A Writer's Tale

If you have a concept that you think is spectacular, give it your best shot. Do whatever preliminary work might be necessary (research), then write the book. It shouldn’t take you longer than a year if you’re serious. Give it a revision, then send it off, sit down and come up with a new great concept, turn that one into a book, and go on to the next.

Whatever you do, don’t just sit around to wait for the “great book” to get accepted. If it is rejected (which is not exactly unlikely), don’t devote months or years to reworking it in hopes of “getting it right.”

Just put it away. (Maybe go back to it some day, but not now.) Instead of hoping to revive Lazarus, make a baby.

And another, and another.

If you are behaving properly as a writer, you will have a second novel finished before your first novel has had time to find a publisher or accumulate more than a few rejection slips.

At the opposite end of the problem from Work in Progress Syndrome and Life’s Work Disorder is a malady that I will simply dub Quitties.

This is one of the most common disorders, and probably inflicts all writers to some extent.

It happens this way.

You get started on a novel, thinking it is brilliant. You write ten pages or sixty or three hundred then give up on it.

There are a couple common reasons for quitting.

One, you decide the story isn’t working out the way you’d hoped. In other words, it no longer seems overwhelmingly wonderful. So it isn’t worth continuing.

Two, you’ve come up with a new great concept, so you’re compelled to drop the work in progress and start in on the new one immediately.

On occasion, perhaps a work should be abandoned for one or the other of those reasons.

But rarely.

As a general rule, you should resist the urge.

Because, believe it or not, the book you quit writing might have turned out just fine. It might’ve even been better and more successful than the one for which you abandoned it.

But you’ll never know if you don’t finish it.

Your initial enthusiasm for any novel is almost certain to diminish as you get into it.

You’ll have doubts about whether it’s any good at all. You’ll be tempted to give up and try something else. The deal is, it’s natural to feel this way.

And if you do quit and go on to a new novel, guess what pretty soon, you’ll start having your doubts about that one.

You’ll be tempted to stop writing it, too.

If you don’t resist these urges, you’ll end up with a room full of unfinished novels and nothing accomplished.

An unfinished novel is no good to anyone. All it does is take up space.

This is true not only for authors suffering from Quitties, but also for authors trying to sell their work on the basis of a “proposal.”

If you have to submit sample chapters and an outline to your agent or editor, go ahead and do it. But go ahead and do something else while you’re at it: write the book.

Best case scenario: by. the time your proposal gets accepted, you’ll have the book ready to send in.

Worst case scenario: your proposal is rejected. But if it does get rejected, you still have a completed manuscript.

An unfinished novel is a waste of space; a finished novel is an asset. Just because a novel is rejected by darn near every publisher on the face of the Earth today doesn’t mean it won’t be bought and published tomorrow.

Rule 6

“Read.”

It should go without saying that writers need to read.

However, I’ve frequently heard authors claim that they don’t have time to read, that they only read non-fiction (research for their fiction), or that they only read books in the genre they hope to conquer.

My “rule” is to read as much as possible across the whole spectrum of published material.

There are several major reasons for this.

First, reading is the best way to learn how to write. Each piece is a sample showing how some other author chose to put words and sentences together, how he described a sunset, developed a character, dealt with dialogue, structured a scene, manipulated a plot.

Basically, everything a person needs to know about writing can be learned by reading other people’s stories, poems, plays, screenplays, novels, etc.

Second, by reading omnivorously, you protect yourself against one of the most common problems encountered by aspiring writers wasting a lot of energy and time trying to write a story that has already been done. If you don’t know the other stories, you’re too ignorant to avoid them. And you really must avoid them. Nobody wants to publish a story that looks as if it’s a remake of an earlier piece by someone else.