The awful abyss into which you throw your years of work

Dear Wendy/Dear Writer

Waiting to Go on Stage - Laura Knight

This post is part of a series of posts in which I try to answer writer’s questions on work, craft, and the writer life. If you have a question for me you’d like my thoughts on email me at wendyprattfreelancewriter@gmail.com with subject Dear Wendy.

Work Notes

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Dear Wendy

How do you/we maintain confidence during long projects - especially when agents/publishers don’t reply or say no thank you. I’ve written a novel which I’m trying to get an agent or a publisher for, in addition to working on 4th draft of a historical novel.

M

Dear Writer

I feel for you.

Every writer seeking publication has been here. There is nothing worse than the not knowing: the awful abyss into which you throw your years of work to see if some unseen entity will grasp at it. Worse even than rejection is the ghosting. It chips away at your confidence. It feels like they don’t take you seriously. How can they possibly think of you as a proper writer if they can’t even be arsed to answer either way? And of course, no publisher or agent ever gets back to you promptly. The standard is three months at least.

Yours is a short question, with a long answer. How do any of us maintain a confidence in the future of our work when the process is such a long drawn out one with so little feedback.

The first thing to say is that no one can maintain a high level of confidence in any project from start to finish. Keeping that in mind is important. Think about house renovations, party planning, weight loss goals etc - all the stuff that is hard to achieve, stuff that is hard work to accomplish, stuff that takes a long time to complete - these journeys are always rollercoasters. Try to remember that a creative project is not a doodle in the margins of a note pad, it’s work, it’s a job, and have you ever been in a job in which you were 100% confident in your ability to succeed from start to finish? Probably not. Have you ever done a long term project and succeeded despite moments of absolute rock bottom? You probably have. Life is a series of events that we survive.

As a creative, it helps to have clear objectives for your creative work that are not about validating your work through publication of course, but that’s a lot easier to say than do. Writing is a conversation, it needs an audience. This is our evolutionary creative drive - to share experience, to share stories about what it is to be human. It’s hard then to say to oneself, just don’t think about it, let the creativity itself be the reward.

Self belief, and the desire to achieve, will get you so far, but I don’t believe that confidence in the work is the key here. I believe that tenacity is the key: a kind of blind refusal to give up. It’s that, rather than confidence, that will keep you going when the odds are against you. However, the truth is that there might not be a successful outcome at the end. Not everybody’s work fits into a traditional model, and it’s worth considering if the traditional route to publishing is the correct vehicle for your work. There is more than one way to reach an audience and often we only see the one that involves agent-publisher-bookdeal. But let me also remind you that you have reached a place in this particular journey that is hard to get to. Turn around and look behind you, the road to a completed MS and an active submissions plan is littered with writers that have fallen at the wayside, writers that gave up when they got stuck at 30,000 words, writers who let rejection frame how they value their own work. You have already beaten those odds to get to where you are.

I also think that there is something else to consider here. You cannot control how your work is received. You cannot control whether a publisher or an agent says yes or no, or whether they say anything at all. But you can control your own reaction to it. If you can, and it seems like you are already doing it, make the part of the process at which you seek representation less of an end goal, make it just another part of the process. Scale it down, don’t make that one response the thing on which you hang your potential. Get on to the next project while you wait to hear about that one. It defuses the feeling of all eggs being in one basket.

This is what we do. We push on, push forward, we keep writing and refining and reaching out into the dark. We keep throwing our work into the abyss, and we keep the blind faith of our tenacity. One word at a time, one submission at a time.

A Note on the Image

This is ‘Waiting to Go on Stage’ by British artist Laura Knight, painted in the early twentieth century. The painting depicts an actress in her dressing room, waiting to be called to perform. It strikes me that this is something like the life of a writer, we are all waiting for the publisher to take our work so that we can finally get out there and perform, so that we can make the connection to the audience. What a life.

What has been your experience of losing confidence in your work, how do you maintain the dream when you are working on long term projects? let me know in the comments.

Until next time

x