On the Importance of Persistence to Writing Success
When I was 20 I lived in a house with six other people. We were all loosely associated with the local DIY arts scene. We worked as little as we could at terrible jobs so that we could have time to pursue music or art or whatever interest we had that month. The one thing we all took a crack at was writing.
(How I Stopped Sabotaging My Writing Goals.)
One friend got some stories published. Another announced he finished a draft of a novel. I got about 20,000 words down, which seemed like a complete book to me. It wasn’t any good. When I read it back, I found it was nothing like Martin Amis or whoever it was whose style I was trying to lift back then. I was disheartened; I thought I didn’t have the natural talent one needed to write a book. So, I quit.
I focused on other things. I started a band. Drew some cartoons. But all the while I continued my habit of notetaking, which had started when I came across a used copy of The Notebooks of F. Sott Fitzgerald at 17. I recorded bits of overheard dialogue or odd things I observed or ideas for songs or cartoons or anything at all, really. Some of these grew into little scenes which grew into story ideas which then led to me writing another novel. I did better than my first attempt, 40,000 or so words. But still I could see it was bad and I had no idea how to fix that. I quit again. I started again.
It was after the fourth time I quit I decided to get serious about life. I was nearing 30 and thought working bad jobs to pursue unsuccessful art needed to end. I signed up for a publishing program at a local university—I figured if I had to get a straight job, it should at least be adjacent to the thing I actually wanted to do. School led to an internship at a big five publisher, which turned into a permanent position.
It wasn’t until that job that I saw the amount of work that went into writing. I saw books that were good enough to be offered contracts taken apart and reconstructed. I watched writers go over, line by line, work I would have considered done. I fielded emails from authors begging for changes to books that were typeset and on their way to the printer. I was discouraged.
(What Are the 6 Different Types of Editing?)
I had always thought I was one good idea, one inspired fit of writing, away from success. But now I saw I was nowhere close; quitting, I thought, was the right decision. I spent two years learning how to edit—learning to spot the weak spots in a manuscript and watching what the real writers did to fix it. And then I un-quit writing for the final time.
I went through everything I had written. Picked out the ideas that most interested me and started reworking them. This time I had a roadmap. I knew the steps, not only of revision, but of getting published. I had seen how close books came to acceptance; how there were days it was just a matter of the number of spots available, not of quality. I knew that all I had to do was not quit.
And it worked; not quickly, but it worked. It was three years before I had a story published. Another two before I had an agent. And yet another three before I published a story collection. And now, three years after that, and 20 after I tucked my first attempt at a novel into a folder on my hard drive, my first novel is coming out.
Which makes me think back to that house and everyone trying to write. I wasn’t the most naturally talented of that group—one roommate wrote beautiful flash fiction with lines I remember to this day. And I wasn’t the most dedicated—the friend who actually finished a novel had an intense focus which served her well in the career she pursued. My early writing showed no particular promise—probably just the opposite.
The only thing I had going for me was an inability to let writing go. And becoming a writer is really just developing the ability to remain interested in it. To keep coming back to it. To get used to the idea that it’s not sudden, brilliant inspiration, but endless incremental change that makes writing work. To persist.
Check out Michael Melgaard’s Not That Kind of Place here:
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