How the Day After the Super Bowl is Symbolic for Writers
It’s possible to be a writer and also watch football. I am such a person. As such, I am still annoyed that such an atrocious call was made by Seattle at the end of the game last night to cost them the championship. (Which it almost certainly did.)
Yet this is not a football blog. (No kidding.) So I won’t delve into my complete feelings on the matter. I will, however, use the Super Bowl as a symbol for optimism to the writer.
You see, as soon as the clock ticked down on last night’s game, the NFL season was over. As I do most years when the championship doesn’t involve my own team, I put out over social media last night, “At least the Ravens are in first place again.”
You’ve probably heard sports fans say that for all kinds of sports. In baseball, everybody is in first place as soon as the World Series ends. Take your pick from the other championships in this country, the point is the same; even if your team has no shot whatsoever at winning it all in the following season, you can console yourself a bit by saying that everyone is mathematically on equal ground in the off season. Plus, once the season starts who knows?
What’s this have to do with writing? Just this; every new project you start is a best seller.
Think about it. That very first keystroke or written word or outline of a project represents unlimited potential. You could be in the first stages of that novel that brings you fame, or gets you that residency. Maybe the article you only just started sketching out today will be the one your favorite magazine accepts.
As with sports, writing success on a grand scale is against the odds for most of us. We writers look back on all of the things we’ve written that did not get selected for publication, or did not sell at all. We also look back on the things we abandoned, or the things that we finished, but with which we did nothing further. Those works did not make it to the proverbial championship.
But we start again. We begin something new. And while our project is still known only to us, within the frayed pages of our notebook or the unseen memory of our hard drive, that project is a best seller until it proves otherwise.
I don’t like that my projects haven’t gained the audience I wanted. That still saddens and frustrates me at times, just as I was frustrated last night that one of the teams I dislike most won the big game. Just as I was upset that my own team did not make it to said big game. But that disappointment, though still present, is halved as soon as a new season begins, as it has for football as of last night. And I can temper some of the disappointment of previous writings not taking flight by remembering that as I start a new project, I may be in the first stages of creating a work that eventually leads me and my career to a whole new ball game.
Confessions of Nervousness
As I take the final steps toward publishing my novel, Flowers to Dionysus I admit I am a bit nervous. A certain nervousness I wouldn’t have experienced before I published Thank You For Ten last year.
Last year when I launched my first ever self-published experience with that short anthology of short fiction, I had what I thought was a base of interest and a simple network for spreading the word about my work. Not expecting nor requiring that companion piece to the upcoming novel to go viral, I did have certain expectations that it would reach and touch a specific type of individual, who would in turn know a few more such people. Given the number of theatrical and artistic people just within my simple network, I didn’t think I had set my sites too high to generate some buzz within my own communities that might here and there splash over to folks I didn’t know.
I didn’t work out that way at all. Most (but not all) of my friends ignored the project, even as they continued pushing and selling their own projects to the same people. A dollar was too much to spare right then, but they’d get around to it. I offered it for free for the holiday season to anyone who wanted it, as a gift of sorts. The numbers changed very little. I’ve been somewhat worried ever since then. I don’t know exactly what I do differently within my sphere than those who have bands, performances, or small businesses with some degree of success. I only know that reciprocity has not, for the most part, worked.
Now that the novel is coming, (on which I work every day now to prepare for formatting), I don’t know where to stand. I am in no position to pay someone to promote it. Furthermore, I don’t think this is the sort of novel that fits in well with wide promotional tactics anyway. It’s a simple, at times quaint but nonetheless, (I think) fun story about a group of community theatre actors, with the tiniest touch of supernatural activity thrown in here and there. I figured those who experienced theatre, as I have, would find the concept interesting enough to pick up a copy, but that’s what i thought about Thank You for Ten, which takes place in the same setting. I was mistaken there.
So, I stand here only a few months before releasing it, not knowing exactly how to change my approach, other than to not count on my built-in network of theater-minded folks as much as I thought I could. Some of them will be there, sure, but as a whole entity probably not. This was the first idea fo a full novel I ever had, and I have been working on it for several years now. I doubt I’ll ever let myself spend this much time on a novel again. So I’d hate to think of it being ignored.
They tell you that it takes a lot more than luck to make something a best seller, and I’m sure that’s true. Yet my goals were and remain, quite modest for the novel at this time. Not instant fame, not wealth. I want to reach and touch a few hundred people who see what i see in the creative arts, and who will understand what these theater folks are going through in the novel. I know I’m supposed to remain confident and never let anybody know that I have doubts, but that’s not me. Based on the support I’ve been able to drum up for previous writings, I do have my doubts as to whether I can promote the book.
I will continue to work on it, of course. But something new has to happen, something positive, in order for me to feel I’m accomplishing even my modest goals this time around.
Inspiration in a Hospital?
Not everyone that goes into a hospital is in grave danger, of course. Good things happens in hospitals too. Yet that doesn’t mean anyone particularly enjoys being a patient. Or waiting for a patient. Yet I found myself in that situation yesterday for several hours as a family member had an outpatient procedure performed.
Still, since I did have to wait there for a while, I had to point out that hospitals are excellent people-watching places. Always busy, with so many levels of staff for different departments moving in and out all of the time. Plus patients or others like me, waiting for patients. All sorts of potential questions about who every one is, what they are doing next, or what they just finished doing. It gets the writer an actor in me to thinking a bit.
And, as much as we try to avoid thinking dark things about hospitals, it cannot be denied that at times they can be dramatic places, with a sense of urgency to their proceedings. It just so happens that nothing urgent or dramatic occurred in the section i was waiting in yesterday, but somewhere in the building somebody was rushing to do something, no doubt. There is a certain energy in a hospital, even in the waiting areas, as a result of so many human stories and motivations descending into one small space.
I’m not suggesting that a writer go wait in a hospital just to get material. That would be macabre. But if you should find yourself in a hospital under a non-emergency or less than severe circumstance, take some time to think about just how much is going on within the building, and how important each of those things is. Life is preserved and improved there every moment, and you’ll see probably dozens of people going about that very important work every few minutes you’re in a waiting room. Might as well make the most of being there and consider that aspect of the experience, if you have nothing else to do for a few hours.
The Fear of Shelving
Last night is as close as I have come to shelving my current novel in progress. It may yet come to that.
To begin with I started thinking that if I keep asking the question about continuing with this story at this time, that’s probably a strong indication that I shouldn’t continue. For more than a year I have, every few months, revisited the idea of putting this novel on ice. How many times does one think about doing such a thing before actually doing it?
Plus, I have written in this long project more sporadically than any other. I wrote the first draft of a stage play last year, and the lion’s share of a one man show. Flower to Dionysus my “first” novel will be available for purchase later this year, after I go through the final proof read. Getting to this place with that novel has been a slow but steady climb over a few years.
For straight up fun, two years ago I finished an entire mystery novel within within Nanowrimo.
In each of those cases their were struggles. There were days, or even stretches of several days during which I didn’t feel like working on the project. Sometimes I didn’t. But then I’d get back to it. I’d push my way into the momentum of writing again. The desire to have any given story told, available some day to readers, got me going through the dry spots. Discipline won out in each of the examples I gave above, as well as countless others in regarding shorter fiction and non-fiction projects.
Yet I stop for working on this novel for extending periods of time.
My initial reaction is that I am just being lazy or lacking discipline. Yet as I have demonstrated in this post, there have been all kinds of projects, even of similar length, through which I have persevered. I’ve even been looking forward to starting the next draft of the play soon. And I will be performing the one-man show next month. Discipline, it would appear, is not my issue. Motivation is not, in and of itself my issue.
So, the natural consideration lately is that the project itself is an issue.
Which is odd, because I still like the overall concept of this novel. I believe in the theme or message I wanted it to deliver. The characters work for me. And yet, something is just not coming together to spark the momentum I eventually found with other long or work intensive projects. To be frank, I’m tired of seeing myself vacillate on this project. I don’t like the attitude or reputation I project, either to the world or to myself with all of the reboots and deadlines and second chances and breaks I take with this novel. I’m better writer than that. Maybe not brilliant or prolific, but better than my behavior with this novel indicates.
If one counts all novel length pieces I have written in my life, including those I had no intention of sharing with anyone, this stalled novel is somewhere around number four. However, it is only the second I ever conceived specifically to be shared with readers some day. Every writer has to shelf something at some point in time, even longer projects. I guess it just smacks of absurd to be thinking about shelving only my second “fully-intended” novel.
Then there is the fact that I have no novel-length narrative in cue to begin should I shelve this one. I have only the faintest whisps of ghosts of potential ideas for Novels Three or Four, and they all lie far off in the fog of my stored imagination. Formless, aimless, and not even capable of summary outside of my mind. If I shelved Novel Two now, I’d be without a novel-length project. (Though I would be working on my play.)
In the end, however, neither being my second fully-intended novel, nor having no other novel in the pipeline are solid reasons for keep this project off the shelf. I know it. It just isn’t easy to accept.
My official list of goals for 2015 gives me the entire year to finish a draft of Novel Two, but I don’t know if that’s the barometer I should stick with. That could allow me to put this whole decision off even longer. I think a mini-Nano sort of thing is in order. Say two solid weeks of daily writing in that project specifically in an effort to reach a word count. If the word count or more enthusiasm fail to materialize, that really should be that.
Maybe.
One might have to be a writer to truly understand that choosing not to write can be just and draining as actually writing.
Yes, Out, No In, On and On
A few weeks ago I was at a chain restaurant. I was seated near the swinging double doors to the kitchen. From my angle I could only see one of them at first. Someone had posted the word “NO” on one of the doors with mail box letters. If I had to guess, I’d say it was done in haste, given how crooked they were. People only ever came out of that door; obviously “NO” meant to not enter through that side. It was probably applied by a weary manager one night the moment he realized, “IN” and “OUT” were not specifically enough messages, thus calling many a broken dish or possibly nose.
I can see some of the confusion that might have happened among the staff with “IN” or “OUT” used instead. “Does it mean ‘IN’ to the kitchen? Or people are coming ‘IN’ so watch out?”
“NO” makes the point. Or as some of my friends would say, “No…just no.”
Without being obvious about it, I got up at one point to get a better view of the other door. As expected, “YES” was applied here. I thought of how yin-yang the entire thing was. How when there is a “NO” somewhere, a “YES” can usually be found if one looks hard enough.
I still wasn’t satisfied, though. Though to most, what lie on the other side of each door would have been obvious, I had to see it myself. It required sustained attention for a few minutes, and an enthusiastic exit by one of the wait staff, but sure enough, on the other side of the “NO” door itself was in fact a “YES.” Naturally on the kitchen side of the “YES” door was affixed the word “NO.”
No we are getting beyond yin-yang and into a bit of Zen or existentialism perhaps. Not only is there a “YES” in life near the “NO” if we look, the “YES” is fact IS the “NO” if viewed from a particular angle. In the kitchen, what is “Yes” is to me as a customer the “NO” door. And the other way around.
Perspective and purpose. One thing defined not just in multiple ways, but as its polar opposite, when order and safety require it.
In the swinging doors in the restaurant of existence, we may all just be servers moving constantly between the kitchen and the dining room. Our goal at the moment, and our position relative to everything else determined if the door in front of us is a “YES” or a “NO.”
And passing through either one causes ripples. Pass through the wrong one, and potential disaster. Pass through the correct one and it continues to swing back and forth for quite a while after we’ve done so. Dancing through all of the yes’s and no’s in our life, we leave something in our wake, at least for a while.
And if we stand there between “YES” and “NO” and just wait, we’re in the way, and will probably before long be knocked flat on our asses.
Ty Unglebower 