Persevere

A decade ago, I attended Desert Nights, Rising Stars, ASU's writer's conference, as guest faculty, several years removed from the years I served as the conference's director. During a break between panels, another attendee chatted me up. "What you think is the most important quality for a writer to have?" he asked.

I don't think I hesitated for a second before I responded, "Perseverance."

The man looked taken aback. "I thought you were going to say something like 'talent.'"

I think about that little moment a lot. I think about how true it was for me then, and how true it remains today. 
I just wrapped up a podcast recording for The Write Process's sixth season. On that pod, I speak with writers affiliated with the UCLA Extension Writers' Program about how they took one project from concept to completion. It's been a real source of joy for me to highlight these writers and share the many, many ways books get into the world. Each one is unique, full of its own trials and tribulations, its own unexpected miracles. The guests talk a lot about persevering through rejection and uncertainty, but all of these stories do have some kind of happy ending--the perseverance paid off. They reached their goal.

Sometimes that's not the way it goes. I'm thinking about this because I just took a break from writing prose to revise poems using an experimental new method I made up. Most of these were written last April, or even earlier than that, and I've left them languishing in little folders on my Google Drive ever since. 

I started thinking about Career Suicide.

Not the idea. The manuscript. My manuscript, which turns 12 this year. It's a collection of poems in the voices of people (both real and imagined) and objects complaining about their jobs, or their function in life. I wrote it in the aftermath of quitting the worst employment situation I ever experienced, something I don't talk or write much about because it felt like failing in the worst way imaginable. In the first two or three years after, I wrote these poems, and they gathered together to become Career Suicide, I title I love because it comes right out of one of the poems ("Complaint of the B-List Actress"), and because I had committed it in my real life.

My first book The First Risk was published in 2009. I had written the poems for a follow up collection from 2004-2008, and in my heart I believed these two books would get into the world after a few years.

I spent time assembling the ca. 2008 poems into a manuscript called Nanopedia, and Career Suicide came together quickly not long after. I started sending them out. There was early promise for Nanopedia--it placed well in some competitions and got me some encouraging rejections, but it wasn't breaking through. Career Suicide pretty much went nowhere. It was a high-concept collection in a time when those were falling out of fashion. Or it was just badly written. Two of the poems in it, "Complaint of Achilles' Heel" and "Complaint of Isadora Duncan's Scarf," were mailed out as part of the Academy of American Poets's Poem-A-Day email and remain archived on the site. Other poems found homes. But not the book.

My second book didn't appear until December 31, 2018.

Over those ten years, I watched some of my peers publish book after book, win awards, get speaking agents, and generally achieve all the things I'd hoped for myself. I was happy for them, even though there were times I wondered what was wrong with me and my work. Other peers vanished from view--some stopped writing. Some, like me, were stuck by the wayside of a publishing landscape that offers at least a hundred opportunities for first books to get published but only a handful for second, third, fourth books. 

Each year of silence added more doubt and, to be frank, more despair.

My solution? Keep writing.

I wrote a novel, a painstaking process I was entirely unprepared to do and one that ended up taking almost 15 years to complete. Then I wrote two more. I wrote poems--lots and lots of poems--for collections that never coalesced, and for one that did--Instructions between Takeoff and Landing, which took about five years to go from draft to book. I wrote an accidental memoir that probably took the least amount of time to go from drafty manuscript to publication agreement.

Writing is not a race. We are not in competition with other writers, even when we're required to enter literal competitions. We are not part of an economy of scarcity. The only competition we face is against ourselves--our own potential, our own discipline. In ten years of waiting, that's what I told myself over and over.

And I believe it's true. I'm fortunate to have had the opportunities I've had. I like to tell Bill--paraphrasing Oprah--that what looks to others like luck is actually the intersection of preparation and opportunity. The opportunities we can't control. But the preparation--that's all us. That's us every day. That's choosing to keep at the work, striving to be better, working toward new discoveries and pushing past our boundaries. 

At this point, rest assured I am prepared for no fewer than 8 opportunities. (LMAO)

And I keep working every day. A writer isn't what I do; it's who I am. Publishing is amazing when it happens, but that's not the work. What I'm really hoping to do is surprise myself with what I write. I chase it every day. I don't know what I'm looking for until I've found it. But at that moment, I know the perseverance was worth it.

Stay true to you, and love your journey even when it sucks.
C