What was your most valuable lesson?

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Lex Black said:
Not from my first book, but from my last: just about a month ago, in fact. I had already given up thinking I was a writer, and while at a convention I attend each year, I ran into some recognized professionals. I had an old copy of my last MS, the one I slaved over for the last five years.

One of them took it, spent approximately six seconds reading it, and gave what I can only describe as a derisive laugh.

It really cemented for me that, while I have loved good stories all my life, I'm not in a position to be trying to tell them myself, no matter how much "positive feedback" I've accrued over the years. It leaves a hole in my heart, but I (and everyone around me) is better off if I just stick to being a cheerleader for actual writers.
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I'll not mention any specific books, but think about several best sellers over the last couple of years. It's a grey area I know, but what would that writer have said about such books. Do you want the approbation of such people, to be recognised as a high literary author, or just to sell lots of books that people will buy by the '000 - and enjoy?
 
Jason Byrne said:
Oh, @Marc Joan , I meant to ask you — when was it that you truly felt successful?
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?? Successful? I'm not successful. If you want to know what writerly success feels like, ask @TaraRose.

But your question started me thinking - when have I ever felt truly successful? At 3 am this morning, beside a gently snoring wife, I was still trying to think of an example. Thanks, Jason.

I suppose avoiding terminal and catastrophic failure is success of a kind. To that extent, I'm successful.

Of course, I'm very pleased if I get something published, and grateful, don't get me wrong -- but it doesn't feel like success. If I had to analyse it, I suppose it's because getting a short story published is just one small step in what I am aiming for. I am writing shorts because I like them, true, but also to learn the art of writing, and to generate ideas and material for a set of three novels, the plots for which are continuing to fester at the back of my mind. Getting some of those stories published is essential for me, because I don't have enough confidence in my writing to embark on a novel without external validation of some of my material.

Also, I am trying to approach writing as a sequence of steps, each of which is to be enjoyed in itself. Better to travel than to arrive, and all that. The underpinning logic is that life can change, drastically and irrevocably, from one minute to the next. How many half-written novels get buried with wannabe writers every day? You just don't know how long you've got. My point is that while it is great to have an ambitious, long-term goal, you are setting yourself up as a hostage to fortune if you pin everything on accomplishment of that goal. So I try to find pleasure in the small steps that lead to that goal. If I get there, great, if not, then I have enjoyed the walk.

So getting a short story published is not success, but it is a valuable component of success...I think that is what I am trying to say, but I haven't had enough sleep.

Sorry about all this vaguely morbid cod philosophy, but don't blame me, blame Jason. Darn you and your darned questions, Jason Byrne! And darn your camel!
 
Lex Black said:
I was trying to write anything I could. Mostly in my preferred genres (sci-fi, fantasy, horror, weird fiction, et al.) but also articles and anything else I could apply myself to. None of it worked. None of it.
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Then the problem could be one of placing and refining your work. It's a bit of a numbers game -- in terms of shorts, my feeling is that first you need to write a good number -- say, 25 -- and then you need to find as many markets for each of those as possible, and send each story to each potential market, and rewrite each one after it gets rejected a few times, and just keep refining them and re-sending them. You can't take rejection personally, it could just be a case that the editor published something similar in the last issue, and doesn't want it for this issue.

And also, when you say 'trying to write anything you could', does that mean you were coming at it from a technical angle (the story arc requires x, y, z, and the genre requires a,b, so let me write a,b, x, y, z); or were you writing things because you just had to? Some people are very good at writing things according to a technical blueprint -- it works for them. Some people tend to produce better work if they are writing something that bleeds straight from the heart. I don't know which category you fall into. They are not mutually exclusive, of course.

If I were you, I'd give writing a rest for a couple of weeks at least -- sounds like you are -- and one day, when it feels right, find a quiet place and see if there is something in you that just must find a place on a page. You might be surprised.
 
Marc Joan said:
?? Successful? I'm not successful. If you want to know what writerly success feels like, ask @TaraRose.

But your question started me thinking - when have I ever felt truly successful? At 3 am this morning, beside a gently snoring wife, I was still trying to think of an example. Thanks, Jason.

I suppose avoiding terminal and catastrophic failure is success of a kind. To that extent, I'm successful.

Of course, I'm very pleased if I get something published, and grateful, don't get me wrong -- but it doesn't feel like success. If I had to analyse it, I suppose it's because getting a short story published is just one small step in what I am aiming for. I am writing shorts because I like them, true, but also to learn the art of writing, and to generate ideas and material for a set of three novels, the plots for which are continuing to fester at the back of my mind. Getting some of those stories published is essential for me, because I don't have enough confidence in my writing to embark on a novel without external validation of some of my material.

Also, I am trying to approach writing as a sequence of steps, each of which is to be enjoyed in itself. Better to travel than to arrive, and all that. The underpinning logic is that life can change, drastically and irrevocably, from one minute to the next. How many half-written novels get buried with wannabe writers every day? You just don't know how long you've got. My point is that while it is great to have an ambitious, long-term goal, you are setting yourself up as a hostage to fortune if you pin everything on accomplishment of that goal. So I try to find pleasure in the small steps that lead to that goal. If I get there, great, if not, then I have enjoyed the walk.

So getting a short story published is not success, but it is a valuable component of success...I think that is what I am trying to say, but I haven't had enough sleep.

Sorry about all this vaguely morbid cod philosophy, but don't blame me, blame Jason. Darn you and your darned questions, Jason Byrne! And darn your camel!
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Uht-oh... :oops:

I think you're successful, @Marc Joan! :D

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Big sorry!
 
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Marc Joan said:
Better to travel than to arrive...
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This is the heart of the matter. I've spent my whole life obsessed with the destination, as I tirelessly wrote literally dozens of stories in the fantasy genre, in which the single overarching lesson is that the journey is always more important than the destination. Usually, it turns out what you were after wasn't even important, and it was the journey for which you yearned, all along!

It's just a really hard idea to quash — the desire for vindication, reward... comfort, even affluence, recognition...

I really need to spend some time in a monastery. My ego is about as big as they come.
 
Lex, I know what you mean about writing being painful. It was for me for a while. Like physically painful. I wanted to say so much, and I just couldn't make it come out right. It hurt really, really bad. I kept throwing myself against the page, hoping and praying it would work this time, and it never did.

Like I said, I gave it a break, and then one day I *had* to write something, so I did. It turned out to be my first good story ever. Good as in, I wrote what I meant to say in the way I meant to say it.

Re small successes, small triumphs are the pennies of self-esteem, as Florence King said. Be the sort of person who picks up pennies! (As I am, lol!)
 
Another thing I did: I had gotten a number of writing manuals, and pretty soon into the first one, I was instructed to write a paragraph about X. I sourly muttered that I didn't know anything about X, so I skipped it. Next assignment was the same: Write about Y. Again, I bitterly griped that I had never experienced Y. And so on.

So instead I sat down and wrote down a capsule of every experience that I HAD had. Honestly, up till then I had never tried to write anything from personal experience. I felt as if I had not had much of an interesting life, never done anything interesting, etc. But I wrote down things that had really stuck with me, and soon I had a whole list of things to write stories about.

So I ended up writing a long series of stories from personal experience. I didn't know whether anybody else would ever be interested in them, but I found that once I started writing out my own autobiography, so to speak, my creativity came unstuck, and I started thinking up stories based just on ideas.

So maybe you should try writing about personal experiences. I know that formula stories never, ever worked well for me.
 
Meerkat said:
Another thing I did: I had gotten a number of writing manuals, and pretty soon into the first one, I was instructed to write a paragraph about X. I sourly muttered that I didn't know anything about X, so I skipped it. Next assignment was the same: Write about Y. Again, I bitterly griped that I had never experienced Y. And so on.

So instead I sat down and wrote down a capsule of every experience that I HAD had. Honestly, up till then I had never tried to write anything from personal experience. I felt as if I had not had much of an interesting life, never done anything interesting, etc. But I wrote down things that had really stuck with me, and soon I had a whole list of things to write stories about.

So I ended up writing a long series of stories from personal experience. I didn't know whether anybody else would ever be interested in them, but I found that once I started writing out my own autobiography, so to speak, my creativity came unstuck, and I started thinking up stories based just on ideas.

So maybe you should try writing about personal experiences. I know that formula stories never, ever worked well for me.
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Awesome advice, @Meerkat! And, as it happens, it turns out that @Lex Black is a good writer. He just doesn't know it.
 
Learning about the business side of the writing habit has been illuminating and frustrating and annoying. The writing remains... whatever it is today. I guarantee it will be different tomorrow and even different when it's re-written. For a vocational choice that is basically isolating, I've found I receive more community support than anything else I've ever done. ;)
 
Richard Sutton said:
Learning about the business side of the writing habit has been illuminating and frustrating and annoying. The writing remains... whatever it is today. I guarantee it will be different tomorrow and even different when it's re-written. For a vocational choice that is basically isolating, I've found I receive more community support than anything else I've ever done. ;)
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I like that — well-put, Richard.
 
Meerkat said:
Another thing I did: I had gotten a number of writing manuals, and pretty soon into the first one, I was instructed to write a paragraph about X. I sourly muttered that I didn't know anything about X, so I skipped it. Next assignment was the same: Write about Y. Again, I bitterly griped that I had never experienced Y. And so on.

So instead I sat down and wrote down a capsule of every experience that I HAD had. Honestly, up till then I had never tried to write anything from personal experience. I felt as if I had not had much of an interesting life, never done anything interesting, etc. But I wrote down things that had really stuck with me, and soon I had a whole list of things to write stories about.

So I ended up writing a long series of stories from personal experience. I didn't know whether anybody else would ever be interested in them, but I found that once I started writing out my own autobiography, so to speak, my creativity came unstuck, and I started thinking up stories based just on ideas.

So maybe you should try writing about personal experiences. I know that formula stories never, ever worked well for me.
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Spot on. I've read that one of the rules about writing is that you should write about what you know. That's what I do (because it's easier and I don't want eg to research 15 th century social behaviour etc to write a story) and the story usually flows. @jasonbyrne wrote in another thread that he was all alone in a warehouse (at work). How many stories can there be in that - I can think of a few.
 
James Marinero said:
Spot on. I've read that one of the rules about writing is that you should write about what you know. That's what I do (because it's easier and I don't want eg to research 15 th century social behaviour etc to write a story) and the story usually flows. @jasonbyrne wrote in another thread that he was all alone in a warehouse (at work). How many stories can there be in that - I can think of a few.
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The boss comes back from a week-and-a-half's vacation in Alaska on Monday, though. I'll be he has some stories too!
 
James Marinero said:
Spot on. I've read that one of the rules about writing is that you should write about what you know. That's what I do (because it's easier and I don't want eg to research 15 th century social behaviour etc to write a story) and the story usually flows. @jasonbyrne wrote in another thread that he was all alone in a warehouse (at work). How many stories can there be in that - I can think of a few.
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I tend to write what I enjoy. Although I do want to write a factual based-on-experience book titled

'Thinking Inside the Box - Transform your lessons into card games' :D

Not quite so catchy!
 
Things I've learnt...

I have always read, and I needed to have read
No one is waiting for my book.
No one cares about it like I do. At least for now and possibly for ever.
I have to carry on with every expectation, whilst also having no expectation.
There is much of great merit already out there, but money's at stake, the zeitgeist is mercurial and this isn't necessarily a meritocracy.
It will start as a feeling, and the writing will mostly feel like forcing rhubarb in the dark for perhaps 85% of the first draft. Then I know I'm going to break it's back and finish it, and then start crafting, and it gets exciting.
 
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The Eschaton

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