IWSG: In Taking Our Time, Having the Smarts, & Not Giving Up

Founder: Alex J. Cavanaugh

Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds. {This has been taken from the IWSG site, where a full list of participants can be found}

Jonathan: So… I’m a proud member of the Decade Club. Anyone know what that is? It’s an elite organization reserved for us writers who have spent 10 or more years writing a book. Members of the Decade Club include, but are not limited to, Margaret Mitchell who finishedGone with the Wind in exactly 10 years, J.R.R. Tolkien who completed The Lord of the Rings in 16 years, and Michael Crichton who just missed the decade mark with Jurassic Park, which only took him 8 years to write, but who finally got his member card with Sphere, which took him a whopping 20 years to finish!

Now, I never set out to write a book in over ten years. I mean, who ever heard of NaNoWriDe (National Novel Writing Decade)? It just sort of happened. In addition to numerous external factors, like moving five times and starting four different jobs in the same period, I recently discovered that there were some internal things going on as well. Shocker! I think the major thing holding me back from finishing my book was a totally unrealistic expectation of myself and my writing. This is the first time I’ve ever attempted to write a book and expecting it to be the next best seller, or comparing myself to authors (like Tolkien or Crichton) who have been doing this forever, is a little crazy, honestly.

Clinically speaking, I’m a perfectionist (or at least I was). Thanks to some books I’ve read on the subject (and there are a lot of them out there, my favorite being The Seven Secrets of the Prolific), I’ve learned that perfectionism leads to procrastination, and procrastination leads to feeling like crap about yourself, and feeling like crap about yourself is just not conducive to a productive writing life. It’s a vicious cycle. So, if you find yourself sitting down at the keyboard, thinking that every word, sentence, paragraph, chapter need to be perfect or you’re a complete and total failure, you might want to look into this perfectionism thing. It really helped me, and I hope it helps you. Back to writing! It’s NaNoWriDe after all…


Leandra: One of the things I worry about is not being smart enough to get published. When it comes to things like grammar and punctuation, I'm... not so great. I graduated from high school at sixteen and I'm the type of person that if I don't use it I lose it. So what can I remember from English classes that I took fourteen years ago? That if I answer the phone and someone says, "Is Leandra there?" that I say, "This is she.", and not, "This is her.". So, yeah, that's helpful with writing! =) But I continue on(battling prepositions and run-on sentences) thankful for things like SpellChecker and critique partners.

Stephen:  Ask my wife what I was like before I got published.

Go ahead. Ask her. I'll wait.

Back already? She just laughed at you? Well, I guess that's answer enough.

Before my debut novel BRAINEATER JONES got picked up by Red Adept Publishing, a small publisher out of Raleigh, NC, I was a sullen, despondent mess. I'm not a religious person, but the Bible tells a story about not burying your "talents" - in the literal sense, make sure you invest your money instead of sitting on it, but in a metaphorical sense, make sure you show the world what you're capable of.

What I could do was write. It was all I could ever do, the only thing that could make me special. I have a tin ear, no eye for color, and even at peak physical condition I'm not much to write home about. Painting, music, sports, I was always mediocre at these at best.

But writing? Oh, I could write. I could paint you a picture with words, conduct a symphony of letters, even make you jump for joy with a well-turned phrase. But for years and years all of that just sat in my trunk, or, more accurately, on my hard drive. My talents were buried. I was a mess.

How could it be that no one was interested in reading what I wrote? How was that even possible? Why would God or Providence or fate or chance or whatever give me a skill and never let me show it to the world? My story might have ended right there. But there's another Bible verse (I know, you'd think from reading this short passage that I'm super-religious, but I swear I'm not) that says "cast not your pearls before swine." In other words, make sure the right people are appreciating your talents.

So I kept trying. I kept querying agents and publishers and when one wasn't interested in my book, I just reminded myself that they were probably a "swine" from the metaphor, someone who didn't appreciate objects of great worth. And finally I found Red Adept.

You would think I'd be good now. You would think I'd be happy to finally be published, but you know what? There's always another mountain to climb, always another obstacle to overcome, always another doubt in my mind:

"Why are sales poor?"

"Why am I not getting reviews?"

"Where are the awards and accolades?"

But when things like that get me down, I'm reminded of another great thinker (I can't remember if she was in the Bible or not) but she said, "Keep on swimming...Keep on swimming."