Back to the Grind

     I've been avoiding doing short stories for a long time, focusing on longer work. Writing short stories and sending them off to literary magazines is pretty agonizing. Working for weeks on a story, then submitting to dozens of litmags, getting rejected by a half dozen over a period of three months until finally one accepts the story for less than $100. I've been focusing on longer stories in the hopes that they would pay well. First the novella, which I hoped would go huge, help build a fanbase, and maybe make it easier to keep publishing more stuff. I have already written another novella which is sitting on a shelf. I had a plan, I worked hard, and I was ready to follow up success with more success.

  

     But I suppose success wouldn't be success without difficulty. When the novella didn't take off I wrote a novel and I've spent the last two months sending it off to literary agents in the hopes that it will help me take off. Nothing yet.

     It's an incredibly difficult thing, pursuing something so difficult and always having it out of reach. When I was 16 I started reading a national best-selling book written by someone my age that was so poorly written I couldn't get past the first page. That's when I vowed (something few 16 year olds do) to come up the right way: by writing short stories and building up my craft like big daddy Will Smith taught me.

                                It's such an inspiring quote you don't stop to ask why someone would lay bricks down for no reason.                    

     When I first started out I was copying other people's styles, trying to find my own voice. Failure after failure, and I finally got something published. When I did get published, when I transformed from being a 'writer' into an 'author' I felt proud. But not because of what I did, but because I hit a milestone, and I got paid for it! A whole three dollars!

                                                                   Exactly how it felt.

But the story wasn't good. Even then I knew it wasn't gripping, the character wouldn't stick with people. It might churn in someone's head for a bit, but it wasn't the sort of thing you tell your friends and have a discussion with, something inspiring.

So I kept writing. I got two more short stories published, and I got paid for both. I was slowly finding my voice, as and a unique style. I read other short stories and knew I was beginning to have a style that was clearly my own. But it still wasn't great.

Worse, I had gotten so used to the endless rejection that is part and parcel with the literary world (everyone thinks they can be a writer, but oh god they cannot...) that I would write a story, edit it until I was sick of it, send it off for publication, and then never read it again. But then I wrote this story. It's an audio format and the narrator decided to give a historical background before actually driving into the story (it's about the insane Roman emperor Elagabulus. I can't decide if knowing his personal story is necessary as there were a lot of cross-dressing, lead-paint drinking, murderous Roman emperors, so as long as you're familiar with that, the character himself isn't important). Then he read the story, and I found myself smiling and even bursting out laughing. Humorous writing is the hardest thing in the world. Getting an audience to laugh with no timing, no inflections, just pure thoughts is like walking a tightrope blindfolded. But I had half a dozen other people say they had the same reaction as I did. Around the same time I published a drama story and a sci-fi story which met similar praise. I felt awesome, I had my own style, I gained an enormous level of skill and I could write and be recognized in numerous genres.

$40. Still waiting for my break.

One year ago I was in Orange, California and I walked into Barnes and Noble looking for a book. Nothing in particular; I'm the kind of person that doesn't care about genre and will read anything that looks good. I was looking at the fantasy and sci-fi section and I swear every book looked like this:

                                                    The photo quality is bad to protect your eyes.

     I'm not saying I'm the best writer in the world but I know I've written better stories than this. Stories which have made people think, laugh. Stories which at their core have a few things that resonate with people but ultimately have so much detail put into every word choice that even if I don't have a Neil Gaiman/GRRM fan base devoted to pouring over my work, at least a few people might catch an in-joke or play on common theme that makes them smile or feel clever for being smart enough to discover something that I just left lying in a room for the wise to find it and feel good about themselves.

     Maybe 'Biting Bad' is worth being displayed on the front of a bookshelf while 'Ender's Game,' 'The Wheel of Time,' and 'River of Gods' are all paperbacks with faded spines. But putting aside 'Biting Bad,' the best mix of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' and 'Breaking Bad' of the past three years, I have gotten to the point where I have read a few widely printed novels and thought to myself (hopefully unpretentiously), "This character should have been a lot more developed," or "This whole chapter was a mess that feels unpurposefully disjointed," or, "Nina had thrown herself against the Layers of the Abyss and gained the cackle-cry of magic that screams from another plane, and meanwhile she only shows up so that the 30-something, Caucasian male protagonist with no physical or mental handicaps can get the help he needs at just the right time, and meanwhile her character isn't developed at all? Hell, I would rather read a story about her than about him!" (That last one could be said about a thousand novels (Fela in 'The Name of the Wind') movies (Mako in 'Pacific Rim') or video games (there has got to be at least one 'Legend of Zelda' were we play as Zelda/Sheik right? Just once?)

Beyond being a grammar authoritarian, a wordplay wizard, and a overall story structure sage, I think I have all the tools and the experience to at least write a novel worthy of competing with 'Biting Bad.'

But every day I open up my e-mail and wait for a literary agent to say 'yes' to my novel. It's always spam, a work e-mail. And every fourth day I get another rejection from another agent. At times during my writing career a single nice comment on a story would make me write that night. There's so little money for the amateur leagues, and despite my river's worth of passion, even that can dry up when it's hardly rained for years. So sometimes the nice comments and the inner thoughts of 'well, what else are you going to do tonight?' or 'you might as well vent' or 'why the hell not?' are what keep me writing another night.

But I chose this path and I know I am good enough. Not the best, not world class (yet). But I've worked a thousand times harder than hundreds who have 'made it,' who never have found the skill and the unique insanity it takes to captivate peoples' minds, even for a little while.

As frustrating as it is, I am going to work even harder. I'm going to keep sending out the novel until it gets published, and I'm going to return to short stories. Back to the grind.

If you ever need motivation, check this out. Yes, it's about professional Starcraft 2 (which I love), but it applies to everything. Trust me.