I Stopped Writing

For two and change weeks, I didn’t write anything, and I didn’t edit anything. I wasn’t on vacation, I wasn’t too busy. I just stopped, because I was too shocked and too depressed to keep doing it. I want to talk about what happened and a very important realization I came to about why, and how I moved past it. (Somewhat)

How hopelessness feels...

I have submitted hundreds of short stories to magazines and done hundreds of submissions to agents for books. I have pitched in person 36 times. In short, I have done everything I know to do to try and get my writing in front of people.

I am part of a writing group with some very talented writers. I have a professional editor who reviews everything I send out: line edits and manuscript edits. I have beta readers. Again, I do everything I know to do to make myself into a better writer.

It has become hard to even enjoy reading for its own sake. I am always trying to understand how the author did what they did, dissect the book, and learn from it. I am always pushing to find harder things to read, and read in my genre so that what I fill my brain with is what comes out the other side too.

That sets the stage for three days which need some specific explanation.

I had just finished going to a pitch conference with agents. They are the gatekeepers to traditional publishing. The young woman I met was very excited about my book. She said (I took notes) something very near to the following: “This is right up my alley. I love the idea, I love the world, it’s exactly what I’m looking for.”

Usually, it takes several months, or forever (read: no response), for a literary agent to get back to me. She must have been excited; she read it right away and asked for the whole book, based off the original 10,000 words I gave her. Yay!

Three days passed. On that day, I received the following two items, which stopped all my writing dead:

A personalized rejection from a magazine, rejected with notes at the line-edit level.A rejection from said agent noted above.

By themselves, these things are not that big a deal. When you submit as many pieces as I do, and as often, I average a rejection every day. Some days I will get none, some days I will get a few, but it is not uncommon to get multiple rejections. Why did these hit so hard? Because I didn’t know what to do about them. Here is what they said.

Let’s start with the agent’s response. Here it is verbatim: “After sitting with your pages for a while and thinking things over, I don't feel I'm the best fit to move forward. You've got a smart premise and strong instincts. But I kept asking myself, ‘Could I actually place this?’ and I don't think I could. I never want to sign something unless I know exactly how I'd pitch it, and I wasn't finding that clarity here.”

What? I stopped cold. She had said it was exactly what she was looking for. Why is exactly what she was looking for suddenly something she didn’t know how to place? Why am I paying a LOT of money to go to these conferences if, even when I hand them exactly what they want, they don’t know how to place it? What is even happening here?

We’ll circle back.

The short story rejection was a 4,500-word urban fantasy piece filled with exactly nine positive comments and three negative ones. The positive comments were in the line of “Nice attention to detail here” and “This is a great comparison to enhance the scene!” Most effusive. Here are the three negative comments verbatim:

1)      “Breaking the fourth wall can be a compelling stylistic choice. However, it can seem out of place if you only do it three times.”

2)      “There is no such thing as an inch-wide bullet, and would it really leave a hole the size of a grapefruit?”

The killer...

3)      “I’d won the battle but lost the war makes no sense. How can you lose if you won?”

To which my brain responded in turn with variations on:

1)      I broke the fourth wall on purpose. It’s in a short story three times, and that’s not uncommon in urban fantasy. Do you even read the genre?

2)      Do you even read at all? There are one-inch bullets, and I am being low-key by saying it leaves a grapefruit-sized hole in you. Have you never studied anything about wounds and guns? Did you not spend 30 seconds to Google it? (It’s a thing. Go ahead and check.)

3)      Finally, the kicker. What do you mean? How have you gotten to whatever age you are as a literate person and never heard and understood the phrase “won the battle, but lost the war”? How is this being questioned?

I stalled out.

Why am I writing? Why am I doing any of this? If what I am writing can’t be understood at the most basic level, even after, again, going through beta readers and professional editors, how can I ever make it to the magazine’s page? Why do I even write short stories?

If I am writing whole novels, a year-long activity, by the way, and you tell me it is exactly what you want, and then immediately turn around and tell me that what you want you don’t know how to place, why am I talking to you?

I just didn’t have any actions to take. I was beyond sad. I was a forlorn kind of hopeless. I didn’t work out right, I slowed down in gardening, I hit a complete malaise. It wasn’t just being told no. I’ve been told no hundreds of times for many reasons. This was something different, and it took me almost a month of processing to understand what it was.

I started writing again about two weeks later because... what else am I going to do? Not ever write? I have hundreds of stories in me, and I believe in them. But my heart wasn’t really in it yet. I was going through the motions.

Were sadness and hopelessness the same? Does sadness, at least for me, and maybe others, come from the realization that I have no action I know to take to get unstuck? I don’t know how to move the writing needle. I don’t know how to pitch better or more accurately. I don’t know what to do now. I repeated it over and over.

Why write if it won’t get better, and what I create is not good enough? Over and over.

I’m stuck here. There is no way forward. Over and over. What changed?

Nothing, really. I’m still there... a little.

I found some actions to take. I forced myself to double down and read better books than I was reading. A friend who is a more successful author than myself confirmed that sometimes when an agent says “I just can’t place this,” it is polite speak for “you’re not good enough yet.” Which is wonderful to hear. It’s painful because I am wrestling with how to get better, but it is a damn sight improvement over “I will ask you to write XYZ, then tell you I can’t represent XYZ,” which feels like a dead end.

I thought about every editor and reader I have had and decided they can’t possibly all be illiterate. I won’t bother submitting to that particular magazine again, which didn’t know basic idioms. It’s a small action, but it is an action.

I reminded myself learning curves are not linear. They are often logarithmic, or punctuated. You can spend a long time in one place before you learn how to make the next leap, or perhaps it is a slow, quiet grind of years until one day you cross the threshold.

I tried to remind myself that the act of work works back on those who undertake it. The struggle makes me a better writer, even if I am not yet a good enough writer. The struggle makes me more articulate for other aspects of my life.

And as my wife says, in the meantime, what am I going to do? Not write? I wouldn’t exactly know how to fill the space. I don’t want to be a person who is 80 and says “decades ago, shit got hard, so I quit.” Because I could call it pivoting, but in that quiet place, I would know I quit. People told me, take it easy, take a break, you’ve been at this for four years, maybe you need to rest... and all I could think is, what if this is the year that I kept my nose down and somehow, I break through?

I said once that if the last book I ever write is the one that “makes it,” it would be worth it. Where did he go, the man who believed that?

Maybe he’s still in there, struggling with hopelessness. Maybe it is the act of shoving hopelessness into a corner and choosing to ignore it that is a kind of courage. To do the thing when you know it’s going to hurt, and you wish there were some other way. For now, there is habit, and the daily work, because that is what I have trained myself to do.

I still love books, and I still love good stories. The belief that there are still some in me is there, and I can’t let it die.

But God damn, it’s hard sometimes.