Melinda Morley

So yesterday I had an epiphany. I know. ANOTHER one. I don’t know what it is with writing and in life general, but it seems to me that I keep learning the SAME things over and over. I think: Wow, I’ve just learned something new and important. And then I think, Okay, that it totally obvious and I already knew it. I guess I forgot. I guess I forget a lot because I seem to make a lot of the same mistakes. (insert sigh.) Isn’t that why we’re here? (insert another sigh.) But, hey, life would be totally boring if we knew everything and there was nothing left to learn, right?

 So here is my epiphany:

On Sunday my favorite mother-in-law (and only. ever.) sent me an email. It was an article and it was long and I confess I still haven’t read it in its entirety. But here is what hit me. Like a sledgehammer. Invisible sledgehammer. Without the pain. Okay I’m moving on.

So, it starts out telling the story of a man who wanted to be a fiction writer. He worked in real estate and the only thing he had ever published was a law review article. He had graduated from law school and had a good job. His family was very proud of him. But what he wanted to was write. He came home from work each day too exhausted to write. So, guess what, he quit his job.

“He began his new life on a February morning, a Monday. He sat down at his kitchen table at 7:30 A.M. He made a plan. Every day, he would write until lunchtime. Then he would lie down on the floor for twenty minutes to rest his mind. Then he would return to work for a few more hours. He was a lawyer. He had discipline. “I figured out very early on that if I didn’t get my writing done I felt terrible. So I always got my writing done. I treated it like a job. I did not procrastinate.” His first story was about a stockbroker who uses inside information and crosses a moral line. It was sixty pages long and took him three months to write. When he finished that story, he went back to work and wrote another‹and then another.”

The first year he sold two stories. He gained confidence. He wrote a novel and then, not thinking it was very good, shelved it. He then went through a dark period, when he didn’t write. He adjusted his expectations and tried again. This time he published a short story through Harper and then  an entire book of short stories. He won numerous awards and high praise. Sounds like a young writer, up-and-coming, dreams come true, right?

Here is the rest of the story:

Ben Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with “Brief Encounters” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight.

I have learned remembered several things from this:

1. Learning the craft of writing takes time. Over-night success do not happen over-night. I keep thinking, I could have my novel done by such and such a date and then start submitting by such and such a date and WALA! Success! But, it’s not happening that way. I have bought half a dozen books on writing and am carefully reading each one. I am studying the craft, the art, the methods, all of it. And you know what? That takes time. And you know what else? That’s okay.

2. If I don’t take my writing seriously, no one else will. Seriously. I’m the only one that can do that. I have to schedule my time to write and keep that time sacred. Did I know this? Yes. Was I doing it? No. Why is that so hard? I don’t know.

Writing is legitimate. I wish it felt more like it. I have to write many things that will never see the light of day. I have to write and rewrite until something is good. I am creating. I’m not happy when I’m not writing.

But most important: I HAVE TO WRITE. OR I’LL NEVER FINISH AND GET PUBLISHED.

I know. Obvious, isn’t it. Why, then, is it so hard to do?

What things do you learn over and over again?