I had a short story accepted recently and it made me think about what it takes to succeed in writing. I think I can distil it to three requirements:
Imagination – which I believe is as much the ability to *identify* the potential for a story as it is the imagination to create the world, the characters, the situation etc.
Technical skill – the ability to write in an engaging way that communicates what you’re trying to get across.
Persistence – a stubbornness to keep going when everything (the rejection slips, the industry gloom, the fact that getting a publishing deal is only slightly more statistically likely than winning the lottery, and a lot less lucrative) tells you that it just isn’t worth pursuing.
Now me, I’ve got bucket loads of persistence (that sounds much better than stubbornness) as people who know me will happily testify to. I hope I have imagination and technical skill too, otherwise I’m sunk, but today I thought I’d look at persistence.
I recently hit a bad patch with the current novel I’m writing, “The Lost”. 65,000 words in and it felt like I’d lost the thread of what I was writing. There are a couple of tricks of the trade to overcome this – skip to a different section of the book and start writing there, spend a while plotting out some more of the book to try and identify where I was going wrong, or ‘write through’.
By ‘write through’ I basically mean grit your teeth and pull out each word one at a time. Sometimes it feels like trying to cross a muddy field on stilts, but each step forward (word written, if you’re following the analogy) is a step closer to the other side, and at some point during the walk I tend to find the ground gets firmer and you can throw away the stilts and start to run again.
Running! That’s why I write. That sensation when it feels like you’re not writing a story, you’re telling it. When the words flood out.
I’m not quite there with “The Lost” yet, the ground is definitely still a little soggy underfoot, but I feel like I’ve got through the worst patch, and as I nearly have two thirds of the novel complete I suspect there aren’t too many more sticky patches to navigate before the end.
And back to that story acceptance. Sometimes it’s the ability to keep writing when it feels like every word has to be pulled from you, and sometimes it’s the ability to keep submitting and damn the rejections.
There’s a mantra in writing called “Heinlein’s laws” (after Robert Heinlein, the Science Fiction author who wrote ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’) and it goes like this:
You must write!
You must finish what you write!
You must refrain from editing
You must market your story
You must keep it on the market
You must start something else
I think you need to take the “refrain from editing” with a pinch of salt (they were written in 1947 so rewriting was probably more of an effort than it is now) But that, my friends, is the secret to writing success. (Only $2.99, send your cheques and postal orders to…)
The story I just had accepted had been passed over by fourteen other editors before it reached the one that it accepted it. It isn’t that it’s a bad story (I try not to let those ones out of their cage) and in fact a couple of times it got to second and even third readings at publications. It just wasn’t right for them. So as important as that initial idea and the craft needed to imagine and then write the story, is the tenacity to keep it out there until it finds a home.
That’s all for this week. At the moment I’m alternating these blogs with my list of “novels that influenced me as a writer”. Which you can read on my website: www.richardfarrenbarber.co.uk.
