Monthly Archives: August 2023

Thoughts on Writing After a Year of Sending out Queries for my WWII-Era Homefront Historical Fiction Novel Set in Lake Arrowhead, CA… and A Whole Lots of Maybes

I am discouraged. It’s been a long haul, and I’m tired. I wonder if it’s too late—if I’m even a capable writer. Maybe I am a past-prime-nothing-special-mainstream kind of a writer with nothing new to offer in a world crowded with bright-fresh-creatives churning out compelling new stories that I am not equipped to write.  

Maybe, more accurately, I wouldn’t write those compelling new stories even if I could, because I truly don’t want to. But that doesn’t mean I never will. Maybe I’m going to want to! With creating, one never knows. Meanwhile, what I write these days is what I feel the magical desire to create. If I were being paid to write, or I were writing an assignment for a course I was taking, it would be different. At least a little bit different, but still really fulfilling. And I have done that successfully.

So I think that means that stubbornness is not the problem. But who among us knows well their own foibles? A self-examined life is not worth living perhaps, but I am not always sure my self-examinations are thorough or astute enough. That is one of the many reasons I need you, my friends!

Writing from my heart for no other reason than I want to create something of my own is a very different task than an assignment or a job, and that is what I’ve been at with A Fine Suddenness, and with many earlier projects. This self-appointed task has been with me for most of my life, with innumerable hours invested outside of my “real” life, most of them happily. Those hours have stretched into a lifetime of practice.

I’ve invested a good amount of my limited income into writing as well. There have been many journals, computers, printers, reams and reams of paper, hundreds of pens (and oh how I love those pink, yellow, green, and blue highlighters!) and yes, the multitude of books I’ve purchased on writing, and the subscriptions to writing magazines. Then there’s the cost of attending various writing events—retreats, conferences, special courses, all of them fabulous and expensive.

The MFA in Creative Writing I earned in 2009 was a big investment that took me years to pay off. I do not regret it.  Graduate school was an amazing experience. I loved every moment of being part of a group of writers immersed completely in our projects, all of us in over our heads, happily drowning in words, study, reflection, discussion, research, and ideas, all filled with the satisfying knowledge that no one among us questioned the importance of what we were doing. It often feels as though the rest of the world could care less about poets, screenwriters, non-fiction writers, and novelists, but it didn’t feel that way when we were in school together.

Few parents would encourage their children to enter into any of these fields. I’ve had friends who must have temporarily forgotten what my degrees are in, because they openly laugh at their children’s desires to study any of the humanities while in conversation with me. “Imagine,” they say. “What a waste of tuition.” It’s clear what they mean. Those fields don’t make any money.

I understand that money is necessary, and my life would have been easier if I had more, but I also know my soul would have shriveled had I worked in any field that didn’t allow me to at least exist in close proximity to the world of literature and learning and language that teaching and library work gave me.

It was never about money.

Writing has been my passion for a very long time. And I believe it has been worthwhile, even at this moment, seeing how things stand. I have never developed a writing platform. I don’t have much of a following on my blog (which is admittedly not something I have any technical skill in setting up or growing). Despite regularly studying the publishing field, sending out personalized queries to agents who work with my genre, and working, working, working on improving the queries, the summaries, the comp list, my bio… all the while making my manuscript the best it can possibly be, I haven’t secured an agent.

Maybe I should stop trying. Maybe I should write, but just stop trying to find an agent, or a small publishing house that might consider publishing my work. After all, it’s not about the money. I’ve never expected that.

Holding a beautifully bound copy of my own work, that’s definitely at least part of what I want, since I so value books, but I understand the process of writing and the joy of finding readers who might enjoy reading what I’ve written are what would move me most.

Maybe I should seriously consider self-publishing, even though I do not want to. Maybe it’s the only way, and maybe it wouldn’t humiliate me in a Willy Loman Death of a Salesman kind of way.

That’s a whole lot of maybes…

What do you think?