According to my original goals, today should be the day that I publish my novel. That, as you could have guessed back in January, is not the case.
Don't think I gave up or decided to slack off, though.
In this post I'd like to share what I've been working on and, why I did not reach my goal.
I went through my synopsis and divided the novel into 36 Chapters including a Prologue. By the end of the Act 2(chapter 27) I condensed the chapters into 33. I had done a number of different things to keep the story going as I was facing creative resistance as well as general mental fatigue at having to rearrange my normal schedule around a new life-style.
A large part of quitting your day job and working full time for yourself is discipline, scheduling, and goal setting.
The discipline part was the least of my worries. I was enjoying getting up and working as much as I could.
Here are some mistakes I made:
I did not schedule time off. I gave myself 7 days a week of working. I originally thought, "some days I'll take it easy and just work a few hours." That didn't work. I needed to schedule days off, mentally. My brain wouldn't stop and as a result everything I was doing felt watered-down. Disciplining your mind to shut off during times of rest is something that should be taken seriously.
I didn't confirm with my editor. My original plan was to send pieces of my novel, chapter by chapter, to an editor and personal friend. This, I thought, would mean that I could get the editing done while writing the novel. Life happens, and my editor didn't have the time we had assumed. This was a huge blow to my time-line as well as financially.
I had moral reservations about what I was doing. While this might seem minor, it is actually the most major of all the mistakes I made. By chapter 27 I was having a hard time making myself write and I couldn't figure out why. I was almost there. General fear and resistance was no small part, but the key reason was that I didn't like what I had written.
I asked myself, which is more important, the monthly goal of getting this novel published? Or the yearly goal of finding financial success and freedom from having to take a day job?
This was a good question to ask in terms of goal setting because I was weighing what the best financial option would be. Publish something now? Or publish a better product in a month?
There were other questions that I hadn't asked myself seriously, ones involving my integrity as a writer and an artist. The answer to the above question was, "publish now." However, after skimming numerous $0.00 novels on Amazon, mostly top sellers, I decided that I didn't want to put out an inferior product. I don't want to be a writer if that means putting out something that I feel is incomplete and of low quality.
This lead to the next question, one that I brushed aside at first.
Am I hack?
It seems silly to ask after quitting your job and committing to be a pro writer, but there it is. And here I'll share something of an argument and an essay I wrote on the matter. This piece was meant for self-reflection, to ask myself honest questions about how I felt about everything so far.
A story is formulaic. It is a pattern that can be observed.
To find it precisely, as expected, is very rare, if it exists at all in this idealistic state. Rather, if you observed the structure of a series of real stories, the kind that explode from the teller and essentially tell themselves, you will find that this formula or pattern only makes itself more exacting through the repetition of comparison with other stories. Like any natural form in nature. Only by created repetitions does the form itself emerge.
This is why originality leads the way in story telling. It may not be the most lucrative, though it often is a quality of the best sellers and box office hits, it is, arguably more often, completely overlooked. Is this true though? Or are all these overlooked forgotten original works actually original? Are they thought to be, simply because the author isn’t well-read enough? Or maybe he doesn’t understand when standing his story up to another that they are in more ways the same.
You can see great success in certain stories that do not appear to be original or unique at all. The game then, and perhaps it should be, is to find what it is unique about the story. Things like Harry Potter which is seemingly a collage of tropes that doesn’t touch anything particular or unique about anyone’s actual life. The Hunger Games, which appears to be a well constructed creative arena for the author and reader to engage in a spectacle, also does not appear to show anything we haven’t seen before. Avatar follows an incredibly predictable story line with a structure that lacks complexity. The themes are preachy, the characters stereotypical, and even the non-narrative aspects of the film fell limp in their delivery to visual artists on a professional level.
If originality and soundness of structure, character, theme and the like are not what make a story gain attention and find success then an author has less motivation to pursue his craft as an artist. Is it simply then compulsive whims of the crowd that most often make a story popular thus successful? Is it some generally acceptable combination of the two? Or are these things mutually exclusive? The artist creates through expression, technique, form, symbol, and medium. The hack writes to pay his bills in the hopes to get rich and famous. The writer loves to write and does so as true as he can while accepting the money. So then, not all writers are hacks or artists. Some writers, then, are neither?
I would then agree that the best works of fiction were done by artists. The worst, by hacks. Or were they? What about artists who were unskilled and, on top of that, not putting forth any real effort when they wrote? Yet they were not in the pursuit of money or fame at the time either. Would those be the worst writers? What about the hack who finds great success producing something that is morally and artistically repugnant? Is he or she then the worst writer by way of putting something out that disheartens the very prevailing spirit of what makes good writing good? Is he not the writer who discourages so many other writers from pursuing their passion to express themselves through prose? What about the artist who creates a great work that receives fame and an offering of wealth but the artist rejects the money and denounces the fame? Brilliant writers like Bukowski who hated both fame and wealth. Authors who viciously mock and deride the moral value of anyone who would even begin to “try” to write. These “purists” also discourage many people from pursuing a dream. Their bar is not high as it is forever out of reach, denied, to “people of a different breed.” The attitude of you either have it or you don’t. You’re either a great writer or you’re not a writer at all.
What if I want to use my brain to make a living and this is the only way I know how? How do I do something simply to do it and, need to do it? I could torture myself with depression and alcohol and addiction and bad decisions and put myself into situations where my creativity and I claw our ways out. How honest is that, though?
It’s safe to say, if anything, that once someone hands you the money, you know that’s why you did it. This idea that the writer “accepts” the money so that he can do what he loves…Can that be true?
It all feels like…
Which lie do you want to believe the most?
Choose your preferred brainwashing.
Or, just do what you love, and stop asking questions. Consequences be damned.
I'm reading John Truby's Anatomy of Story while rebuilding my novel from the ground up. This is a very extensive process. It'll take at least a month before I get to the point of actually writing the story.
The idea here is to put myself through a detailed and arduous process to put out a superior product, one that I feel proud to share.
The next step then: Get Faster.
My first novel will be part of a trilogy. My goal for this year is to put out 5 novels. I have the first 4 in development.
A final note, and what I learned from all this.
When you give yourself ambitious goals, failure means accomplishing more than you thought you could.
Thanks for reading.