Writing for Myself

I think I’ve passed through the other side of my dejection about not getting published. I’ve received enough rejections (for novels and poems and short stories, by publishers and agents and Pitch Wars). What does that leave?

Writing and improving for myself, primarily. Not letting my self-esteem be at the mercy of publishers and agents. Of course, I would like to be published (I have a couple little things published, and it’s fun). I’d like to have a novel published. I’d like to be published somewhere that people actually read.

I’m willing to keep trying, because the rejections aren’t really that painful anymore. I can take more until my writing hits the right person, whoever that is.

Wish me luck.

********

I took off yesterday from writing the blog because I’M ON VACATION FOR A WHOLE WEEK!

Ok, I got that out of my system.

I’m a writer, though. I have things to do over vacation:

Edit one short story for a short story contest.
Edit a couple poems (minor edit)
Edit Whose Hearts are Mountains, which seriously needs a developmental editor because I don’t know if I’m going in the right direction
Rethink this whole writing thing (which I do once a week).

Of course we want to be read.

I feel invigorated, simply because I’m being read.

I have three beta-readers now, and I’m getting constructive feedback that’s helping me make good substantive changes to Voyageurs. And, occasionally, expressing what they like about the book.

You, the reader, have read excerpts from this and other books here online, but it’s different. I don’t know if any of you are real or just bots. I assume some of you are real, or else I wouldn’t be talking to you right now. But its murky, and since I know only a few of my readers, and I know nothing about whether you’re enjoying what you read, it hasn’t been like being read.

As a result, I am becoming increasingly convinced that writers don’t write just for themselves.

If they did, there would be no self-publishing. There would be no Wattpad. There would be no FanFiction.net. There wouldn’t be a whole industry based on improving writers’ skills if writers didn’t want to be read.

There would be no hashtags on Instagram like #writersofig. No writing-related memes on Facebook that the writers (usually the unpublished ones) reblog. There would be no shirts like the one in my closet that says “You’re coming dangerously close to being killed off in my next novel”.

There’s enough of us who want to be read that there’s a multi-million dollar industry who wants to make money off us.

Therefore, I will quit apologizing for wanting to be read, and for agonizing over rejections. I write for myself, but I want to be read, and I am willing to craft my message accordingly, even if I won’t change my themes or characters.

So, what is writing “good enough”?

I talked to my Pdoc (psychiatrist) the other day about how I don’t just want to be good at things, but excellent at them. I don’t just want to write, I want to get published; I want to earn awards at school, which makes me discount when individual students thank me for helping them, etc. (I’m sorry students, it’s not that you’re not important or good enough! It’s my problem!)

Dr. Jura suggested that I look around at what is held as the standard definition of good and then reduce it ten percent.

I would love to be doing things good enough rather than try to be the best, especially as I’m the best only in my dreams. I would love to write “just for myself” — much less strain, much fewer down moments. But I don’t seem to be able to settle for “good enough”, especially to writing. I associate love with accomplishment, and I want to feel loved. (Yes, Richard loves me, but my inner child is a voracious monster who needs love every moment of every day.) I want to earn being loved (I didn’t grow up with unconditional love). I want to —

I obviously have a values conflict here between “I want to win” and “I want to be accepted on my own merits. I need to resolve it.

I’ll be back to creative excerpts tomorrow.

Writing from the Soul

Writing comes from a personal place.

I would argue that all writing — poetry and novels, song lyrics and even textbooks come from a need within one’s soul. The need may be as mundane as “I really wish someone had written a textbook about case management for the disabled (Me about 10 years ago)” and as lofty as “I want to share this prophetic dream I had last night” (me thirty years ago), or for that matter, “I want to imagine I’m the captain of this starship who gets away with anything short of murder and gets branded a hero” (Whoever write the Star Trek movie reboot).

One also can write for the market, which can be a whole ‘nother thing, as they say around here. This is the thing I struggle with, because I have this crazy notion that people need to read emotionally packed narratives about people who don’t match the status quo. For example, there’s Amarel:

Finally, Janice found herself back at the building site. The bales had been set in place, and workers set a framework inside and out to create the cob walls. Gideon walked the perimeter, pointing out how to develop the frames for the curved sections of the house. Larry and another man watered something in a wide trough, then pounded it with what looked like small tree trunks with handles.

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 27.0px; font: 12.0px ‘Times New Roman’}

Most of the men had taken off their shirts, as it had grown hot outside. Janice admitted she enjoyed the view, and then she saw Amarel, shirtless and untouched by sun, at a wheelbarrow where he mixed mud and straw with a shovel and dumped them at the end of the trough. What Janice saw was beautiful, the angelic face focused, the graceful torso with muscles engaged, pectorals both muscular and curved, the intrigue of slight curves that she didn’t understand at his hip. The alabaster sculpture gained detail in her mind.

Amarel is truly genderqueer, engendered that way by the plan of the Maker. He presents as both make and female, and that causes some consternation even among the supposedly liberal people surrounding him. Janice, the artist taking refuge at Barn Swallows’ Dance, wavers between thinking him the perfect sculptor’s subject and worrying about the implications of falling in love with him. This is what comes from my soul — imperfect people who defy the status quo and have to resolve some great developing problem.

I’m still considering whether I can write for the market and satisfy my soul. I might have to take solace from the case of Emily Dickinson, who continued to write despite a readership puzzled by her poetry. I’ll see how it goes.

The actual, the ideal, and the "ought" self

Yesterday in class, I taught about self-discrepancy theory as a form of motivation. In this theory, we have ourselves — our current selves — and two states we aspire to, our ideal self and our “ought” self. Our ideal self is what we aspire to be, while our “ought” self is who we feel we have to be.

Our “ought” self is all about obligation and sense of duty — go to work, save money, pay parking tickets, don’t scream in the middle of a train station. Think of the “ought self” as “I am the person who shows up to work on time, doesn’t litter, and pays my taxes.” I can envision ought selves that are bloated with rules that are not so much obligation and sense of duty but fitting in as well — I talked with a friend yesterday and we both grew up with the command “Don’t act smart — boys don’t like that.” That’s a pretty useless ought unless women are obligated to undermine their own rights, and that’s not right.

Our ideal self is about accomplishment. I would distinguish here between experiential activities — “I would like to go to Disney World” and true accomplishment activities — “I would like to walk a half-marathon.” The accomplishments we choose to define us go into building our ideal self. A map of ideal vs ought selves might look like this:

Ideal Ought
Engages in deep conversation Votes
Performs skilled volunteer work Practices compassion
Takes 10-mile hikes Gets enough sleep
Writes novels and poetry Yada yada yada
Publishes books

Those are actually part of my ideal vs ought selves. (Ought selves are not as interesting.) Ideal selves help us to set growth goals, whereas ought selves help us to set maintenance goals.

Note the last item on my Ideal list. This could explain my fixation with getting published. My ideal self is a published author. It’s not just my desire to be read and to reach people — it’s that I like the image. My ideal self gains some cachet by being a published author. Society expects accomplished (i.e. published) authors to be eccentric; eccentricity without a credential is perceived as weird.

It’s going to be a struggle, because of my history of rejections. I have to see an alternative ideal version of me that’s creative even though nobody’s watching (I got zero nominations on my book in Kindle Scout yesterday). That’s hard, because my ideal self is someone that others would look up to — not fawn over, not idealize nor idolize, maybe not even admire, but respect.

I’ll keep writing for myself, but I’m going to have to find something else that takes the place of getting published, something creative that can gain me respect and some visibility. And as I am very bad with my hands (I cannot knit, crochet, sew, weave, color within the lines, or walk a straight line), crafts are out. I’d love to do carpentry, but I’d also love to have all ten fingers. So this brings me back to writing.

How do I parlay writing into something that’s not just for me, but has an audience, has usefulness, and fulfills my ideal self?

A Writer’s Confession

After the great reception I got for yesterday’s “No Coffee” post, I wonder if I should label every one of my writings as “No Coffee”. Ok, I guess not — it’s perhaps a bit disingenuous to do so, like carving a ten-foot man out of gypsum and dirtying him up a bit and saying you dug him up in your backyard.

To be genuine, I have to confess some things:

Sometimes, I daydream about getting published and critics remarking that I have Something to Say. In reality, getting an agent is one struggle, getting published is another, people even reading what you have to say is yet another.
I don’t want to get published badly enough that I want to write with a commercial sales end in mind. I don’t have to support myself with my books, and I don’t want to write for the market. For those who read in the SF/F genre, I want to be Ursula LeGuin, not Laurell K. Hamilton. There’s nothing wrong with the latter, but her books offer lots of gore and over-the-top (and I mean over-the-top) sex and not a lot of thinking. In other words, she writes for a mass paperback market that wants fast gratification. I’m not sure wanting people to think is necessarily a good thing, but I can’t write like Laurell K. Hamilton.
I often doubt my ability to write. I wonder if my intros are catchy enough. I wonder if enough happens in my books. I never wonder about my characters, because I know that’s my strong point.
I do often wonder, even if I’m not depressed, whether I will put writing down eventually. I have seven novels with two on the way, plus one or two non-fiction items. I’m currently feeling more rewarded by the seedlings in my basement — so far, a god-awful number of cardoon, so many that I can’t put all of them in my garden; the tomatoes/peppers/eggplant that were just planted; the moringa tree’s new shoots after I thought it had died; the seeds in peat moss in the refrigerator so they’ll sprout in a couple months. I plant them and am rewarded by visible growth. They live in the garden and feed my husband and I. Sometimes the plants fail, but it’s easy to learn how to keep them alive next time.
We still have no coffee. Our bean order is coming in today, and if I’m really lucky, I’ll have time to make a pot at work (New Guinea, great for a press pot!) .

I do think I’ll continue writing, at least for a while. My reasons, however, may change. My books bear fruit, if only for myself, and that will have to be enough.