Sometimes, the writing was bad. By writing, I mean the craft itself was bad. I had poor sentences or awkward paragraphs and in many places I had beats in the wrong places and the story just flowed wrong.

Other times, as mentioned in a few other blog posts, I submitted a scene or even a loosely collected series of narrative events. In these instances what I submitted was not what most people would consider a short story.

The piece I submitted this morning, a 5,100 word urban fantasy short story, is by far the single best short story I’ve ever written. After finishing the first draft nearly two months ago, I have been re-writing it, editing it, and subjecting myself to brutal criticism from an amazing editor (if she had a blog or a mugshot, I would provide a link here).

Several dozen revisions later, I feel like it is a great short story. It isn’t a scene that is being squished into the short story format, it is an actual short story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It has a hook. I think the writing is some of the best I’ve ever done, the beats are in the right place, the story flows fast when it should be fast, slow when it should be slow. All of the myriad of tiny little details that readers take for granted, I obsessed over for months trying to get this story right.

Now that I’ve submitted this story and I can see what it looked like when I started versus what it looked like when I finished and it really is night and day. I didn’t add a mountain of words and in many cases removed some, but the painstaking attention to every detail in every paragraph as well as to the story as a whole really paid off.

This led me to re-evaluate my concept of the editing process. I used to think of writing as a process that consisted of two big steps: you write, then you edit. To me, editing was something that was done after you produced whatever it is you wanted to label your initial draft. This placed far too much emphasis on the initial output and not enough on editing.

What I’ve learned is that writing isn’t what you do before editing. Writing is editing. The initial output is just that, it’s the starting point on a (often very long) journey. What you do to your initial output isn’t a grammar check or a check for punctuation, it’s a check for the thousands of subtle things that writers do at the micro and macro level: hunt down adverbs and replace them with stronger verbs, find passive voice and passive phrases and strengthen them where appropriate, make sure that as you build compound sentences you lead the reader’s mind’s eye from the right start to the right finish every time and at the right pace.

There’s still a million other things to do that I’ve been habitually bad at doing like consistency checking (making sure that if a character is on the ground in one paragraph, they’re still there in the next), object tracking (making sure that the reader’s mental image of a scene is stable and not disrupted by inconsistencies), dialogue consistency (making sure that people talk the way they should be talking given their backgrounds and current situation), beats and pacing check, exposition versus dialog (“say it don’t tell it” etc) checking, and when that’s done there’s a million more things.

I’m not saying these things to scare potential writers. I’m saying these things because I used to look at a draft and say, “this is good enough” and stop 20-40 revisions too soon. Good enough isn’t good enough. It’s very hard for writers to put themselves in the minds of a reader who has never read the story before – it’s been bouncing around in the writer’s head for weeks, months, maybe even years. It takes disciplined attention to detail and the aid of unbiased, objective, and hopefully brutal reviewers and editors to pull out the core nugget of greatness from the surrounding pile of mediocre writing and turn a good story into one worth publishing.

I am hoping that with this new-found respect for the editing process, my future pieces will be better for it. Even if I never get any of my future stories published, I now know how to make them far better than they ever would have been before.

As if mustering the willpower necessary to keep going in the face of repeated, heart-stopping rejection wasn’t enough, we have to deal with the brutal reality of the need to pay bills, feed ourselves and our families, and possibly even put gas in our cars. Most writers have to deal with the daily choice between spending time doing things that earn money and spending time doing things that are fulfilling (like writing).

I have a demanding day job that often requires that I work from home, work after hours, and even the occasional weekend. In addition to this, I also write technical books on all kinds of computer programming topics, including iPhone, Mac, and Windows Phone 7 programming. When I am not spending time working on those projects, I enjoy spending time with my family – the simple pleasures like watching TV with my girlfriend, going to the movies, getting out of the house on weekends, etc.

So when I step back and look at the potential to spend enough time working on my writing to get good enough at it to get published, the prospects look grim. Any writer will tell you that the secret to being a great writer is to write. You need to write, and you need to do it every day. Just like a guitar player needs to do a few scales every day just to keep the fingers nimble, a writer needs to write a few paragraphs every day just to keep that part of his brain working. Writing is not like riding a bike – the longer your brain spends not writing, the less your brain likes writing.

The question then is, given a busy (albeit rich and fulfilling) life, do you attempt to continue writing even though you know you just don’t have the time to do it justice… or you do throw in the towel and give it up? You hear stories about writers who were able to walk away from their day jobs and become successful, published authors on their first try like Brent Weeks but we also know that most of us can’t afford to take that risk. We can’t walk away from our day jobs and live on Top Ramen for a year while we write our novel only to have it never published. Nearly every published writer tells us that we should never plan on using money from writing to pay the bills because that just doesn’t happen to the average Joe.

For me, the answer is never quit. Writing fiction makes me happy and so I am going to try harder to re-arrange my schedule so that I have more time to do it. Even if I only get to write one paragraph a week, that will have to do. Even if I get 100 more rejection letters this year, that’s going to have to do because of this one important fact:

What I love is writing, getting published is an optional side-effect.

At the beginning of a new year, we often find ourselves facing a clean slate. We figure it’s a new year, so it’s time to start fresh. Time to make promises to do the things this year that we didn’t do last year. Time to make amends for the crappy year we had last year and make this new year one to remember – everything we want it to be!

Unfortunately, this is also a time of denial. A time to kid ourselves and try and sweep the crap from prior years under the rug, look at the shiny new rug, and promise ourselves that the same stuff won’t happen this year. This time of year we fill ourselves with empty promises (we call them “resolutions”) to do more, be better, and achieve everything we’ve always wanted to achieve. Just like there are those who sin all week and then duck into a church every Sunday in search of absolution, there are those of us who use January 1st and “resolutions” as a form of absolution. We tell ourselves that we’ll be better this year.

The trick here isn’t to avoid resolutions all together, the trick is to treat them as goals and make them achievable. We have to pick things we want to accomplish, things that will stretch us and challenge us and make us grow as people or as professionals or as both. Pick something that’s just out of your current reach so you have to take that extra step in the new year to get it… but don’t pick something that’s so far out of reach you’re just going to give up before the end of February.

I’ve got a pile of resolutions that I plan on for this year but I also plan on achieving all of them. Oh I’ve got the usual “lose weight” one, but I’ve been hitting the gym 4+ times per week so I think I may actually accomplish that one if I stick to it long enough. Weight loss is a long, drawn out war of attrition (literally). It’s your willpower versus your gut, and your willpower has to win every day, all day and it sucks the life out of you (well, at least me anyway).

I also have a couple of writing resolutions. This year, I am going to pick one of the open books that I’ve been writing and I’m going to choose just that book and I’m going to finish it. I’m not going to stop and obsess over every chapter I am simply going to grind through the entire book from start to finish and I will end that book. Finishing the book is the hard part. The months of editing afterward are (relatively) easy. I have heard many times that the difference between published authors and aspiring authors is that published authors actually finish their books, aspiring authors just keep starting new books over and over again.

So, one way or another, for better or for worse, I’m going to finish a book this year. In addition, I’m also going to write and submit at least 3 short stories, regardless of my rejection history with short stories. This is because I need to prove to myself that I can continue to love the act of writing in the face of rejection, despair, self-loathing, and all of the other horrible things writers do to themselves when they get rejection letters.

So that’s that. I’ve aired my resolutions publicly and I hope to be accountable to them. Lose some weight, finish a novel, and submit for publication at least three short stories. I wonder what kind of resolutions other authors (published or otherwise) have? Do they fall into the trap of “new year absolution” and just come up with a pile of unattainable goals, or are they pragmatic about it and set fixed, measurable goals that they know they can work toward? I’m always curious about that. I wonder what Stephen King or Neil Gaiman set for their resolutions…

Yesterday I found out that a short story that I’d submitted to a fantasy magazine had been rejected. As with virtually all rejections, there was no associated list of reasons why the piece had been rejected.  There are a couple things that writers typically feel when they get these letters that I want to write about:

First, don’t blame the publication. I know we’ve all heard stories about how ridiculously famous authors have had their books rejected and most of us have heard the stories about how, to see what would happen, people submitted a NY times bestseller to a publishing firm and it got rejected. Say what you will about the system or the man or whatever, but they’re just doing their jobs. The system isn’t there to coddle you, stroke your ego, or put you down humanely. It’s there to make money. Bottom line: if they don’t think your story/book/poetry/whatever will sell money, you get rejected. Writer self-help step #1: Accept this fact. It will never change.

Second: the Kick in the Face. If you have read this blog before, you may have seen this post I wrote previously about handling rejection like a true writer. I’m going to say something that a lot of the writing self-help books don’t say. When you get that rejection, you’re going to be pissed off. You’re going to be mad and you absolutely, positively will feel like giving up. Writers, when we get these rejection letters, will say and feel all kinds of  crazy stuff ranging from “my writing sucks” to “nobody’s ever going to publish my stories” to the absolute worst of them all:

Why do I even bother writing if nobody’s going to publish my work?

This is where the kick to the face comes in. It’s perfectly fine to feel these things and you should feel them – let yourself go through the range of anger, sadness, and dejection that comes with that rejection letter. Then kick yourself in the face. Slap yourself out if it. Realize that all of that crap is just that, crap. You write because you’re a writer and if you do it long enough and hone your craft enough, you will eventually find some success. You may not get on the NY times bestseller list, but there will be small victories.

If you can’t slap yourself out of it, then get a friend to kick you in the face. Last night I was babbling on about how I was going to give up writing and I quit and life sucks and why should I bother yadda yadda yadda. A friend of mine slapped me in the face and told me to knock it off (you know who you are…thank you!). What I intend to do is write tonight… write until I can’t take it anymore.

What I failed to remember, and what we may need friends to kick into our thick heads (hard!), is that we write because that’s who we are. We write because we tell stories, and we gain some satisfaction from telling and honing a story. Publication is secondary to writing, and every writer gets rejected.

So I’m taking my own advice: sucking it up, getting back on the horse, and moving on from yet another rejection and realizing that friends who can slap you around a little bit after a rejection are probably more valuable than friends who can proofread your stuff before the rejection.

So I’ve received my first rejection letter. Note that I said “first” and not “a” or “the”. This is an important distinction. Throughout the career of any writer, the reception of rejection letters is going to be commonplace, with a few notable exceptions for people who are lucky and talented enough to strike a hit with their first book.

Even though I knew it was going to happen and I knew it was coming, it still hurt. I’ve written or contributed to 14 different books that were all published and sitting on shelves in Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc. They were all technical books but they were published books nonetheless. As a result, I’m not particularly accustomed to people telling me they don’t want to publish my work.

This is where the courage part comes in. As soon as you open (either the physical envelope or the email) a letter containing a rejection, your brain starts doing all kinds of horrible things to you.  It tells you that your story sucks, it tells you that you can’t write and that you have the writing skill of a four year old. Your brain will tell you that you should’ve given up before you started, why should you even bother if your stuff sucks and nobody wants to read it? Then, when your brain has thoroughly beaten you and you are on the ground bleeding and positive you don’t want to get back up, your brain then asks you the most dangerous question of all. Be careful – it’s a trick question:

Why do you want to be a writer?

This is where you will get tripped up. If you answer this question, then you might as well give up now and seriously not bother trying to write any longer. This is a trick question because you don’t want to be a writer, you are a writer. Whether your writing is good, whether you can get published, whether the only person who ever reads your writing is your dog – you are a writer and there is nothing you can do about it. It is in your DNA and your soul as surely as any other immutable part of your anatomy and who you are.

This is the suffering that all writers go through. A writer doesn’t come up with stories, he or she is plagued by them. The stories and scenes and characters and ideas come unbidden at random points throughout the day and they quite literally cannot function properly until they have vented those ideas; given them release and physical form on paper or computer. Whether a person ever writes a single word for publication is irrelevant to whether or not they are a writer.

And so, with my self esteem in the gutter, I open a new blank word processor document and start anew, knowing that I will continue to be rejected and knowing that there is nothing I can do about it. I don’t want to write, I must write. It is essential to my sanity and the completion of a story is a therapy that I can buy from no clinic. This is my curse and my gift: my brain is full of stories and these stories are screaming to be given form and it is my job, my responsibility to do just that.

For people who blog all the time and for people who are used to writing a lot, the idea of cramming something meaningful into a mere 10 sentences can seem pretty daunting. To see if I could really condense a meaningful thought down to 10 sentences, I submitted a work called “Hands” to them and today it was published on their blog.

Click here for the link to the publication.