What if you are not the one?
getting unstuck when your book is not picked up
Growth is not a linear experience. Success as a writer does not begin with writing your first poem/passage and end with winning the Forward prize/Booker prize.
Often, so much more often than you think, you write a collection of poems or a novel or a memoir and it doesn’t get picked up. It might get long listed, shortlisted, highly commended. You might get accepted onto mentoring programmes and development programmes and maybe even win a pre publication award and still not get your book picked up. It is debilitating and soul destroying and you might feel a wave of embarrassment and shame (if you’re me and have crushing low self esteem) because you told people you had done well and now you think you haven’t done as well.
What might be happening with your current project that stops it from landing?
It might just be bad luck. There are a lot of writers trying to land work. If you have had some successes around your work either as short listings or competition wins, try to think of that as acknowledgement of you and your ability as much as individual pieces of writing. Use that acknowledgement to make your foundations solid, to give yourself reassurance in your abilities.
It might be that although the poems in your collection are strong and you are an excellent writer, as a collection it doesn’t quite land. It might just not be quite be saying what you intended it to say, in that format. It might have a similar message to other collections. It’s very difficult to spot this, and it is at the end of the day subjective. But if you allow yourself the space to grow forward using this project, you might find that the landing point poems from the initial collection grow into something that is honed further, with a stronger identity.
You might get stuck in this place in which your project is still live, and feel you can’t move on because you are waiting on decisions from publishers and awards and funding bodies, hoping beyond hope that your work is going to find a home. It might begin to define your writing. It might be that in your head the book you were hoping would get picked up is your career. It can take 6-8 months for some of the bigger, career building award bodies or funding bodies to get back to a writer. If you are a creative, you cannot stop working for six to eight months waiting for one project to land and give you a place from which to take your next step. You have to take the next step anyway. It’s time to move forward. You have to go against the tide of negativity that you feel, the voice that tells you you aren’t meant to be a writer, and you have to act like you already are a writer.
I did not say MOVE ON, you are not giving up on that book, you will continue to submit it, continue to do all the things you are already doing, but you are going to allow yourself to become unstuck. Allow yourself to grow. You will need to make your own jumping forward point. You will have to use this experience as a place to move forward, not a place to stop.
I feel that learning to move around your artistic intentions, and by this I mean a wider view of what you want to do as a writer in the long term, is as important as making those publication milestones. How you move on to new projects, and the way you build the skills around finding new projects is something we don’t talk about a great deal in the creative community. There is immense pressure to ‘succeed’ in a traditional sense. Good art, good writing is success. Of course, partly what I have just said is privileged bullshit too, because art needs an audience and artists need paying for their work. But what I’m talking about here is allowing yourself space to not be entirely invested in one single project and having the courage and confidence to use that place for growth, to explore, to create, when you don’t have the much easier to acknowledge jumping off point of publication. This skill is a necessary part of developing as a writer. If you learn it early, it is easier than learning it later in your career.
There are different ways of moving forward. If you’re like me you might have a whole range of eclectic interests. You do not lose anything by playing with the ideas around them. If you’re too stuck to write what you want, just write. Bring something, anything into existence. Make notes, listen to the things that spark your interest, your joy and just write about them, describe them, journal on them. Be careful not to rush into a new idea feeling it is definitely the one, and applying for funding grants and planning out project timelines etc. I find that, after moving forward from a project there is a tendency to grasp for the high you got when you were in the flow of your original project, the sensation of really getting somewhere. In reality you will probably have to play in the fallow fields, let yourself explore, let yourself come to your work with the beginner’s mind - looking for the feelings of joy that you began your writing journey with before it begins to feel more natural to be turning your focus away from your original project.
Another way of growing forward is to find the places in your existing work that have room to evolve and grow from.
I’m reminded of something I heard the poet Kim Moore, of Kim Moore and Clare Shaw fame, say once - something about how in every poetry collection she writes there’s usually a seed poem for another collection. (Sorry Kim, I’m paraphrasing.) It was an idea that stuck with me and has helped me along the way. Rather than seeing each project as a file to be completed and put away in a drawer, creative projects often contain the seeds for new projects and often the growth you need is in finding the seeds, or taking cuttings.
What I’m saying here is don’t give up, grow.
What I’m saying here is see where the doors are closed and kick them open.
What I’m saying here is that you are the master of your own artistic intentions, do not let yourself stand in your own way.
What I’m saying here is do not let your writer self be defined by any one project. You can be known for a style or a theme or a book you have written without being defined by it.
Go forth and WRITE.
Until next time
x
A very timely post for me, just what I needed to read. Thanks Wendy x
I agree with this post. Though it can be a different set of challenges when you are nearing your 70s or 80s as time is not on your side in the way that you might have thought it once was. I think that's one instance when the poetry model of distribution fails.