Failure/James Jones/James Dean/High School Play/Writing/Agents
By Michael Haskins
The New Year has arrived and you've got to expect a lot blogs on New Year's Resolution as well as conversations and some people even go as far as to send letters out to friends with their resolutions. I guess if they tell everyone they're going to quit smoking, or some suck silliness, they'll have to do it or feel like a failure.
Writers, on the other hand, are not afraid of failure! Me for example, I've continued to contact agents in and around NYC with query letters for longer than I want to think about. Failing to capture an agent's imagination is a kind of failure, failure of my query, anyway, or the three chapters or the synopsis I sent; maybe the whole package. The agents never say why the story isn't for them just that it isn't. But they do wish me luck placing it somewhere else. I sometimes writer back with as much sincerity and say thank you.
It's my failure, but it is also the collective failure of all those agents too. If you've been to the MWA's Florida chapter's SleuthFest, (www.mwaflorida.org) you will hear the same story told by some of the must successful writers and the unpublished writers, it took a hundred attempts before an agent accepted me.
Every writer has a room full of rejection slips. I recall when they came in the snail mail and you literally had people like me pasting the rejection slips on a wall.
I also remember that James Jones wrote in the introduction of a collection of his short stories that every story in the book had been rejected when he first sent it out. After he became successful, he resubmitted the stories to the same magazine that had rejected it and they were all accepted.
The stories hadn't changed, he had because he was successful. So it goes, one day you can't do anything right and after one success you can't do anything wrong.
For 2011, I resolve to continue to be a pain in the ass to NY agents, until I find one smart enough to recognize my talent. I hope there's an agent out there making a New Year's Resolution to stop being a dumb ass and really read the material that comes in, he might discover a new talent! Do you think?
I also resolve not to limit myself to agents only in NYC. I will go to NJ, and Connecticut too. Somewhere within the borders of those three states there has to be one reasonable agent with the ability to recognize my genius. You'd think, right? Hope so.
I resolve to write more. I know I can't sit down and chain myself to the computer like Stephen King or Robert Crais, but I can spend a little more time writing and not plotting and thinking the story through.
My problem is that I have it all worked out in my head, and maybe in my notebook, but then my characters take over and run with it without much consideration for what I had sketched out. When I am in a reflective mood and not sure how it all happened, I sometimes think that maybe God feels that way about us – His failed experiment. Maybe?
My second book, Free Range Institution, is due out in about a month, my third book, Car Wash Blues, is floating around out there looking for that one agent with insight, and I am about 120+ pages into my fourth book, Stairway to the Bottom.
Being an Irish Catholic I've got my Jewish friends beat when it comes to guilt. I sometimes have a hard time differentiating between an Irish-Catholic mother and an American-Jewish mother when it comes to making us feel guilty.
I often feel guilty because I don't write enough. By that, I mean time wise. I sometimes feel beaten down after less than an hour and other times I can go for four or five hours. Some days I write as few as 150 words and other days more than 2,000. Some days I only self-edit, to remind me where I am at in the story and the changes that have taken place.
I resolve to rid myself of the guilt and feel as elated at 150 words in a day as I do 2,000. Now that's gonna be a tough one.
Resolutions have one thing in common and that is they are made on dreams and ordained to fail. The battle is to go as long as you can with your resolution. Six days or six months, give it your best. It's all about the battle, the game, the challenge . . .
In high school, a little red clapboarded abode in the marshes of North Quincy, Massachusetts, I joined the drama club (hey, James Dean was dead and someone had to take his place. Unfortunately it wasn't me) and I learned a great lesson. I learned I wasn't gonna be the next James Dean, but that isn't the great lesson. I realized after the play* was over, when the final curtain came down and we were at the wrap party, that the play itself wasn't important, it was all the work going into getting it done that was important and made it fun. I wasn't going to miss the play, I was going to miss all the worth that led up to the play.
My final New Year's Resolution is to look at my writing in that same light. I'm having a hell of a good time playing god in my little world and the fact that someone, somewhere is going to read about my world and possible like it is great, but the fun is in challenge of creating my world each day, being surprised by the characters and learning that sometimes it's out of my hands.
Happy New Year.
*For anyone that cares, the play was In Our Town by Thornton Wilder, and I played the newspaper boy in the opening.
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