Finishing — Part 2: The Fear of Failure

One of the great contradictions of professional writing is that it attracts control freaks, and then removes almost all control from them.  You’ve got very little control over what will sell, or if, or how.  Once it does sell you’ve got very little say in anything related to production, publicity or package.

The one thing we do have control over is the story itself, and that’s the important part, right?  So it’s okay to obsess over it.  In fact, it’s vital to obsess over it.  Every word must be carefully chosen and placed, and it must be rewritten and rewritten until it is perfect, no matter how long it takes.  Right?

Ummm…right.  Up to a point.  At some point you just have to declare it done.  It’ll never be perfect.  Perfection doesn’t exist, especially not for the author because you know where all the seams are and the location of each and every buried body.  The more you rewrite the more seams and buried bodies there are going to be.  You just have to dig deep and say it’s good enough, and let it go.

The inability to stop rewriting is one of the manifestations of the great writing fear; fear of failure.

Be a Hoarder

Dear CL:

Whatever happened to that Deep Water Whale romance you sent me awhile ago?  I was having lunch today with T. Editor, and he’s actively looking for whale-themed romance

Yr. Agent.

Okay, this is not the actual email my agent sent.  But it is close, and I got it just a week ago.  My response:

Erm…nothing happened to it.  Do you need a fresh copy of the proposal?

She said yes, I went back to my files and it turned out I had not just a proposal, but a completed mss.  Wow.  When had I written that?  Thinking back, I remembered I’d written it at the request of an editor who subsequently rejected it.  V. upsetting.  But I didn’t throw out the offending mss.  I put it in a file, and I kept it.  Because I knew the odds were decent that something like the above would be coming in eventually.

This was something else I learned early on.  Never EVER throw anything out.  Keep the scraps, keep the snippets, and above all, if you’ve finished a project, keep it.  Even if it never sold.  Especially if it never sold.

Back in the day when I was strictly a denizen of the short story zone, I wrote a deal-with-the-devil story set in the old west.  I have an unhealthy fascination with deals-with-the-devil, and I’d just read a good book on old west gamblers and nature took its course.*

It was only after I started sending it around that I found out fantasy editors did not share my fascination.  It must have gone to 20 publications, and gathered an equal number of rejections.  So, with many a gentle tear, my masterpiece went into the drawer (yes, this was back in the days when the submission process was still mostly paper.  Thank G*D those days are done), and it stayed there for two solid years.  Until…I got word a new magazine, REALMS OF FANTASY was opening, and actively buying.  My story came out of the drawer and went into the envelope.   This time, it sold, for a decent rate per word too.

Since then, I’ve saved just about everything.  Even if a market doesn’t appear for the work in its current form, I do flip through the archives from time to time and see what still strikes my imagination.  Ideas and storylines are malleable things and can be reworked.  I (G*d willing!) improve at my craft, and can make improvements, or a good ending to an idea that wasn’t quite there a year, or two, or five ago.   Or, a new market has appeared suddenly (see above), and I have something I was toying around with that might now have a shot.

A metaphoric attic full of mss. and ideas is one of the greatest resources a writer has.  It means you don’t constantly have to start from scratch, and when a new chance comes, you can be one of the first in line to take advantage of it.  So keep them, all of them.  You never know when they’ll come in handy.

*If you want to read the story, “The Redemption of Silky Bill” you can for free under my Sarah Zettel page Book View Cafe.

Sequels

Sequels can be a risky business, both writing them and reading them.  A book one absolutely adored can be spoiled, or at least seriously damaged by a weak sequel.

One reason I’m thinking about this because I just read such a sequel.  A few years ago now, I was given a YA book called INGO by Helen Dunmore, about a girl on the Cornish coast who discovers her family connection with the local mermaid population.  It was a good book, well-written and compelling.  But I was slow off the mark looking for the sequel, THE TIDE KNOT, and it sort of came and went without me.  But I finally found it at my local indie bookstore (yet another reason to shop indies), brought it home and tucked in.

Sigh.  Unfortunately, the author had so many ideas she wanted to pursue: coming of age, split families, environmental change, balance, trust, to name a few, that she didn’t properly follow up on any of them.  The plot was committed in a scattershot fashion and the resolution felt….unresolved.  It didn’t tie back to what the heroine had learned or needed to achieve to do that coming of age thing.

Questioning Authority

Is there something about writing; the business, the craft, the life you’ve always wanted to know but has so far remained beyond the reach of your Google-fu?

Ask here.  Keep it clean.  I’ll do my best to answer.  If we get enough questions, we can make a regular feature out of it.