it all other than a love of the game. What a curse blessing.
They (I) say you make time for the things that really matter. Writing does matter quite a lot to me. I know that because when I slide into flow for any period of time while writing, I come out of it feeling lighter, happier. As though something has been accomplished and the horizon has opened to the possibility of more. Even just a couple hundred words tacked onto the very early stages of a second novel I’d like to write is nourishing. I don’t have a clear sense of where it’s going or what it’ll be, but actively chipping away at that unknown feels a lot better than simply thinking about it.
That effort is in fact the only soothing force in my relationship to an—let’s face it—extremely broken system of publishing. I’ve done almost everything in my own power to move the process of trying to publish a first novel forward, from several revisions based on peer feedback to reworking my pitch a million times to building out and querying my way through an agent list to sitting around and just waiting. I mean, I even project managed the hell out of my last major revision with a table that listed out every chapter on the y-axis and distinct elements of craft on the x-axis, populating the cells with specific changes I knew I needed to make and then doing a front-to-back plot edit, then character edit, then pacing, POV, dialogue…you get the idea.
Short of spending at least a thousand bucks to get a professional editor to poke holes in my work so I can look through them and decide how to patch things up again, this control-obsessed freak is out of ideas on what to do besides keep sending my pitch and first chapter(s) to literary agents that might like the story, and pray they do. Some have said they do in fact like it, and want to read the whole thing, but no one has offered representation. Yet! (You’re damn right I said “yet”. Have your own back.)
So. To keep my sanity in this corner of things-that-matter-to-me, it really just makes sense to be onto the next thing. That’s how I get better anyway. And convince everyone, myself included, that the journey is the destination. Be it fretting over finer aspects of a mostly-done book about an aimless son of Soviet Jewish immigrants who becomes a father due to an accidental pregnancy (Fatherboy), or a just-started, alternative history of a major tech company that builds Artificial General Intelligence and sees it change the world in irreversible ways (Bad Actors). Maybe someday you’ll get to read both in print.
In any case, that’s how the writing is going. What about you?
Yesterday when I was at the hospital for my volunteer work, there was a 90 year old man on the list for me to visit. Apparently he was a poet. He had family there and was asleep when I went by so I didn’t get a chance to talk with him. Earlier, he apparently told the care team that “some people die when they have nothing else to say. He still has two ideas of books to write.”
If you need more motivation remember what Mary Oliver said: “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
Keep writing Victor. Write for you and no one else. Give it both power and time, and it will give you both back.