A Real Achievement

A bit of an eye-opener today: an e-friend of mine wrote to say that I should be congratulated, that a 76,000-word, complete novel is a real achievement.  Funny that I'd never, not once, thought of it that way.  I've always been so hellbent on being published that the actual completion of the manuscript wasn't a big deal to me.  I'd felt, and still do to an extent, that if I didn't get the novel published, I (and it) was a failure.  Period.  The completion of it was nothing special--though I'd been through a bit of hell to finish it--and the only purpose of its existence was to see it published.

I now see that this was a bad attitude to have toward the art of writing, as well as towards the business in general.  First novels don't sell, usually.  Unless you're J.D. Salinger, or Harper Lee, or maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald, your first completed manuscript won't ever see the light of day.  More importantly, most aspiring writers don't ever finish their first novel-length manuscript.  They say they're writing, and they call themselves writers, but they're not writing, and most of these writers never complete anything.

I did.  I not only finished what is called a publishable manuscript (even by the agents who've rejected it), but I also wrote a lot more stuff and eventually sold a story to a print magazine.  These are achievements--not only the published stuff, but the completed stuff.  Novels, stories, poems, essays, etc.  Everything a writer finishes is an achievement, and as long as I continue to see it that way, I will finish more pieces, and perhaps sell more.  If I only think of my writing as a success if I sell it, than most of the time I will feel like a failure--which I had, especially during an eight-year hiatus from writing at all.  (For some reason, I found myself saying that to a roomful of professors and writers, all of whom expressed their condolences to me, and who told me to continue writing, that I was too good to stop for any reason.)

So I say all of this not only for myself, but for every writer who reads this blog.  Do not think of your writing solely as potentially published pieces; if you do, and if they don't sell, you'll fall victim to despair like I did.  Look at your writing as potentially living and breathing pieces; this way, once you've completed them (and I do mean fully complete, not just a "rough draft" complete), you'll feel as if you've given life to something that had never existed before.  You'll feel a sense of accomplishment.  This way, also, you won't be waiting around for that piece to sell; you'll feel successful and write (and complete) something else.

Epigrams: Lorrie Moore, Birds of America (Short Story Collection)

My better half tells me this blog should have a consistently different theme every day, like Monday is poetry day; Tuesday, epigram day; and so on.  While I realize this isn't a bad idea, I'm also the kinda guy who wants to do what he wants to do (within appropriate reason, whatever that is), and right now I want to share some awesome epigrams by Lorrie Moore.  I wouldn't be able to do this without vetoing myself, so I'm willing to hear ideas about this.  Who's for saying that I should stick to some sort of system?  Who's for The Whatever?

And a little thing about short story writers: While novelists and screenwriters generally bring in the really huge bucks, the multi-million dollar deals, the quality of short story writers is sadly overlooked.  Bad novelists still rake it in, but short story writers don't have the luxury of being bad; they first have to get their stories published in places like The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Harper's, before they "collect" their stories into a book, and those places simply do not publish bad writing.  And in the short story, every word counts, so wordy writers like Stephen King would have a problem (and let's face it, he hasn't written consistently high-quality short stories in a long time now).  So go check out Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver and other short story collections; you will find some very high quality writing there.

And, by the way, Google Scholar has Lorrie Moore's Birds of America for free.  But, anyway, without further ado, here are a few of its gems:

This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in the people around here.  They were not good people.  They were not kind.  They played around and lied to their spouses.  But they recycled their newspapers!---"Community Life" p. 73

...She had lost her place, as in a book...One should live closer to where one's parents were buried.--ibid. p. 77.

..."The United States--how can you live in that country?" the man asked.  Agnes had shrugged.  "A lot of my stuff is there," she'd said, and it was then that she first felt all the dark love and shame that came from the pure accident of home, the deep and arbitrary place that happened to be yours.

Thank God, thank God, she was not her mother.

Over the years, she and Joe tried to have a baby, but one night at dinner, looking at each other in a lonely way over the meat loaf, they realized with shock that they probably never would.  Nonetheless, after six years, they still tried, vandalizing what romance was left in their marriage.---"Agnes of Iowa," pgs. 78-95

Holding fast to her little patch of marital ground, she'd watched as his lovers floated through like ballerinas...all of them sudden and fleeting, as if they were calendar girls ripped monthly by the same mysterious calendar-ripping wind that hurried time along in old movies...What did Ruth care now?  Those girls were over and gone.  The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take the thing too seriously.

The only way to know absolutely everything in life is via an autopsy.

In this way--a wedding of emotionally handicapped parking spaces...they'd managed to stay married.  He was not such a bad guy!--just a handsome country boy, disbelieving of his own luck, which came to him imperfectly but continually, like crackers from a cookie jar.

He looked crazy and ill--but with just a smidgen of charisma!

Every house is a grave, thought Ruth.

If she had to go on a diet with a fake woman's name on it, she would go on the Betty Crocker diet...

---"Real Estate," pgs. 177-211.

This is but a sample.  Short story writers are the true wordsmiths and artists.  No one gets rich just writing short stories.  Check out Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, too.