Never doubt that thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has.—Margaret Mead
Monday you got the bad news. Now you get the good news. You’re very welcome!
- THE DILIGENT: those who sit down and write
Natalie Goldberg immortalized it without words, the simple gesture of holding up a pad of paper and writing.
Don’t write for publication. Don’t write for ambition. Don’t write because you keep reading the news about people even less literary than you making it in the best selling Big Time. Don’t base your dreams on greed.
Write for zest and exploration and color and detail. Write as research and daydreaming and argument and creativity and hypothesizing. Write for experimentation and hallucination and entertainment and friendship and education and sheer goodness of heart. Write for amusement and revenge and anguish and, ultimately, exhaustion.
Write because writing’s what you do—and what you’re going to be doing for the rest of your life—even when you have nothing to write about.
Guess what? You’re a writer. - THE IMAGINATIVE: those who are always looking for ways to liven up the party
You know why so many writers have such great biographies? Because the best ones never know when to leave well enough alone. They pull up their socks and yank on their shit-kickers and go out there to face life with all their innocence and guilt and huevos shining in all directions. They pay their dues and take their chances. They shoot the rapids. They wrestle the angel. They throw themselves on the mercy of the lion.
And when they sit down to write, they approach it the same way, with recklessness and bravado and sheer, uncontrolled, brain-bursting inanity. That’s how they get themselves into the tops of trees and under the bowels of the earth, on the extreme end of adventures they can’t possibly get out of in one piece, hurtling lock, stock, and barrel into outer space. And that’s how they have the stamina and endurance to drag a whole galaxy of readers along with them.
- THE SENSITIVE: those who pay attention to their senses
You were born with five, or at least most of five. They are your passport to the world of words. No matter where you go, what you do, or what you think about it, those five senses are always operating, twenty-four hours a day, rushing an infinite number of perceptions to your brain, where they are promptly transformed into concrete, vivid, material details, complete with all the trimmings.
Even more than that, your brain itself sorts, classifies, and stores them all. THEM ALL. And for the rest of your life they’re there, being carted around inside that unbelievable micro-storehouse inside your brainpan and added to every instant of every second of every moment of your day. . .a constant, unending stream of fertile material.
All you have to do is write it down. - THE INSENSITIVE: those who have a businessperson’s professional attitude toward rejection, vagaries of the industry, unforeseen disaster, yes, even self-parodying black humor
Almost every single time I write one of those black humor posts, I get a whole bunch of people laughing their heads off and one unhappy person saying sadly (or not-so-sadly) and without a trace of humor, “Why are you such a big meanie?”
I’m not. Truly. Read my client testimonials. I’m an old fuzzy kitty-cat, and the people who work with me on their own tender, delicate, yearning fiction are my biggest champions.
But I’ve been out here in the writing business for three decades and counting, and I know if you don’t develop a sense of humor about the weaknesses and failings you yourself bring to it, it will chew you up and spit you out long, long before you ever thought you could possibly be done. The publishing industry is not out there waiting for you to bring it your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. The publishing industry doesn’t care about you and your wretched refuse. (For the record, it doesn’t care about me or mine, either.)
The publishing industry is nobody’s mommy.
It’s a business, that’s all. And the only way you’re ever going to succeed as a writer is by learning to laugh at yourself, alongside others just like yourself, in the spirit of camaraderie and warts-&-blemishes and cockroaches scuttling around under rocks in the dark of all those who have gone before you. Because they are legion. And when you are dead and gone, legions more will still continue to arrive on these fictional shores.
Quit worrying about getting your feelings hurt and throw your arms open in joy now that you arrived here when you did. Even as we speak, you are recreating this place in your own image. - THE PATIENT: those who take their time, realizing life is long and a career in the arts takes the whole of it and even the greats never lived long enough to learn it all
Somerset Maughm lamented it. Flannery O’Connor lamented it. You can lament it too: you will never live long enough. You can devote all the decades of your life to the craft you love and be ecstatic you did, but you will still die, like Albert Einstein, leaning out of bed with the last frail ounce of strength, grasping for a reproducable theorum of the divine.
And you will know, as you lean, that you gave it your all, every day of your life: your passion and curiosity and love and devotion to this craft that means so much to so many but, especially, to you. And you will die grateful you had the chance, thanking heaven you stumbled on it while there was all that time to luxuriate in it. . .even if you became a writer only days before you died.
It came to you—this extraordinary craft—as a free and unfettered gift, and you got to own it, for just a little while. - THE BLESSED: those upon whom the gods smile
Because there is luck in all the business of humanity. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one in time plays many parts.”
Get used to it. And get used to recognizing when you are blessed. It is a huge and amazing thing. It is well worth stopping and making an issue out of. You got smiled on! Break open the clouds, stand in shafts of sunlight, let the angels sing.
One of the gods smiled on you.
For the rest of it, well, get used to sharing that with all the rest of us, this ridiculously motley crew of hapless strugglers, drowners, fighters, dreamers out here. You think you’re alone in your natural lack of blessedness? Open your eyes and look around. You’re not alone.
Truly, people. A piece of paper, a pen, a handful words, and this life of yours: that’s it. Luck comes, and luck goes. Live long enough, and you won’t be able to escape it.
You are all you have.
And remember: you have 5 Things to Celebrate About Finishing Your First Draft.
Happy to open my eyes and see the others!
Now I have a new pen, extra paper. . .and I am happy. 🙂
Great post.
Enjoy your vacation!
Great post! This made my day. 🙂
Dear Victoria:
I loved this post, especially 1. Diligent . . .
Thanks for taking the time, and enjoy your trip! Newly teenage maniacs are great fun. 🙂
“sheer, uncontrolled, brain-bursting inanity”
I’m pretty sure you meant “insanity,” but they way you have it written works kind of well as a description of my blog posts and tweets. Such fortuitous happenstance in a typographical error! 🙂
Even if it weren’t for the happenstance, though, this’d still be a great post. Yay!
How about “The Neurotic” and the “Alcoholic” ?
How about the chocoholic?
I loved this post. It’s so real, so true. Laughing at the whole thing is so, so important. I learned a lot of this in my previous artistic incarnation as a performer, so I haven’t started from scratch in this area. In the rest of writing however, I’m taking my first steps. As in my past artistic persuits, I find that diligence comes from inspiration and love of what you’re doing.
I forgot to add. Can I let my readers know about specific posts on your site or maybe take little quotes occaisonally. I’d always include a link to your site, of course. It’s just that I often find a sentence or two that you write that illuminates something I’m writing about.
I’m at http://publishersearch.wordpress.com/
My blog’s about the journey to publication of my YA fantasy novel ‘Lethal Inheritance.’
I just found you through Adventures in Children’s Publishing and I’m SO HAPPY! I was thrilled when I read your post about 6 personality types who won’t succeed and I didn’t fit into any of them. After reading this post, my day has been immeasurably brightened! Thank you!
Wonderful post! And it is sad that there won’t be enough time . . . that we will simply not live long enough to write all the words and worlds in our heads. Fabulour thoughts.
or fabulous if you don’t hit the wrong key . . .
Both this and the previous post are great, showing, without sugarcoating who can and cannot succeed in writing. Brilliant posts!
What a wonderful post. As a therapist I’m always interested in the psychology of the process, and as a writer these qualities ring true. Signing up for blog straightaway!
Another fantastic post. Not only does it give insight into the process, but goals to strive for. Hope you don’t mind if we include this in our Friday round-up of best articles.
Martina
Wow, this was such a great post, and so very true for so many writers out here! I’ve finally mastered the art of patience as well (knock on wood)!
I’m so glad to have found this wonderful post.! Each of these personality characteristics resonated with me, but most of all I would love to be the imaginative.
I am definitely fall into the category of THE DILIGENT. The actor Will Smith said that I’m not the best actor but I am the most motivated. I think a lot of people are great writers but lack discipline, motivation and also the business acumen to be a writer and promote their own work.
thanks so much for the hard and inspring words. My writing is based on your principles (most of the time). And I read the writer’s curse and blesssing when I first decided to be a writer in 1987. ‘once you have written, nothing else satisfies.’
I loved the sensitive / insensitive dichotomy. I’m a psychologist who’s brand new to this writing & publishing thing. I probably bring loads of “sensitivity” to this venture but I’m quickly learning that I need to build the “insensitivity” gene as well, especially as friends and others are just starting to read my novel. Thank you for the thought-provoking post!
An insightful post! (As well as inspiring!)
Thanks for sharing this. 🙂
This makes me smile. And eager to get back to my manuscript–without anxiety…simply because it will be a lovely way to spend my Sunday afternoon 🙂
“THE DILIGENT” – remindsme of the Sinclair Lewis staggering drunkenly up to podium to address an audience of would-be writers: “You dumb sonabitches wanna be writers? Well, g’wan the hell home and write!”
It’s starting to hit me that the publishing world is a tad cutthroat. That aside, I’m still digging my nails into it and trying. I can say without a doubt that agent, editor, publisher, or none of the above–I will still be scribbling scenes down in my notebooks.
What a great list! So often people talk as if there’s only one kind of way to be, if you want to succeed, but it isn’t true. And it seems to me that recognising what you naturally are, and then what it would be useful if you learnt to be a bit more, it the key to both getting somewhere in the industry, and staying sane.
And “get used to recognising when you’re blessed” is so important. Yes, some are luckier than others, but it’s very easy – because we’re mostly bred up that way – to see our own failures and deficiencies, in luck as in everything else, and not our successes and talents. We all have both.
What a great and inspiring post!
Thank you!!
This list gives me some much needed inspiration. Wonderful post! Hope to pass it on to many others that also need a little light!
I think I may print this and post it on my refrigerator as
My Validation! This, in itself, is a Great Motivator for those of us
who find Writing, as breathing, A MUST, and just like breathing, we
don’t think about it, but it happens… so, I guess I see Writing as a part
of my Autonomic system to Function! Thank you, Victoria, for Validating me!
Great post. I think you nailed it with the types of personalities. Probably the writers who are the most successful have all of these elements in their personality at different times in their careers and at different stages. Really interesting post 🙂