The story that was rejected fifty-two times, accepted four times and what I've learned about being a writer

We're often told as writers that getting published can be a question of luck as well as ability. You could write "The Cask of Amontillado," something centuries of readers and critics alike will treasure, but if you get a reader at a journal who isn't really up to snuff, or who has a thing about stories with violence or revenge in them, or who isn't having a great day, you'll strike out. I'm fully aware of how human readers for journals are, having done a year or it myself. You will, of course, make your odds better by writing something good, but that just gets you in the door with hundreds of others. Getting published sometimes comes down to giving one particular editor the story she was looking for on one particular day.

That said, as my 9th grade science teacher always said, "The harder I work, the luckier I get." When I first started submitting stories to journals a little over seven years ago, most ignored me. All of the higher-tier journals completely ignored me. (What do I mean by "higher-tier"? I don't want to get to much into it, but I guess the journals from tier five and above on this list, although the list is a bit dated now.) After nearly a year, I got an acceptance from a good, but not elite, journal. Another year went by, and then I got a second, then a third a month later. I've kept getting an acceptance or two a year from the non-elites since then. 

I'm happy when anyone likes what I've written. I really am. It's gratifying for even the humblest of journals to publish a story I wrote, because there's no journal so small my story didn't have to get picked over a lot of others, stories whose authors loved them as much as I love mine. 

Still, I've had a longing to see if I could make it into one of the higher tiers. There are two reasons. One is I'd just like to have a somewhat broader audience. Secondly, a friend of mine told me when she got a story in the high-tier New England Review, she got publishers asking her if she had a novel ready. Since I've had a hard time getting people to look at either novel I've written, I'd love a short cut.

A few years ago, I started getting more than just form rejections from some of the higher-tiered journals. There's actually a rejectionwiki someone keeps that helps you to know if your apparent "encouraging rejection" was actually meant to be encouraging. Most of mine were.

One of the most incredible string of encouraging rejections I got was from the now-defunct Glimmer Train. I somehow managed to make the finals of contests they ran three times in a row, without winning any of them. At the time, I was somewhere between excited and completely demoralized. I didn't feel like I could possibly write a better story than those, and even though I'd gotten closer, it seemed at the time like that was as close as I was ever going to get.

There's a reason I've written more about rejection on this blog than any other subject.

I decided I'd try to at least get over it enough to try to find a home for those three stories. Once I did that, I'd think about hanging it up for good. 

One of the stories, "Collision," I think I might never get published anywhere. A number of journals other than Glimmer Train have said they liked it, but I think they're all a little nervous about publishing it. One writer friend of mine who read it said immediately that it would never get published anywhere. Essentially, it's within the "#metoo" sphere of influence, and I think it's too hard for editors to tell where the story's allegiances lie. One editor said as much. I've tried rewrites to make it a little clearer, but I think it's too ambiguous a treatment of the subject for nearly any journal.

The second of that triumvirate of stories, called "Jajangmyeon," will be published this winter by The Chattahoochee Review. I'm really excited about this. The editors suggested a few changes that I think made it a lot better. I thought highly of the editors at this journal during my interaction with them. They were prompt to reply and insightful, and I couldn't like the journal any more if it had the clout of The New Yorker. 

Finally, my story "Love Hotel," I can now announce since the journal has, recently won the Robert Day Award for fiction at New Letters. If you believe in tiers, New Letters is the highest-rated journal that's accepted me yet. It may not get me Nate Silver asking me about novels in my desk drawer, but it's a big breakthrough for me. Mostly, I'm just happy someone saw in this story what I've seen all along. Some writers say they can't pick a favorite story they've written, that it's like asking them to pick a favorite child. I don't feel that way. "Love Hotel" is my favorite.

Even a strong story can have a twisted path to publication

Actually, New Letters wasn't the first to see something in it. It's the first story that ever earned me more than a form rejection from The New Yorker. The Georgia Review, and Hopkins Review each told me I'd made it to the final round of cuts before falling out. A number of other elite journals gave me my first non-form rejection: Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Granta, The Missouri Review, The Common, and and a few others. Each time I got one of these, again, I'd be stuck between elation and the most abject feelings of dejection.  

I decided to just start sending it out to whatever journal and resolved that anyone who wanted it could have it. About a week after I did that, I got an acceptance. It was from a brand-new journal. Part of me wanted to just let them have it, just so the story landed somewhere, but at the last second, something stopped me, told me that I'd already placed stories in okay places, but this story was worth believing in enough to keep trying for something bigger. 

So I told that journal it had just been snatched up right before they got to it, which, strictly speaking, isn't good writer behavior. A few weeks later, New Letters told me it was a finalist in their contest. While I was waiting for them to pick the winner, another journal said they'd publish it. I hadn't pulled it yet, because I wasn't sure it would be published in New Letters. This third journal agreed to wait to see if it won the contest. I pulled it from everywhere else then.

Or at least I thought I did. I forgot about one journal, because I'd submitted it so many places, I missed when I had to withdraw it. Also, because I was on the road and not working from my home computer when this all happened, it was hard for me to see where exactly I'd pulled the story from. This last journal happened to also accept the story, meaning I had to explain to them what had happened. All the editors I had to turn down were gracious about it, which was probably more kindness than I deserved.

What I learned from all this

There are two lessons to this. One is that there are just some editors who are never going to like my work. I'm looking at you, Colorado Review. I'll never get so much as a "we liked your work and would like to see more" from some places, so matter how strong the story is. "Love Hotel," which moved the likes of The New Yorker and The Georgia Review, got form rejections from some journals that don't appear on the list of 500 I linked above at all. Finding the right audience is a little like finding a romantic partner. The fact that everyone isn't into you doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. 

The second lesson is a little harder for me to absorb. Of course, I edited "Love Hotel" a lot before I first sent it out to journals. But after a year of near rejections, I looked at it closely for the first time in a few months. I made one major change to it, one which shortened it by a thousand words and made the main character's motivation clearer. (In fact, I had edited it so many times, I had to name one version of it something different just to keep it separate from all the other versions. This one I called "Lobu Hoteru," after the Korean pronunciation of the loan words "love hotel." That's the one that won, so now I'm stuck with "Lobu Hoteru" for all time.)

I hate waiting. I like to write stories, edit them, and send them out. It takes long enough waiting for a response, I don't want to wait forever to put something out. But even though I've written a few stories in a short amount of time that worked and were published, I think the main thing I've learned as a writer is that there's no substitute for time on your work. Writing a story, re-writing it, putting it away, re-writing again, and then putting it away even longer before re-working it yet again, is the surest way to make sure your story's putting its best foot forward.

In my day job, I'm always pushing people to not let making a perfect product be a reason to never produce anything. And at work, that's the right attitude. I have to learn to separate my work from my writing, though, or I'm going to continue to get close-but-not-quites. 

I just re-learned this lesson last week, when The Missouri Review gave me such an encouraging rejection on a story I wrote post-"Love Hotel," I thought they were actually accepting the story for a paragraph. Ultimately, though, they let it go, because they felt it got a little too windy. I looked at it again, and sure enough, after being away from it a while, I found 500 words to cut pretty easily, words that the story was better without. The editor also suggested I give the reader a little more of the main character's internal struggle, which I think I did with two sentences.

So while I'm elated by the success of "Lobu Hoteru," I'm also kicking myself for not waiting to send out my latest story, which might challenge "Lobu Hoteru" for favorite child status, a little longer. I'm wishing I'd made it just a little harder for The Missouri Review to turn it down. I won't get that chance again. 

What I've learned about writing is that it's extremely unfair. You can write a story that's 98% gold, and that two percent you didn't quite iron out is somehow making the whole thing not come together. There are so many elements to keep track of and pay attention to and be sensitive to, it feels impossible. But it won't do any good to either be in denial about that two percent, or to complain about it. The only way to cope with crippling depression post-rejection is to act like you're not depressed and work harder.   

"Reading other writers will affect my voice while I'm writing" is a baseless fear for most of us

This blog used to be full of either complaining about the difficulties of advancing as a writer or occasional advice to developing writers on the rare occasions when I felt like I'd figured something out. In the last few years, it's tended to lean more toward my own idiomatic version of literary analysis, one inspired by literary theory, literary criticism, and the genre of Protestant sermons. Occasionally, I've looked at movies, TV, or novels, but mostly, I've been focused on short stories. 

I don't know if my readings of short stories are good, but I know this much: the deep concentration on the stories that's necessary to write something at least halfway sensible about them has made my own short stories better. I know this from the empirical evidence, such as writing provides. I've been accepted in more journals and a few more highly regarded journals than I used to. I've also gotten far, far more positive feedback from the elite journals than I used to. (They completely ignored me for years up until a few years ago.) But I also know it because my own inner reader looks at what I write now, especially after I've had time to get away from it, and is just a lot more satisfied with it. Sometimes, I've even surprised I wrote it. 

I could really sum up everything I've learned about writing in the last seven years with some really obvious advice. If you want to be a writer, read a couple of books on how to write, then read a lot of whatever genre it is you want to write in. More importantly than reading a lot, read closely. 

And I could leave it there, but there's a concern a lot of writers have. Some really good writers even have mentioned it. They're concerned that if they read a lot of other writers, especially while they're deep in the process of writing something themselves, the voice of the person they're reading will bleed into their own writing. Some writers have said they completely cut off input once they start writing for this reason. 

It's an understandable concern. Writers want to have their own style, not just imitate someone else's. Certainly, when I'm writing, I tend to cut off input, although for me it's more because when I feel the urge to write something, I don't want to interrupt it with anything else. It's more about striking while the iron is hot than it is about keeping my voice pure. I've only got so much time, and when I've got words to put down, I tend to make that my priority. 

But let's grant it's a valid concern. I still don't think it's a reason to keep developing writers from reading broadly and deeply, even while writing. (In fact, if you're going to follow the advice some give to write every day, that would mean you could never read if you wanted to avoid reading while writing.) 

There are two reasons. First, while developing, it's unlikely that accidentally picking up influences from the best can do anything but good for your writing. It's a lot like how you suddenly play tennis better after watching Wimbledon for a couple of weeks. As long as you're not flat our trying to transcribe Pynchon into your own auto-biographical-based story, the influence is probably a good thing. It's not going to magically make you Pynchon, but it can help you unlock new levels. 

The second reason is that even after you've started to develop your own style and voice, you didn't develop it out of nowhere. It's always been a mix of what you've read and the unique impact that had on your psyche. It's always been a tension between what's inside you and what's coming at you, trying to change what's inside of you. That tension doesn't stop while you're writing, even if you avoid reading. Reading just makes it more overt. At least you'll know where the voices in your head are coming from.

All writing is a lot of hard work that you hope serendipity somehow takes a hold of. That's why it's so devastating to lose something you've written. People might think, well, you wrote it once, you can write it again, but it isn't like that. It's like how Sauron couldn't make a second ring because he'd put too much of his own power into the first one. Once you write a thing, you've kind of emptied that part of you into the work, and the things that were coming together to make the you who wrote that work will never coalesce in that same way again. Reading while writing might mess with your voice, but it's possible it will mess with your voice in a way that's interesting, that the new hybrid will be something you never thought was in you. Because it literally wasn't until the second you wrote it. 

More daydream than lucid dream

One figure of speech about writing fiction that's held up for me is that it's like dreaming, or dreaming while awake, or lucid dreaming. But I'd add that the most apt simile is that it's like daydreaming. I think a lot of writing advice gives the impression that the best way to write is to keep a dream journal, wake up in the middle of the night, and write furiously while your dream is still fresh and your conscious, linguistic, rational mind hasn't completely taken back over yet. This is, in fact, almost exactly the advice Olen Butler gives in his fiction how-to book, From Where You Dream.

While this image of a good story as something like a dream converted into words has held up for me, I'd like to add the caveat that it's more like a daydream for me than lucid dreaming. In both a day dream and the dreaming we do during our deep sleep, our brains tend to churn over whatever has been occupying their neurons in the last few hours before the dream begins. With a daydream, the link is somewhat direct: someone says something about getting takeout, and you start thinking about how good takeout was in Korea, and then you wonder what it would be like to deliver food in Korea on a moped, and then you've imagined this moped delivery guy's life, and you realize you've been dreaming a story. Everything is a bit linear in your thinking process. If you can remember enough, you'll recall how you got from point A to B to Z. In a dream during sleep, this linear process doesn't seem to hold.

The majority of stories I've written have started as daydreams. I'll use "Sunflower," which recently got published, as an example. I think part of how I ended up dreaming this story came from reading another short story, "The Stamp Collector" by Dave King, which I wrote about here. It's about an alcoholic in search of his rock bottom. I was sort of following some thought having to do with that story, and I was also hating myself for having just eaten too much again.

I was thinking about how eating too much isn't just bad for my vanity or my health, but it's actually a sin of sorts, because it means I'm using more of the Earth's limited resources than I should be. Overeating is like leaving the lights on. I was thinking about what would happen if everyone who over-consumed got what they deserved, and somehow, my brain put together King's story with overeating and the karma thereof, and I landed on the idea of a karmic rock bottom.

That's just where I started from, of course. As I wrote the story, I had to poke and prod, and I used the naturally occurring elements to build further than what my initial burst of imagination had been able to accomplish. Calling the woman Sunflower and then using the image of a sunflower as a central symbol came later. The dream gave me the scaffolding, but from there, I had to use my normal brain to finish the work. That's why I feel like writing a story is more akin to daydreaming than deep-sleep dreaming, because it's a negotiation between normal cognitive functioning and the breaking loose from reality that comes with a dream. It's a middle state between the logic of your brain after it's had its morning coffee and it's focused on work and your brain when it's whacked out on vodka and Gatorade and you pass out on the couch.

Writer problems: pseudoplagiaphobia

I vividly remember my first college class with a research paper as part of the requirements. A few weeks into the course, a day was set aside for us all to announce out loud what subject we had chosen and the outline of the paper we planned. It was very important to me that I be the first to present my planned paper. Why? Because I was certain that the idea I'd landed on was so good it would be obvious to everyone else, and if I didn't present it before everyone else got a chance, three other students would announce they were doing versions of the same thing.

After a few semesters, I finally realized that I was older than most of the others students, had spent time in the Marine Corps, and was therefore a lot more serious about going to college than nearly everyone. Which meant that nobody was stealing any of my ideas. In fact, they usually showed up to class on the day we were supposed to announce our topics without any idea at all what they were going to write about. In other words, my fears that just because something had occurred to me meant it would occur to others were almost always groundless. I got over pseudoplagiaphobia, the fear of falsely appearing to have stolen an idea from someone when I was merely the victim of having had the same idea as someone else. (Side note: a quick Google search tells me I might be the first to coin this word, but I'm sure a more industrious researcher might tell me I'm wrong.)

It's a whole other story writing fiction, however. In college, I only had to worry about whether someone else in my class would happen to have the same idea as me, and the odds of that were pretty long. But when I'm writing something where the potential audience includes the whole world, there's a much bigger pool of other writers to worry about having had "my" idea first. Worse, there's no possible way to investigate the collected writings of all humanity in order to know if anyone ever did something similar enough to what I've done that I might be accused of stealing it. I could check for titles, of course, but generally, I already know whether my title is sui generis without having to check, and that's not really what I was worried about, anyway. Repeating a title isn't a big deal, but repeating a story--or coming close to repeating a story--is. With the whole world to worry about, the odds I'll stumble into something someone else wrote become a lot higher.

This doesn't usually bother me, but it did bother me over the last few months when I, probably like a lot of other writers, was pushing my way through my COVID-19 novel. (I mean I wrote it during my free time I got as a result of COVID-19, not that it's about the disease.) The novel started out as one thing, but it pretty quickly morphed into something else, and when it changed, I suddenly knew where I wanted to go with it. The change was something I was really happy with, but about halfway through writing, I started thinking that surely, someone else had done something similar at some point, because if it occurred to me like that, it must have occurred to someone else.

Like the thing pseudoplagiaphobia itself worries about, there's probably nothing new about an obsession over whether your idea is really new. The best advice I can give to you if you're suffering from it is that if you've been writing long enough or if you're talented enough that people might actually read your work, then you're going to have a style unique enough that even if you do happen to stumble into the same plot points or character sketches as someone else, it's still going to feel pretty solidly your own.

The professor in one of those classes from my undergraduate years later became a friend of mine. He once was talking about how early 20th century writers were struggling with trying to find something new to say, and in an off-handed way, he threw out this line: "The Barenaked Ladies sang 'It's All Been Done,' and even that was already done a hundred years ago." The good news about the impossibility of coming up with something truly novel is that people are fairly forgiving about ideas with a lot of overlap. Hell, Moulin Rouge came out barely two years after Shakespeare in Love, and even though the second was nearly a transposition of the first to a different era and visual aesthetic, people gave both a ton of awards. (And if memory serves, that was also about the same time Hollywood found that yes, America did have room in its heart for two separate disaster flicks about an asteroid hitting Earth.)

It's true that in a very big world with a lot of talented people writing fiction just like you are, there's bound to be somebody who did something like what you did. If you're really unlucky, there might be a story out there that's a lot like yours, and you won't find out until you've published your own work. That's not really a reason to write in fear, though. You're as likely to end up with readers finding the two works to be in conversation with each other as you are to be accused of stealing an idea you didn't even know existed before you. If that happens, it's probably a good thing. Teachers love assignments that force students to compare and contrast, and if you've got something that forms a Venn diagram with another story, you might just end up being on somebody's syllabus.

You can probably rest easy that if you read a reasonable amount and write well enough to find a readership that you don't need to spend years making sure nobody already did what you are doing.

(Now, that being said, here are two things I've discovered you will have a very, very difficult time not repeating: coffee shop names and craft beer names. Seriously, I've had to put these in stories before, and I've spent hours coming up with one clever--or so I thought--idea after another only to find that yep, some guy in Des Moines already has a coffee shop by that name or there's a brewery in Michigan making that very beer. If you need to put a coffee shop or a craft beer in your story, it's best to just kiss the idea of being clever good-bye. I'd recommend having the owner of the cafe or the creator of the beer commiserating over how hard it is to come up with a new name, because it really is.)

Yes, it's normal for a literary journal to ghost on you after they accept your work

Long ago, this used to be a blog about writing fiction and the travails thereof. It's been more of a blog dedicated to analyzing and reviewing short stories for about the last year. In part, that's because it's been good for me as a writer. Forcing myself to pay close enough attention to what some of the year's mostly highly regarded short fiction is doing, enough that I can write about it without making a fool of myself, has really helped me develop as a writer of fiction myself.

Proof of this came about a month ago, when I got notice that a journal I really like wanted to publish a story of mine. It's not the New Yorker, but it's a solid journal. I was actually surprised they picked me, because I kind of thought they were too cool for me. The great thing about it was that they wanted to publish a longer story of mine. It's very hard to get longer fiction published, so the fact they were willing to publish my story must have meant they really found it appealing.

The acceptance letter mentioned that I should sign the contract attached. That's pretty normal stuff, except there was no contract attached. I sent an email profusely thanking them for believing in my story and explaining that there had not been any contract attached, so could they please send one. I got no response for a week, so I emailed again. Two days later, I got an email that said, "Here you go," along with the attachment.

That was a little curt, but it was what I wanted, so I signed it and sent it back, along with the other things they asked for, like a photo and a bio. I later realized that one of the attachments I'd sent them was the wrong one, so I sent another email explaining everything and including the right one.

I didn't get any response on that. Two weeks later, someone responded in Submittable, the online website where a lot of journals handle the business of accepting submissions for stories. That person said "Sorry!" and attached the contract again, seemingly unaware that I'd already gotten it and responded through email. Whoever answered the email for the journal obviously hadn't seen my response, or hadn't forwarded it to the person who answered in Submittable.

So I attached everything again in Submittable, then sent an email just asking to be sure they'd gotten everything, explaining what seemed to be redundancies in replies I'd gotten from them. I asked to get a reply just so I knew they had what they needed. I've not heard anything in another two weeks since.

If you are a new writer who just got accepted for the first time or is hoping to get accepted for the first time soon, I want you to know how normal this is. I've now had eight stories accepted for publication. Six of them were like this. So if you struggle and struggle to get that first acceptance, and as soon as you acknowledge their acceptance you stop hearing from them, that's normal. If you end up freaking out and worrying that they forgot about you, or came to their senses and decided they don't want to publish you, that's normal, too. If you don't hear from them for seven months and then finally find out your story was published three weeks ago, that is also normal.

The people who run these journals are not getting paid. They're squeezing in time between life and work and their own writing to put your work out. They don't usually find time to hold your hand and make sure you know everything is going to be alright. But if they said they'll publish your story, they'll publish it eventually.

It was hard getting this far, I know. That doesn't mean the next steps are really any easier. But hopefully, if you at least know that it's normal for the next steps not to be any easier, that'll make it easier to deal with how it's not any easier?

How to deal with hating your own stories until they're done

I've said before (wayyy back when I first started doing this) I didn't care much for Robert Olen Butler's From Where You Dream, even though it's one of the most frequently cited books of advice on writing fiction. Essentially, I found Butler's advice rather broad and more pointed at what he thought good writing looked like than how to get there. It had some useful advice, but that advice was punctuated by a lot of Butler's own aesthetics.

Still, I took one thing from reading that book that's stayed with me, which is the notion that writing is akin to a kind of lucid dreaming. You have to try to arrange your life so you can recall your dreams as close to how they happened as possible. Butler advised writing in the morning when the mind was still in a pre-verbal/logical state (sort of akin to having a pad of paper by the bed to dash down notes on your dreams before they fade away).

I've found there is a lot of truth to the idea that writing a story is like wrangling a dream on paper. It's the strongest argument for not having a day job and committing yourself fully to writing; that's the only way to be sure that when the muse hands you a vision, you're able to immediately transfer it onto paper. If you can't afford to quit your day job, though, I don't think you need to despair. There are plenty of ways to deal with muses. I've found my muse to be pretty reasonable about my timeliness in transferring her visions to paper. If I write down a few lines to remind myself what I saw, I can start the real rough draft sometime later. (Usually in the late evening or early morning before work. The best time to work is late Friday night on into Saturday morning.)

Dream hangover

There are more kinds of dream-states than just the ones that visit you during REM sleep. There is day-dreaming. I think most of my stories come to me as day-dreams. There is also that manic kind of late-night thought where you feel you've suddenly found all the answers to everything. Writing, especially first-draft writing, feels a lot like this 3 AM kind of thinking (not surprising, since often, at least for me, I literally am writing at 3 AM).

3 AM thinking feels very powerful when you're in the middle of it. Maybe because the brain thinks it should be dreaming at that time, you're in a place where dreams and the real world collide, and suddenly, the obstacles that were blocking your thought are obliterated. It's a very creative time. 3 AM thinking is free-write, first-draft thinking, when you're just going with the visions or voices in your head.

Of course, 3 AM thinking doesn't always seem so sound the next day. We've all been where Jerry Maguire was, wishing to God the next day we hadn't listened so much to the 3 AM voices in our heads.

When writing a story, the advice generally goes to just get the first draft on paper. It doesn't matter if it's garbage; at least you can work with garbage. You can't work with nothing. So write something. Write drunk, edit sober--that kind of advice.

It's not bad advice, but there's a point where it can be problematic for a writer. In fact, it's the point where I'd say most of my story ideas die. It's rare I can write even a short story all in one go. If an average short story is, say, 5,000 words or so, then it's going to have at least a couple of acts. Usually, the muse-given vision that got me sitting at my desk in the first place only covers one of those acts. After that, I need to wait for more inspiration.

The problem comes when I'm waiting to figure out how to continue the story from one act to the next. Often, I have to wait a while. In order to keep my brain working on the problem of how to continue the story, I have to go back and re-read what I have so far. And that's when my logical, analytic brain seizes up in horror at the mess I've got going so far. My whole brain shuts down--both the logical and the imaginative parts--because I've got such a pile of shit going on, and I don't want to just keep piling more shit on top of it.

Two ways to deal with the horror of your own partial rough drafts

There are two ways you can deal with this. You can try, as much as possible, to avoid looking at your work as you go. I do this sometimes. Even if it takes me five or six different sessions at the computer to write a story, each time I start a new one, I won't read much more than the last few sentences of where I left off. The advantage of doing this is that your critically-oriented mind doesn't slow you down. You can keep plodding forward until you've at least got something you can work with. The idea is that you write the rough draft uncritically, then look at the whole thing critically when it's done. At that point, you do some major work to re-imagine the thing, at which point the non-critical, creative side comes back in to make a new draft, but one that's got some stricter limits to it imposed by the critical brain. You keep going back and forth between these two until you get a draft that's polished.

The problem with this is that by the time you've written 5,000 words in dreamland, you can sometimes have such a mess that the whole thing was a waste of time. It's very demoralizing to write 5,000 words for no reason. I know writers will tell you that this is normal, or that maybe those 5,000 words weren't really a waste and you might reuse them somewhere down the line, but the fact is that there in the moment, it's a very sobering thing to realize your brilliant dream thoughts were gibberish.

So you can try another approach, which is kind of the opposite of the first one. You can overload yourself with reading and re-reading the drafts you've created. While you're waiting to figure out how you want to proceed, you can just keep going over and over the rough draft. Edit it. Whack at it. Or don't. The important thing is to just keep immersing yourself in it, because what it will do is make you somewhat immune to the gut feeling of how bad parts of it are. It's like getting used to a smell. Not that you want that smell to stay in your writing when you're finally done with the whole thing, but you do want to have developed the ability to at least work around the smell without getting sick to your stomach.

I tried both approaches this month with two new stories I wrote that I'm pretty excited about. Both approaches worked. I used the second approach with the longer of the two stories, because the length of the story meant there was no way to get around needing to go back over and over again to earlier passages so I could keep it all straight. Since I had to keep looking back anyway, I figured I would just keep re-reading what I'd done so far. After a while, it started to feel like I was working on someone else's work. I had distance from it, which meant I could be more objective. The shorter of the two stories, I just kept leaving myself an unfinished sentence as I wrapped up each session at the computer so I'd have an easy thing to get me going next time. The result was that I ended up getting through the story quickly, so at least the dream-feel of the entire story's first draft felt somewhat consistent.

I think either extreme will work. You'll have to try both yourself and see what works with your temperament. Either way, the goal is to get past your own "this is shit" sensors, at least until you've had enough of a chance to give those sensors a complete story to complain about. 

Hump day thoughts on the artist and the day job

Quartz recently ran an article, based on a letter from 19th Century French novelist Gustave Flaubert to his mother, on the notion of an artist taking a day job to survive. Flaubert himself called the notion an "illusion," claiming that such pursuits were for the mediocre, and that if he were going to commit himself to writing, he would only do it if he could apply his entire energy and strength to it:

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds — like those horses equally good for saddle and carriage — the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.

The article was balanced, offsetting Flaubert's artistic puritanism with examples of writers (Kafka, Harper Lee, Jennifer Egan) who had succeeded as writers in spite of holding down day jobs. It also pointed out that Flaubert's parents were fairly well-off, which is not a privilege every writer has. 

The problem isn't work; it's kids

Long ago, when I was in my mid-twenties, didn't have kids yet, and wanted to be a great writer more than I wanted anything in life, I wrote a personal creed of sorts in which I said words to the effect of "anyone can raise kids, but only a select few people can be prophets who create great art, so if I have to choose, I will choose not to have a family so I can create great art." 

It's hard for me to believe that puttering away at the kind of job needed to preserve a subsistence living for one person is going to keep you from being a great writer. You can do almost anything full-time, and if you're willing to make personal sacrifices like having a roommate, you will be able to sustain yourself. (Assuming, of course, you don't have unusual obstacles like expensive health issues.)

Furthermore, the kind of job you need just to pay your own bills isn't going to be so taxing you can't still write when you get home. It probably isn't going to be the kind of job where the boss is on your ass so much you can't sneak away for a few minutes to jot down the idea you just had so you can work on it when you get home. You think the manager at a drug store is going to write you up because you took five minutes to jot something down? As long as you more or less show up on time and more or less don't insult customers and more or less don't steal from the store, you're going to be fine.

A single person with a day job should be able to discipline herself to write when she can and still write everything she needs to write to accomplish her goals. It's when kids enter the picture that things become difficult. First, you're going to need a better job, the kind that sucks your best energies and makes you expend brain cells. You'll maybe have some fleeting idea for your story while on the job, but you need to run to the bathroom or you won't have time to go before the next meeting starts.

Then, of course, when you get home, there is a whole other set of people with problems that require your attention. A single writer with a day job can still put writing first in his life; a conscientious parent will be lucky if it's a distant third.

Priest vs Preacher

I have no issue with someone making a conscious decision to avoid the responsibilities of family life to pursue art. If artists are in some sense prophets, then they are entitled to follow the long tradition of beliefs in the world that espouse the need for spiritual leaders to avoid Earthly entrapments. The Catholic Church, for example, wants its priests to remain unmarried so that they can focus fully on pastoral care. It wouldn't be hard for me to believe that the writers who are the greatest virtuosos with language were also the writers with limited familial responsibilities. The music inside their heads was seldom blasted away by The Wiggles.

But the Protestant in me feels like this isn't the only route, and not the one for me. I feel like it's a little rich to be doling out life advice when you aren't yourself experiencing the one thing that most profoundly affects the lives of nearly all your adult parishioners. I'd prefer to take my advice from someone who struggles to deal with his kids fighting each other as he writes his sermons on the kitchen table. As Clint Eastwood's preacher put it in Pale Rider, "the spirit ain't worth spit without a little exercise."

The only photo of this scene I could find. 

At the very least, I think you have to agree that once you have kids, your responsibility for them is greater than your responsibility to create art. I may not still be a Christian, but C.S. Lewis's evaluation that a Christian writer must know from the outset that saving one soul is worth more than all the great works of human history still checks out with me.

How can you be a vessel of divine truths when you neglect the needs of your own family? In my experience, words and images worth committing to paper are hard to come by. You have to place yourself in a position somewhere between the most abject humility and the most unjustified certainty. I don't see how one could even get in such a place while ignoring the welfare of the people you are responsible for.

The decision to not have kids is a great life decision. I don't want to deride it in any way. But I can't believe that taking on such a basic part of human existence--even if it comes with all kinds of mundane extras like having a job-- makes one unable to write about the mysteries of that existence. My two favorite writers, Melville and Vonnegut, both had heavy family responsibilities. In Vonnegut's case, it altered the way he wrote, because he needed his books to sell. In Melville's case, it dogged him his entire life. They both still managed to write great art.

For me, developing the discipline to be a father, including all the pain of having a grown-up job, has also helped me develop the discipline to be a writer. I might miss out on a few scenes I'd otherwise have written if I were able to write on "event time," but I think I gain more than I lose.

Breaking the rules well: starting near the end of a story and when to really start at the beginning

Like a lot of writers, when I read advice on how to write well, my first instinct is to look for counter-examples that negate the advice. Anyone who is drawn to do creative work probably feels this instinct. We don't like to be told you can or can't do something, even if it's friendly advice from another creative type. This is probably a healthy instinct; every great work probably breaks some rule or another. But anytime a rule is broken, it probably does so following the logic of some other rule. The "rules," in fact, are nothing more than generalizations drawn from inductive reasoning from thousands of stories that worked.

On the one hand, if you could write a great story from merely following a list of rules, everyone would do it. You need to be able to show readers something they've never seen before by breaking the rules in the right way. On the other hand, if you've written a story and it doesn't have anything in common with any story anyone has ever cared about, you might need to ask yourself if you haven't broken the rules in a bad way.

One rule that comes to mind is the one best expressed by Kurt Vonnegut: start as close to the end as possible. Vonnegut himself followed this in a lot of his novels by having a narrator write to us from the perspective of someone who is already at the end. The narrator will drop hints throughout the novel of what the end is. The world has ended, and I'm writing to you from the future of this novel, for example.

I think the standard literary short story probably should follow the "start near the end" advice most of the time. Let's say you have some character in mind who grew up with a hard-knock life. He never knew his daddy and his mama never loved him. He discovered he was good at math by running numbers for a local mob boss. A kind-hearted teacher realized his gifts and got him a scholarship. But on the night before he leaves for Yale, he accidentally runs over the mob bosses's kid with his car. Nobody saw the accident. He can leave and nobody will ever know it was him. He has to decide, right there in the rain and in the dark of night somewhere, what he will do.

You start that story near the moment your hero hits the kid with his car, not back in his childhood. You can fill in the details of his past life from how your hero reacts to hitting the kid. His thoughts and actions will fill in the details for the reader so the reader knows all the stakes involved.

Different from "write the story with the end in mind"

"Start the story near the end" isn't the same as the principle, advocated by some writing advisers, of writing the whole story with the end in mind. This separate advice has to do with plotting throughout the story, not deciding where to begin. It is simply the idea that everything in your story should contribute to the eventual end. Even though most writers of "serious" fiction now eschew this idea, and advocate writing without pre-determining the end, I think it's still possible to let the end "just happen" on its own and still write with an eye toward the end of the story. This comes about through editing and revising the draft once an early version has shown you the way to the end. Dream, then draft.

But that's not what I'm talking about when I mean start your story near the end. I mean pick the spot where the crux is. Look at the entire arc of your character's life. Figure out what this story is about and start the story right at the crucial moment. Don't start "Bartleby the Scrivener" with the boss's decision to go into record keeping as a profession. Don't start "Gift of the Magi" with Jim and Della falling in love and getting married.

When don't you start near the end, then?

The epic seems to be a place where you should ignore the rule about beginning near the end. In an epic, you really want to start back at the beginning somewhere. Tolkien doesn't start Lord of the Rings with Frodo deciding whether to drop the ring into the fires of Mount Doom. Game of Thrones begins with a scouting party that picks up the first clues of a coming doom that will take 4,000 pages to fully materialize.

Reader expectations in the epic seem to be that they're going to get a long story, one that goes more or less in straight chronological fashion, and that it's going to give us a pretty complete timeline as it happens.

Of course, that still doesn't mean you start at the actual beginning. Tolkien had a world plotted out back to the creation, but he doesn't start the story of Frodo and the ring with the Valar singing Arda into existence. Martin also has a long history in his world that pre-dates the Game of Thrones series, but he still is focusing that series on a part of the timeline of his world that makes sense for that individual story.

I've argued that Justin Cronin's The Passage started too early; we spend over 200 pages seeing how the vampire apocalypse came, then another 500 pages watching as characters a hundred years in the future re-learned the whole history. Obviously, since the book did very well and millions of readers love, it, most people disagree with me, but the point is that it is possible, even in an epic, to start too early.

Limits to the rules and using your intuition

There isn't any rule for how to determine the exact correct point at which to begin a story, which should make fellow rule-breakers happy. Whether you're writing a tight short story with expectations that we are starting near the climax, or writing a fantasy series with expectations of hundreds of pages of world-building, there is a point that is too early to begin, and a point that is too late. You're going to have to use your own intuition to feel out where the sweet spot is. It is helpful, though, just to have the issue raised to your consciousness, to mull it over while thinking of some of your favorite stories or reading new stories in the future. What makes this the right place to begin? Is this similar to a story I want to write, and should I begin in a similar place in it?

A diverting exercise to try sometime is to take a story you love and imagine it beginning somewhere else. If it did, how would you still include everything in it that needs to be there? Is it now too difficult to tell the story, because you need to rely too much on flashbacks? Are you taken out of the moment too much? Then, try it with your own stories. Sometimes, you might find by starting it somewhere else that you've actually improved the sense of urgency within it.

Remember when this used to be a fiction writing blog?

Yeah, me neither.

I was thinking the other day about the stories I wrote that I managed to get published. They are:

1) A story about an Ethiopian refugee who became an Olympic long-distance runner.
2) A story about two refugees from Eritrea who were kidnapped in the desert while trying to escape.
3) A story about a second-generation Eritrean-American trying to help his family pay to bring a refugee family member out of Africa.
4) A story about a poor kid in Baltimore and his role in the 2015 riots.

and:

5) A story about a working-class white guy who accidentally kills someone on his first day on the job as a truck driver.

1-3 are all about Eritrean or Ethiopian immigrants/refugees. #4 is still about the marginalized, and its main character is still black. Only #5 has a white person who is, if not rich, at least scraping to reach the middle class.

Politics, or something else?

Absent other information, if I had to guess, I'd assume the editorial boards of most literary journals are left-leaning politically. That would mean, among other things, a preference for diversity, for wanting its content to be about more than the realities of white, male American life.

My own success rates seem to bear this out. I've written about 30 short stories in the last four years. Only six have been about people who weren't white. Four of those got published. Only one of the other twenty-five has been published.

Some white writers complain about it being harder to get published as a non-minority. I don't think that's exactly true, and I don't think it's as closely linked to political beliefs of editors as one might think. Every journal gets hundreds of stories and can only choose a few. Many of them are of similar quality, and it's very hard to pick winners from similar products. It's not always a political decision to pick writing either by a minority or about a minority. You're just trying to put together a good collection, and that means you don't want all the material to seem the same. The diversity isn't ideological, it's pragmatic. The magazine just seems better that way.

Not that it's never ideological. It used to bother us on the Baltimore Review that our journal was named for a majority black city but our contributor page was always so lily-white. I was always on the lookout for writing from black writers or about black, urban issues that reflected the city. We seldom got it. That meant that if you were black and sending us a story, your chances improved. The other editors once picked a story I didn't think was very good, but had been written by a politically active trans-gendered woman. It was about the evils of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Or something. I really thought the other editors picked it because it said what they thought enlightened literary journals ought to be saying.

This isn't new advice, but make it new

It may sound like I'm writing one of those oh-so-precious "It's-hard-for-a-white-man-to-make-it-in-the-world" pieces, but that's not my point. If there is a bias in favor of minority writers, my point is that this is natural. Every writer has to struggle with the difficulty of writing something that seems fresh and new. Minority writers maybe have just a small advantage at making it sound new, because what they're writing about may seem new to editors and their readers. And I have no problem with that.

The lesson for everyone else is nothing novel. You have to write something people haven't already seen a thousand times. That show "This is Us" that literally even woman I know is crazy about is an interesting example. It's really about the realities of white, middle-class America. One character defends his family to a snobby theater-type, " So what if we're normal?" Except that they're not normal. They're triplets. Well, twins who lost their triplet in birth, so their parents decided to adopt a black child who'd been left at the hospital on the same day as their twins. One of the twins is a well-known actor; the other is a 300-pound woman. So, not normal.

You might be even whiter than I am, if that's possible. You might not know a couple of languages and have worked inside communities that give you access to good stories most people haven't heard before. But nobody's normal. Everyone has something weird, different, and new to talk about. Find that and write about it.

Because as much as people want a story that's strange, they also like to see themselves in stories. Finding what's abnormal in your normal life allows you to combine the shock of the new with the shock of the familiar.

For those of you considering a New Year's resolution to write more...

...I decided a few weeks ago to put writing for on hold for a while. Since that decision, I haven't been able to stop writing. Seriously. I had been stuck for over a month, unable to write anything and chiding myself for not writing. The moment I decided to give up, words came.

I've said before I'm not a big believer in writing every day. I think if you write every day, if you treat writing like it's your job, you end up with writing that sounds like it's your job. That is, it risks coming off as perfunctory. Write when you can't stop from writing, not when you feel obligated.

In my four-year run of seriously trying to write, the two most fertile writing periods I've had were immediately after making a decision to quit.

There must be something to the psychology of this. Straining to write, you feel the whole time like you're failing, like you're under pressure to do this thing you've set out to do. But if you already accept that you're done, if you tell yourself you shouldn't even be writing, that you have better things to do, writing feels like a stolen pleasure.

When I found out I was getting a book published early in 2017, I felt a lot of pressure to start acting like a writer. That sort of made writing a lot less enjoyable. It took six months of failure at the end of 2017 to get me to realize again that this is not my day job, it's something I do for the joy it brings me. When it doesn't bring me joy, I shouldn't do it.

I hope you write a lot in 2018. Unless you hate it, in which case I hope you don't write at all. But then I hope not writing makes you learn to love writing again at some point.

Merry Christmas, readers and writers.

Writing is not your day job, so don't treat it like it is

In grade school, I loved the math game we called "travel." You've probably played it, even if it was called something else. Two students stand and the teacher reveals a math question on a flash card. Whoever shouts out the right answer first moves to the next desk and faces off with whoever is sitting there, and the process repeats itself. The student who travels the most desks during the game wins.

I guess I must have been a cocky kid. Strange, since now I have almost no confidence in anything I do (or, more accurately, I vacillate wildly between total confidence and crying in a corner), but I liked that there was a game that not only tested whether you knew something, but how quickly you could get through it. It was a way to show how easy math was for you.

In graduate school, when I read Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, I learned of the notion of virtu, which the kids today might translate as "skills." Castiglione proposed that a distinguished gentleman of court would strive to not only show himself skilled in all the subjects a gentleman should be adept in, he should also strive to make it look easy, to show his virtu, his skills. It wasn't enough to succeed, you had to succeed with style, to hide the hard work that went into becoming adept in the first place.

Trying to make it look easy can win you admirers, but there's also an obvious downside to it. Josh Waitzkin, the one-time child chess prodigy who was the subject of the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, noted once that when he was a child, he would often beat better chess players because they were hurrying, trying to make it look like beating a child took nothing out of them to accomplish. Trying to look cool cost them big time, and they ended up looking like doubly uncool as they would have if they had just let everyone see that beating this particular kid was not that easy.

At my day job, I am sometimes guilty of trying to make the work look easier than it really is. Part of this is just work politics: if bosses think there's no work I can't handle, then I get the good assignments and more responsibility. In theory, one day this will lead to me getting promoted and paid more. I also tend to mistrust the perfectionists, whom I sometimes believe are using the quest to make zero mistakes as an excuse for malingering. Whatever picayune mistakes I might sometimes make, I more than make up for in quantity of work.

Don't quit your day job, but also don't try to do your day job at home

But I sometimes take this attitude home with me to the stories I write. I act like just having written a lot of more or less passable stories is what I'm aiming for, instead of ripping into the depths of myself to write the best story I possibly can right now, even if it's the last thing I do. I try to charge through my writing to-do list like it's a list of weekend chores: finish rough draft of story about the unfairness of the immigration system; touch up story about a young woman's ambivalent search for her own racial identity, but really ratchet up the tension in the climax and if you can, see about making that description of the hospital unforgettably beautiful and yet haunting.

It doesn't work like that. Writing isn't raking leaves.

I blame those writing advice givers for making me think it is. I mean the ones who tell you to write every day, as though writing were nothing more than a set of push-ups to do in the morning. Writing is hard. Or, it's hard if you're doing it right. That doesn't mean that every time you sit down to write something, it's going to feel like drawing blood. Sometimes, the writing comes rather naturally. But getting into that state where the writing comes to you--that's what's hard. You're not going to be in that state every day of your life.

I'd wager one of three things is true about those who write every day:

1) They're professionals. All they do is write, so they can arrange every day in such a way that they are in the right space to write;
2) Their writing sounds like it was cranked out by force (i.e., it sucks); or
3) They write a lot of wasted words.

I realize everyone has their own way of approaching writing. If writing every day works for you, and you don't mind writing a lot of words that are going in the trash, have at it. I find that just wears me out, and delays me getting into the right head space to do the good writing I need to do.

In my last post, I indicated that I hadn't written in a few months. It was partly a loss of self-confidence, but it was also just exhaustion. Work has been very tough the last few months, and I eventually wore out trying to match my energy during the day when I came home every night. I needed a few weeks of mindlessness, of doing anything except writing, in order to get to where I could write again. The writer's mind is a well. It can run dry if you are over-using it. You have to give it time to fill up, and you have to give it reading and experiences and just plain idleness so it fills up again.

I just had one of the most productive weekends I've ever had. All that lack of self-confidence I had a few months ago melted as the words just came to me. I'm on such a roll right now, that I really need to give it a rest for a few days. Common wisdom might be to keep going while I'm on that roll, but I think it's really better to leave while you still want more. In a few days, I'll come back to where I was with fresh eyes and new energy.

Some people fear that if you don't keep pushing through the same work while you're in the same frame of mind, it will end up sounding like it was written by more than one person. I actually don't think this is always such a bad thing for a story. Most stories I read for my magazine where I volunteer start off pretty strong and then flag. They get bogged down and lose their initial energy as the writer starts trying to get into the exposition. This is a very difficult thing to avoid, but doing different parts in a different state of mind can actually give each its own propulsion. You are really taking the work of another person--the writer you were the last time you were working on this story--and riffing off of it as the person you are now.

You can probably write a story all in one go if you're writing micro-fiction. If you're not, it's going to take you a while to write the story. It really is. That's because writing is hard. If it seems hard to you, that means you're doing it right. Don't try to keep pushing through as though it isn't. 

Be careful of the advice you take (with bonus microfiction)

I get sent links in my email to columns about writing, because some algorithm has figured out I'll read some of them. The articles I read are a mix of good and bad, with both usually being pretty easy to spot early on. The danger is when you read an article that's good in general, but all wrong for you.

The other day, the algorithm sent me an entry from this little blog by a woman named Mary Jo Campbell. I knew nothing about her, but it was a focused entry on how to write micro-fiction, so I read it. I thought it was fairly well done; it contained some advice most writers already know, like the importance of details and creative use of language, but it was generally worth my five minutes. However, if I hadn't already known the conventions of literary fiction pretty well, I'd have been led astray by some advice she gave. Here's the 100-word story she wrote that she shared as an example:

What Brings Us Together

My fingers are cold yet sweat drips down my armpits, under this black polyester suit jacket. Mom’s smile is her phony-phone-voice as she busies herself introducing the families that enter. The chosen groomsmen are called to the front of the aisle, one brother taller than the next, sleek in their dark combed hair, smooth complexions, pressed suits. Solemn handsome faces contrasted by the pink blotches on the bride-to-be’s cheeks. They are each handed a pair of too-small, bright-white gloves. I swallow hard as my brothers line either side of Bob’s casket.

I've said before I'm not a huge fan of 100-word stories, but they are a thing, and it's a way to get your name out there, so I guess I'd grudgingly write some if I thought I could do it well. But there's something about this story that doesn't sit right with me, at least as literary fiction. It seems to violate a critical aesthetic principle, voiced by Meg Wolitzer in the Introduction to this year's Best American Short Stories anthology. Wolitzer begins by discussing how the first short stories she was assigned to read in middle school were always the kind with a surprise ending, stories like "The Gift of the Magi." These stories conditioned her to always look for the big twist at the end, to consider it a sine qua non of a good story. Later, however, she came to realize that "if everything is surprising, then nothing is," and to dislike "an unearned surprise for a surprise's sake." She later comes to a more mature understanding of surprise: "...the idea of 'surprise' wasn't abandoned entirely; instead, it was given a shine and polish and a more mature translation. It's possible to see that a whole story--not just the ending--might itself take on what had been considered the function of an ending."

In other words, the whole story should shock one's expectations, should undo the reader's way of seeing things.  As a reader, you will "find yourself in a place you didn't know about before."

Campbell, however, specifically recommends the shock ending, calling for "...a twist the reader won’t see coming. But after a re-read, they feel that gut-punch of realization." The story above seems mostly designed for the sake of the surprise ending. There are details given that are clearly meant to lead the reader astray, like the mention of "groomsmen" and a "bride-to-be." (Campbell writes in the blog that this was taken from a cousin who died just before getting married. That's nice to know, but the story as it stands is a little confusing. Why are groomsmen at a funeral? When I read it, I wondered if someone died at the wedding, and they just had the funeral right there that same day because the church was already booked.)

It's nicely written, it has good details, and the unexpected, jangling simile of the smile actually "being" the voice is nice. So is the alliterative word play of "phony-phone-voice." There's nothing wrong with the story, except that it's not literary fiction. I finally realized at this point that Campbell's blog clearly calls attention to the fact that she mainly likes YA fiction. I missed that up front, because I was assuming the algorithm was smart enough to know I write one and not the other.

The lesson is to pay attention to the advice you're getting and where it's coming from. Most writing advice is universal, like use good details. There are some principles, however, that change according to tastes and are genre-specific. So pay more attention that I did.


BONUS FLASH FICTION!!!

Just to give everyone a chance to shit on my writing, instead of me just picking on someone else's (even though I've said I liked her story), I hereby submit to you all the only 100-word story I've ever tried to write. According to the rules, the title isn't included in the word count
-----------

Professor Mulkin Equivocates before a Greater Power

Professor Mulkin tried to be both seen and invisible in the Book Bonanza!; he hadn’t been in a bookstore since Borders closed, hadn’t even known they still existed. He saw only DVDs of TV shows and tween vampire fiction. His wife, recovering in the hospital, had asked for an adult coloring book.

He had written for the Times criticizing such fare and those who read them. They signaled the end. Now, he asked for them out loud. He paid for his purchase with his card, finding it suddenly easy to forgive every crime in history. 

--------------

I have no idea if that's a good literary fiction 100-word story. Like I said, I don't know of any of these things that have really dazzled me. I think they're just an effort to be cute and prove literature isn't always stuffy--like churches telling us that Jesus is cool. This was my best effort to do something with the form. If it sucks, it won't really hurt my feelings much.