For a New Year—M.G.Sondraal

Disappointments, Reality, and Resiliency for a New Year

I love writing. Not always. Sometimes it’s frustrating and distinctly unpleasant but, overall, I enjoy the process.

I relish building worlds and imagining scenarios for my characters to encounter, thrill when a scene effortlessly flows and advances the plot, and delight in a novel I’ve crafted and still like after innumerable edits. It’s a heady experience. (It isn’t always the case. Sometimes I struggle to finish a WIP, don’t like it, can’t think how to fix it, and am reluctant to even try. More about those later.)

A successful final product causes selective amnesia. As reality is forgotten, false memories emerge, ones where I channeled my inner muse without distraction and perfectly conveyed what I imagined, with only minor tweaks necessary, fixing typos because my creative juices flowed so quickly my fingers couldn’t keep up. Anyone who writes knows that doesn’t happen often, consistently, or possibly ever.

More often there are painful days of grinding out absolute dreck to force the story arc onto the screen as I recite the mantra “I can’t edit a blank page”. That first draft is inevitably a disappointment, the ugly fruit of my labour, misshapen, unwanted, despised, unsellable. It’s fruit though, however unappetizing it is to me. Disappointment is not yet despair.

The structural edit to identify gaps, major errors, pacing problems, and timeline inconsistencies follows. This is where characters, even the ones I lovingly nurtured and adore, are hacked out of the text and where whole scenes of my precious words are ripped out in service to a tighter, cleaner story. Let them rest in a discard file and hope for resurrection in another work.

When the story arc is finally solid without holes and satisfies my narrative, I’ve barely begun. What follows next are weeks ferreting out and destroying passive speech, filter words, superfluous dialogue, and poor word choices. This is where doubt and despair well up unbidden. Who am I kidding? What possessed me to think I could do this? How can I call myself a writer? Why do I repeat mistakes? Where can I find a drink? With perseverance, something polished and balanced takes a pleasing shape. Maybe this is the one.

It's interesting to me how my inner critic fluctuates wildly. I read works that enthrall me. (I can never write this well. I should quit immediately and stop embarrassing myself.) I’ve read books that confuse me. (How did this drivel get published? I can write better than this. There’s still hope.)

The reality is somewhere between these extremes. A Giller, Governor-General, Stephen Leacock, or Edgar award will forever be out of my grasp. Cast that dying dream along side the one where Shelagh Rogers and Eleanor Wachtel interview me about my books on CBC (too late, they retired before any publication of mine) and take the one where I become a bestselling author along with it. Not going to happen. (Of these, missing interviews with Shelagh and Eleanor hurts the most.)

Can I consider independent publication? Absolutely not. That requires massive self-confidence that I lack. Furthermore, I am ill-suited to marketing my books, probably the worst salesperson ever created. This is not a path I can follow.

Is traditional publishing possible? Long odds on that. I’d need an agent, and I’m not looking. I used to believe it was lack of confidence, fear of failure, poor understanding, and outright slothfulness that prevented me from searching for one. I understand now that in the most secret, brutally honest part of me, I don’t measure up, maybe not even to the poorly edited, horrible disappointments that somehow got published and earned my contempt.

Since that excruciating moment of clarity, I’ve had months to reconcile to that harsh self-assessment. It’s a sad thing to acknowledge your deficiencies and that the trash pile of dying dreams is growing exponentially. It’s also freeing. I can’t possibly disappoint myself more than I already have. Expectations of self are gone. Now I can dust off those flawed, failed manuscripts, tear them apart, and stitch the remnants back together for another attempt to write something to satisfy myself alone. No more friend circle to torture with amateurish tales.

I will continue to write. For me. Because I love it.

And maybe one day, I’ll produce something that’s good enough and amaze myself.

And then all bets are off.