Anyone that’s ever tried to write anything for publication or competitions will know that 99% of the time, the answer you get back is rejection and/or failure. I am not immune from this writerly condition, nor did I ever expect to be. The most important thing, I think, is to learn what you can from the failure and keep pushing on to do better.
Resilience. Very much easier said than done.
Does it feel like someone has kicked you in the stomach when they tell you they enjoyed your work, but it’s not quite good enough? Absolutely. Does feeling like you’re the only person in the class not to instantly understand a new concept knock your confidence? Yes. 100%. However, it is not a permanent state of being. It’s a transition point - or to lean on my alchemical vibes - a transmutation point. You’re stopping being the kind of writer that makes those mistakes. You’re becoming a new kind of writer that makes new mistakes instead. This all sounds very philosophical, but the reality looks a lot more like your head hitting the desk, a small pool of tears, digging your nails into your face with frustration and despair as you read through or listen to the comments that tear your work to bits, and a lot of chocolate in consolation.
I call these “wobbly writing weeks.” They happen. Often.
This past couple of weeks, I’ve been facing up to writing “subtext” in my work. Somewhere during the lecture on the subject, my brain decided that this was something I found utterly impossible. The fact is, subtext is probably already in my writing somewhere, but my brain has gone into panic mode and I can’t see it. I’ve also realised that I’m something of a direct character. I’ll say what I’m thinking most of the time, and apparently that’s unusual. I tried to explain the difficulties I was having to my husband, bouncing the ideas and concepts off him and asking him why he thought I wasn’t quite getting it. His response was to pat me on the shoulder and reply “T’was the ‘tism, my lady.” He may have a point there, but it didn’t really get me any closer to understanding where I was going wrong.
When asking for help fails, I resort to the tried and trusted read a book about it strategy. Spending a week dragging myself through the exercises in Writing Subtext by Dr Linda Seger did help me to get a bit more of a handle on things. However, until I start throwing more of my redrafted writing in front of someone with the ability to spot the presence or lack of subtext, I’m not going to be entirely sure if I’ve managed to sort this out or not. I’ll be trying that again in class this week. The saga, therefore, continues apace.
My point here is, that we’re always learning. Learning can often feel icky. It’s the uncomfortable, squirming moments where you have to face up to the fact that really, you have no idea what’s going on and if you don’t fix it then things are going to get a lot worse. However, no one gets things right first try. Persistence and resilience pays off - supposedly - but you’re not going to find out if that’s true unless you stick around long enough to find out.
That said, sometimes things just go wrong.
On those occasions, you have to sit down and face up to it. Honesty is always the best policy. This was the case with a short story I submitted for an online writing competition. The theme was vampires and werewolves. I had to somehow find a way to incorporate a family recipe, a contract being signed, and a cursed object. I had a maximum word limit of 2000 words and ten days to draft, edit and submit.
However, I had no experience of writing short stories and find writing to set prompts a very suffocating and difficult thing to do.
Predictably, then - it did not go well.
My work was in the bin on the first sift. What made that all the more disappointing was that I had really worked hard at it. I’d put aside all my other projects and focused on trying to carve something out that would be engaging and hit the prompts with subtlety rather than a sledgehammer. I’d had various friends offer their feedback on it, which was generally positive. I hoped I’d caught the holes and that it was a powerful story.
As it was, it turns out it was a bit shit. And that’s okay.
The judge reading it felt that the magic I gave my vampires wasn’t explained enough and was contradictory. That reasons one of my characters had a ring that was cursed were also not explained well enough.
It was bin fodder. On reflection - fair enough.
I threw the magic in as a last minute change because I felt that my vampire-heavy story wasn’t ‘fantasy tropes’ enough for a fantasy writing competition. That was mistake number one. I should have trusted my initial instincts and left it alone.
Mistake number two, was not knowing how to plot something to fit within 2000 words. That’s very much a specific skill. Writing a novel is very different to writing a short story - and having never written a short story of any form before, I wasn’t really aware of this until I was knee deep in the cess pit I’d built for myself and with no time to clamber my way out.
Mistake number three was not practicing doing this kind of thing before entering a competition for it and denting my confidence so much that I’m not sure if I want to do it again.
As it is, I ended up really quite liking the characters and this was something that the judge picked out in their feedback. They would be happy to read about them and their world in a novel. Perhaps not all is lost and I can do something with them on a larger scale in future? Time will tell.
Somehow I think it was the 2000 word limit/ short story form that screwed things over for me more than anything else. I’d like to think it didn’t work because the story I wanted to try and tell with them was far bigger than the word limit would allow. Maybe that’s the case. Or maybe it’s just shit and the person giving the feedback was just doing the compliment bit of the compliment sandwich with that comment.
Either way, the most important thing is that I’ve learned something. I’ve learned another weakness I have in my writing - which means I know it’s something I can try to address or learn to do better. I’ve learned about my own preferences for how I write. I’ve learned that I plot on a huge and detailed scale and that this doesn’t work for short pieces of work unless I learn to really carve out a lot of the world in my head and get down to basics.
I’ve learned I have so much more work to do. And that’s okay.