Writerly musings

First things first: I got my first rejection letter for a story. :)

That may seem like an odd thing to smile about, but I promise I'm not just trying to (literally) put a happy face on things. I wasn't kidding when I said earlier this was a story I was proud of, and this submission was miles above any of the hold-your-breath-and-dive-in submissions I made to story contests and whatnot. So getting an actual rejection letter, even just a form letter, feels like a badge of legitimacy - I truly and honestly gave it my best shot, and it didn't fit with what they were looking for. So now I keep looking, and keep writing. That's what authors do, especially ones that are new to the professional game and haven't established a niche yet. Admittedly, I don't know if I'm comfortable calling myself an "author" yet, but it feels like a big step along the way.

I realize I'm in a somewhat privileged position to be so sanguine, since neither my finances nor my sense of identity were riding on an acceptance. The former's mostly a matter of luck, but the latter...I've been working hard on that. I know I've at least mentioned that I was (and, sometimes, still am) struggling with defining myself, especially now that I'm not working a traditional job and don't have any regular source of my own income. (I think it's partly why I've latched on to yoga so heavily; it gives me someplace to go outside the house, and a way to define myself, albeit more as an enthusiast than a professional.) But mostly I've been trying to take my mother's advice, and rather than beating myself up because I haven't reached a particular milestone/earned a particular title, be more accepting of where I am now, and who I am now, and just enjoy where I'm going. It's a process, true. And I don't want to limit my writing to "when the muse strikes", because that seems like it could very easily become code for "I don't feel like doing something hard". But I've been a lot happier about my life and my writing both over the past month and a half.

Meantime, I've written another short story - one that feels good enough for professional submission, although I'm honestly not sure where the market would be. (I wrote it as a gift for a friend, though, so that's a secondary consideration.) I'm proud of it; it's another project I've seen through a difficult/thorough revision process and come out with an infinitely better product. Once I was finished, I even did something I've never done and went back and read the rough draft. There was more of it in the final product than I'd guessed, but even more, it made me realize how far my writing's come in the past couple of years. The rough draft was about on par with a lot of the half-finished stuff I've got lying around in my Google Drive; the final draft was better-developed, tighter, and far more gripping.

One of the things that made this one such a challenge was that it was about fundamentally different characters than the sort I normally write about - darker, and more aggressive. (This caused a bit of whiplash, as it started off as a playful piece, and then midway through took a couple of comparatively dark turns.) Generally, my characters tend to be in pursuit of Truth/Beauty/Freedom/Love, because I'm a Bohemian at heart; this time, the main character's central conflict was that he desperately wanted those things but was also terrified of them, so he kept sort of orbiting the core of the story but couldn't reach it like I initially wanted him to.

Part of the reason the revision process was so difficult ("I want you to do this thing! Why won't you do the thing??") was that this wasn't something I decided in advance; it wasn't until my faithful beta reader commented "He's a tragic figure, isn't he?" that I realized why I'd been having so much trouble with him. At one point, I even spent some time trying to write him into a sex scene (because, yes, I'm still a porn writer at heart, but also because what people do and say during sex is a good measure of who they are at their core), and ended up with five different variations on the scenario, none of which felt particularly arousing. That was when I started to get that his problem wasn't that I couldn't find his truth, it was that he was too terrified of his own truth to express it, even wordlessly. (And, big surprise, sex without emotional truth really doesn't do a whole lot for me.)

Man, the creative process is strange. No wonder artists are known for being a little eccentric.