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.

Certainly I fear rejection. I think you are given this fear as an initiation present, a “welcome to the author’s club” trophy that you carry with you as a combination point of pride and burden for the rest of your life. I don’t think fear of rejection ever goes away, we just get better at suppressing it.

What I think I realized this weekend, however, is that underneath the fear of rejection is an even more deep-seated fear, a fear that is often so traumatizing that we can’t even bear to confront it or even admit that we have it. Some writers reading this now probably know what I’m talking about already. The real fear, the paralyzing fear that simmers underneath the frying pan of the fear of rejection and the other things that contribute to writer’s block is this:  the fear that we aren’t actually good at writing.

When I was a kid I took an aptitude test. This test told me that I should consider a career in the sanitation field or perhaps janitorial. At the time I had very few lofty goals outside of augmenting my collection of He-Man and G.I. Joe figures, so this didn’t hurt me much.

What if, as an adult, someone reviewed my writing and said, “you know what, you should stick to your day job.” Nobody (with the exception of a few strange people) wants to be that guy on American Idol who thinks he can sing but ends up in the “embarrassingly bad” clip montage. No writer wants to be that guy that devotes a year or two or twenty of his life to writing, to pouring his soul out onto disk, only to be shown the door and told that his stuff sucks and is beyond help.

I think this is the real cause for so much of a writer’s anxiety. They aren’t necessarily afraid of rejection, though it certainly stings. Everybody knows that even great writers have been rejected – if the story isn’t what they want to publish at the time, or if the editor was in a crabby mood that morning, the story is thrown in the round file. What none of us want is to get all the way to the end of the road and we wind up on the “embarrassingly bad”  writer’s list. We can tolerate being called “unpublished writers”, but, can we tolerate someone telling us we shouldn’t be writing?

As I was standing on the launching platform for the zipline I looked down about 25 feet and saw metal fences, hard rock, and people, none of which I was particularly interested in landing on. 25 feet below them I saw water. I’d always had trouble with heights so it came as no surprise to me that I had trouble breathing and every fiber of my being told me to turn the hell around, go back on solid ground, and give up. Let someone else take the risk.

That’s when I reminded myself about this one pervasive fact: the only difference between me and the other people on the zipline was what was going on inside my head. If my brain wasn’t telling me that I was going to die, then I could easily get up on the zipline and jump off the platform.

This same conversation goes on in a writer’s head when they sit down to write. Somewhere deep inside, there might be a voice telling this writer that they aren’t good enough, that they aren’t really a writer, and that they shouldn’t bother, that they should let someone else take the risk.

I decided at that moment that I was going to take the risk, that the journey was worth it even if the ending wasn’t the one I’d dreamed of. And so the point of this blog post is that, if anybody is reading this and thinking about spending a year or more writing a novel, they should do it. Don’t let someone else take that risk, because they’ll end up with a novel and you’ll end up with regret. The only difference between the writers writing and the writers pacing is what’s going on inside their head, and thankfully, we have complete control over that. So write. Fear can’t stop you unless you let it.

I will close out this blog post with some inspiring words from Frank Herbert’s Dune about fear:

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Writer, go and write. Everything else is secondary.

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.

I’m not apologizing, my absence actually has relevance and meaning to the life of a writer. My life as of late has been very chaotic. I’ve had ups, downs, big ups, and big downs, all within an extremely short period of time up to and including considering a potential job change, considering moving, beginning divorce proceedings, and much, much more. Even though my divorce probably ranks at the top of the worlds most amicable divorces ever, its still a huge source of stress, anxiety, and most of all – change.

As I floated around on the top of the waves, nearly drowning from having swallowed so much stress I got to thinking about how long it had been since I actually sat down and wrote anything. I don’t mean having written anything good, profound, or meaningful. I mean, how long it had been since I’d written anything. I hadn’t blogged, hadn’t written in a journal, and certainly hadn’t been working on my fantasy novel.

So, I slapped myself in the face and said to myself:

One thing that writers must do is write. Thinking, plotting, scheming, dreaming – all useful but mean nothing without actually sitting down and writing.

If I’m not writing, I’m not a writer. That’s the short and long of it right here. So, I sat down and started writing. Since then, I’ve finished a short story that I’ve sent out for consideration by a popular fantasy magazine (will know in about 6 weeks if they liked it) and I’m nearly done with another short story that I’m submitting to an anthology. Once done with those, I’m going to dive back into the fantasy novel.

The point I want to make here is I hit rock bottom. I was wallowing in self-pity and I was coming up with every excuse in the book to stop writing. Since I’ve started writing again, I’m a happier person. The moral of the story is if you want to be a writer – the one thing you must do above all else is write. Its about time I followed my own advice.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

There are several other variants of this quote, including the ever-popular “Perfect is the enemy of done.” which often shows up in leadership guidebooks, motivational tools, and other corporate propaganda. This quote has very special meaning for me because it sums up in the smallest amount of words possible the absolute core of the reason why so many writers fail. It describes the reason why it’s taken me ten years of waiting to finally start working seriously on my book.

As a writer, I am constantly plagued by feelings of self-loathing and I continually hurl insults at myself that one shouldn’t use against one’s own worst enemy. This is because the story that is in my head feels clean, pristine, and unmarred. When I allow this story to flow through my hands into the word processor, the end result is something that feels like a dirtying of the original story, as if I’ve somehow ruined it in the telling. This is perfectionism at its worst. The problem is that I feel that my narrative isn’t good enough, that my characters aren’t real enough, that my plot isn’t good enough, and I let that feeling paralyze me.

I sit in front of the word processor and I tell myself that what I’m about to write is going to suck. I tell myself that I’m a worthless, 2-bit hack who is just pretending to be a writer and then I slam the lid shut of my laptop and go off and do something else. You see, this is also a self-defense mechanism. If I am the one who tells me that I am a loser and a no-talent hack then I spare myself the inevitable vulnerability and crushing blow when someone else tells me that. The unwritten story cannot be criticized and if I am the source of the worst criticism, then I will not be hurt. At least, that’s what I tell myself.

At this point I’m at a crossroads. I can either continue to be sucked into the downward spiral or I can remember this quote,

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

And pull myself out of the pit of self-loathing. I can repeat that quote over and over again until I finally decide that it is more important to allow the story to escape my soul unhindered than it is to ensure that it is edited, pristine, and perfect upon release.