Maybe You Need Encouragement Today

How to weather the bad news

The writing world is constructed of walls, hoops, locked doors, and mazes. Inside is often din and clamor.

Bad news comes to a serious writer, and for disappointment you will need a plan for recovery. I have learned to have a back-up plan and a backup’s backup for how to recover, to never be torn loose from my mooring like a heavy boat in a storm, never without bumpers, never without a rope aft and port.

I find myself thinking these thoughts—

• Things should get easier, after all the sacrifice and pain.

• Giving up is appealing.

• How much else am I willing to forfeit?

• How do I not take things personally?

• Who should I tell? Who should I not tell?

• Where do I go next? Who do I to approach next? Who has a door open, standing not blocking that door but to the side?

I’m always thinking of a plan.

If you are a writer or want to be one, resilience will be important, because you'll suffer losses. Bad news will come. I could paper a wall with rejection letters. But I don't.

Loss has a cycle: shock, recovery, shock, recovery. Resilience means “to jump back.” It’s the moss springing back, the bluebirds laying another round of eggs, the stump sprouting. Resilience is

• showing up

• submitting

• trying again

• starting anew

• not accepting no

• looking for yes

• asking again

• signing up

• sending a manuscript out for the fortieth time.

Truly, however, resilience is not an action but a habit cultivated inside.

Once I heard a securities trader talk about ways to weather an economic crash. He said you'd do better if you were debt-free. You’d need silver and gold since paper could become worthless. You'd need cash in small bills. You'd need alcohol, because people always want a drink. You'd need tools and real skills. You'd need the ability to research. You'd need how-to books.

Go ahead now and make a plan for creative sustainability.

How do you survive heartbreak?

Friends, therapy, hobbies, mobility, aware breathing, yoga, antidepressants, walking, cooking, eating, flowers, chocolate?

Be aware, too, that privilege makes us resilient. If you are a poor writer, a woman writer, a black writer, a state-educated writer, a LGBTQ writer, a Native writer, a Cajun writer, a blind writer, a physically challenged writer, a traumatized writer (and so many more), you will need more creative sustainability than a writer who is not.

Giving up is easy. It shapeshifts into many forms, including distractions, procrastinations, racheted-down goals, compromises, new preoccupations. It becomes the urge to check the phone, to make a coffee, to take a walk. Sometimes giving up is necessary. However, however, however, if you have a dream and it burns inside you and you wake each morning thinking about it and you go to bed each night dreaming of it, then don't mind the bad news. Bad news comes.

So does the good.

P.S.

Much of the bad news, I should note, comes when we’re waiting for others to pick us. Also it comes from hoping instead of acting. Make sure that you’re really showing up for yourself and for what you want, and make sure you’re choosing yourself.

Show up. Choose yourself.

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I really would love to hear how you recover.

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Personal Update

I finished another round of edits on my forthcoming book, Craft and Current: Write to Change Your World. These edits took days of work, and at this point in a manuscript the edits should be much milder and less arduous. So I am bracing myself for another round. And I’m also saying, “Imperfect but done.” With that attitude, I sent the MS on to the designer.

This book will not be for everyone. It will be for a very select group of people who love literature and write literature. It’s about craft, for heaven’s sake, not about throwing words on a page.

If that’s you, then thank you for being here. And I hope that I am making something you will dearly love.

Thanks for being here.