Robert Heinlein would hate me
[Before we get started, the writer Scott Lynch has very graciously offered to pay for three people to attend my 4-week horror writing course, and there is ONE SPOT LEFT. You can sign up here.]
I failed at writing at least half-dozen novels before I ever succeeded at writing one. From talking to other writers, I understand that this is pretty common: most of us contain a vast graveyard of half-written ideas or dead-on-arrival stories. My unfinished and undead drafts still vastly outnumber their completed brethren, and probably always will.
I really thought this would change at some point! I believed I’d reach a level of writerly skill that would allow me to divine if a story idea contained a fatal flaw that meant I’d never finish it. So far, though, despite more than a decade of being a published author, the ratio of flat-lined projects to polished creations has held steady. For every story I finish, I pour my heart into one or two others that founder and sink.
Listen: I have also read Robert Heinlein’s famous rules for being a writer. To wit:
“You must write. You must finish what you write. You must resist rewriting (except to editorial demand). You must put your writing to market. You must keep it on market until it is sold.”
And I don’t disagree with any of those rules, except that I have broken nearly all of them.
I spend long periods of time not writing, because not-writing is when I do most of my thinking, an unfortunate pre-requisite of completing a long-ass book. I finish only half of what I start writing. I rewrite the shit out of everything, whether my editor demands it or not (and on Dead Girls, despite my editors asking me to stop). These days, everything I finish goes on submission, but when I wrote more short fiction, I’d sometimes finish a story and decide to keep it in my drafts.
Despite what it looks like, I don’t think this was me being precious about what I wrote. Really, it’s the opposite: I am fairly mercenary and brutal with my work, way more critical with it than I ever would be with someone else’s writing.
Weirdly though, it has helped me build up an immunity towards feeling like a creative failure. The question What if I can’t do it? loses its paralyzing power when you concede, yeah, sometimes you can’t! The world spins on anyway. Failure becomes a known, familiar, and neutral state, and you learn to lean on process instead of outcome.
NEWS
The official pre-order announcement about Dead Girls Don’t Dream went live this week. If you pre-order your copy through Astoria Bookshop, you’ll get a free zine (written by me and illustrated by Nibs) and a postcard designed by Natalie Kovacs.
If you already ordered the book elsewhere, I’ll still send you a postcard with one absolutely true fact about Voynich Woods or the town of Roscoe. Use this form to request it.
Are you free on Tuesday, October 22? Do you like scary books and the weirdos who write them? Do you want to know if we’d rather be eaten by a giant snake or possessed by a cursed doll? I’ll be playing THIS OR THAT over on zoom with some other fantastic YA horror writers, and I am already planning my costume. Sign up here to watch and/or heckle: https://macmillan-publishers.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_RnXS87-oRXmbWxHQ1MoUUA#/registration