Today, day two of Hannah Tinti’s online short story class, we focused on setting up the story. Just like yesterday, Tinti led us through a detailed, sentence by sentence prompt to turn the first sentence we had written from the exercise yesterday into a full, paragraph long set-up of a full story.

I found it much more challenging today than yesterday, but this was largely a result of the fact that I was working on it while my husband, Damien, was in a meeting, so I had our daughter crawling all over me and begging for my attention. I asked her to help me write the story, though, and started reading aloud what I had so far and what I was adding. That way she felt like she was part of it, and it felt like we were doing something together (although, like I said, it was still more difficult, then, than it would have been to just write totally undistracted).

In the end, I’m pretty pleased with what I came up with. It’s still very drafty—needs a lot of work, I know—but I feel the characters beginning to come alive beneath my fingertips, and I know, soon enough, my characters will start writing the story for me, just like they always do when I get on a good roll with a new story. Tomorrow, I think we’re going to be working on the inciting incident, or propelling event, or whatever you want to call it. I’m stoked! I don’t have any idea where this class is going to take this story, but judging from yesterday and today, I have complete faith that I will, indeed, be ending the week with a complete draft of a full short story, just like One Story promised.

My dearest internet, it has been thirty fortnights since last I wrote you. I’m breaking my long silence, at last, and will be posting every day this week—EVERY DAY—about my progress in Hannah Tinti’s One Story short story online class. I’ll explain the reason for my disappearance in a later post, and the reason for my return, but first things first:

I decided to sign up for the One Story class because I have some big writing goals this summer—I want to have a solid draft of all the stories in a new collection before school starts back up again in August. But the first bit of the summer was taken up with two summer classes I was teaching—one a creative writing class (it was so much fun!) and one tech writing. That and buying a house, moving in, trying to figure out what was leaking in the shower and why the air conditioner didn’t seem to work. All that fun stuff. But all that’s finally behind me, and now I have a month and a half (give or take) to dedicate to my writing goals for the summer. This class just happened to coincide exactly with my readiness to get going. Plus, it’s cheap enough that I can afford it without feeling guilty but expensive enough ($75) that I’ll feel obligated to keep up with it for the entire week.

So I’m planning to blog every day after I’ve completed the coursework for that day. I don’t want to step on Tinti’s feet (or set-ups—if you’re taking the class, you’ll get that joke), so I’m not going to regurgitate her lessons and assignments in these posts. Instead, I’ll let you know what the class has gotten me working on and how well the class is helping me get my momentum back up as a writer, that sort of thing.

The first lesson was about structure. Tinti laid out for us five key elements of story structure, from the story’s opening to the climax and resolution. Nothing new, of course, but it’s good, in my opinion, to return to the basics from time to time. Her first assignment was to write a five-sentence story that dedicates one sentence to each of the five structural components from her lesson. She provided us a detailed prompt for each sentence (for example, a particular sentence must include at least one of the five senses and a reference to the setting, things like that), and informed us that these would be the stories we would be working with throughout the rest of the week.

My story came together pretty well, I think. To get past that initial shock of writer’s block when I began the prompt, I decided to write a story I had had the idea for a couple of years ago, back when my daughter, Amalie, was a tiny little thing. Amie used to cry for, like, hours and hours on end, and we’d read somewhere (probably online) that going for a drive can calm a colicky baby down. I remember one night we were frazzled and exhausted and we strapped her into her car seat and drove around until she fell asleep. As I sat in the back with Amie and held her hand, I thought about what a great setting for a story this would be—a couple, who I decided should be fighting, would have to keep their voices down for fear of waking their baby. It seemed like a great backdrop to explore the strangeness of becoming a parent, of being pushed to the limit, of watching your partner make mistakes, knowing you yourself were making mistakes, too, of trying to live with post-partum and wondering if you had made the right choice, having a baby.

I’d started to write the story when I first had the idea, but couldn’t get past the first few pages. I just couldn’t figure out what should actually happen in the darn thing—how to get past the initial premise, which was all I usually have (if even that, to be honest) when I sit down to start writing. Tinti’s sentence by sentence prompts helped the story organically find its form. What I have now is far from finished, of course. It’s five sentences long, for cripe’s sake. It’s just a skeleton of what could (and hopefully will) be. But I feel like the story has found a form, and it will be easier, working with this, to fill in the details and help it come to life.

 

I posted the draft in the discussion board. I don’t know what will happen—if anyone will read it there or give me feedback. There are over 300 people in this class, which makes it seem all the less likely that people will bother reading other people’s discussion board posts. Feels too overwhelming with that many people, and it’s hard to choose which posts to read and which to ignore. But either way, I feel great about what I’ve accomplished so far, and I’m pretty freakin’ pumped about seeing what Tinti will have for us tomorrow.

I’ve been preparing to retake the GRE this December, so I can apply to a PhD program for next year. The decision to (try to) go for a PhD deserves its own post, so I won’t get into that now. What I do want to talk about it is vocabulary.

See, when I took the GRE the first time around, seven years ago—has it really been that long?—I didn’t bother preparing at all, and I was pretty mortified by my verbal score. On the quantitative side, I did terrible—bottom 25% percent—but that didn’t surprise me at all, nor did I figure it would matter, since I was applying for MFA in creative writing programs. I got in to two of the three schools I applied, so my scores must not have held me back too much.

Still. That verbal score, it stuck with me. I’ll just come out and say it—I got a 500. I was ranked in the 61% percentile (meaning 39% of people who took the test did better than me). I did great on the writing part, but that verbal score surprised me. I’m a writer. I was an English major. I read all the time. Why was I not scoring up way at the top on the verbal part of the test?

Seven years have passed since then. That’s seven more years of reading, six-and-a-half years of teaching experience, and three years of graduate school (in English). I’d like to think my verbal score will improve this time, but to hedge my bets, I’m working on my vocabulary.

As I’ve been studying my new words, I’ve been focusing on expanding my vocabulary for real and not just memorizing a bunch of words that I’ll forget as soon as I take the exam. I want to actually have a stronger vocabulary, not just for this exam, not just so I can get into a PhD program. I want to have a stronger vocabulary because that’s important—isn’t it?—as a writer.

When I got the results of my first GRE, I tried to make myself feel better by reminding myself that I’m not a fan of bombastic prose (although I didn’t use the word “bombastic”—that’s a word I learned as I’ve been preparing for the test this time around). Concision and simplicity, minimalism, that’s what I’m drawn to as a reader. Couldn’t I write, then, and write well, even if my vocabulary was only better than 61% of college graduates (and really, it’s 61% of college graduates planning to go on to grad school, since that’s who takes the GRE)?

The answer is obviously yes—I mean, I’ve gone on to become a published writer; I won an award to publish my first book, for cripe’s sake—but, as Reverend Lovejoy from The Simpsons would point out, the answer is, “Yes with a but.” Yes, I can write well with an only just higher than average vocabulary. But I can write better with an even better vocabulary.

As I’ve been learning new words, I keep coming across words that I really like, words that I can’t help but imagine using in future stories, words that have more interesting and refined meanings than their simpler counterparts. These words can open the door to all kinds of interesting metaphors and ideas, and though I still think it’s important (for my tastes) that readers shouldn’t have to hold your book in one hand and a dictionary in the other, I do think my writing can only stand to improve from the careful, unobtrusive addition of these less common but oh-so expressive words here and there.

I’ve said this before and I’ve always gone back on it, but you have to believe me, this time I really mean it: I’m done with my thesis novel. Finished. I’ve officially moved it to my “Failed Attempts” folder, from whence it shall never return. When I had said I was going to move it to my “Failed Attempts” folder in the past, I lied. Well, I didn’t lie, exactly. I was planning to do it. But when it came time to actually make the cut and paste, it just felt too, too, I don’t know, too something. Too painful. But this time, it’s already moved. It shall forever be considered just another one of my failed practice novels.

How do I know I’m really going to stick with it this time? Because this time, it felt really good, like a relief. It felt right. This time, I decided, I really am ready to move on.

And not only that, but this is the first time I’ve looked at the novel and thought, Eh, it’s not really that great. I got to this point because I was working on yet another revision of the novel, with the intention of entering it into Fence’s Modern Prose contest. This revision was sort of a combination of my most recent draft and some earlier drafts, and I do think the result was better than what I’d been sending around. When I had been cutting things in previous revisions, I actually cut some scenes that I now think are pretty integral to the reader’s understanding of certain characters, so with those scenes woven back into the story, everything felt a lot stronger.

But as I was working on it, I started really analyzing how well some of the components of the novel are working. There are some great things in this story, I think. Some of the writing is really strong, and some of the moments feel perfect. But there are some really serious problems with a couple of the characters, leaving those characters feeling very flat on the page. There are points that lag, too, and I almost feel like it’s a novella that’s been stretched in to an entire novel.

In short, I don’t think I want it to get published. I don’t think it reflects what I’m capable of. I can do better. I’m a much better writer now than I was when I began this novel. My first drafts, now, need less work than this nth draft of my thesis would still need, and I think it would be a better use of my time to work on a new first draft of a new novel.

Which is exactly what I’m doing right now. And the truth is, I’m having way more fun and am way more interested in this new novel than I am in reliving for the millionth time the same story from my thesis. I’m just so sick of Timothy Bannister and his dead father—there, I said it. I don’t want to work on this novel anymore. I don’t want to send it out. I don’t want it to get published.

But that doesn’t mean that those few years I spent working on it were a waste. I learned a lot about how to write a novel from this experience. I made a lot of mistakes and learned how to fix them, and I think my next novel will be much stronger from draft one as a result. Maybe the next one will be a practice novel too, who knows? But I do know that this last one definitely was, and finally—FINALLY—I’m okay with accepting it and moving on.

Ohio University, which is home to the graduate creative writing program local to my area, hosts an annual literary festival each spring. Last year the headliner was Tobias Wolff, and the year before, George Saunders. We’re talking big time names. There’s always a lot of excitement in the air during the festival, and since I know several people who are affiliated with the program, I get to hear a lot about the authors who come—what they were like during lunch and the genre specific colloquiums they run with the grad students.

This year, I had never even heard of most of the people coming. Amy Hempel, I was told, was sort of the headliner, but Susan Orlean is hugely famous too (having written, it turns out, The Orchid Thief, the book that’s being adapted into a screenplay in the film Adaptation), as are Denise Duhamel, Richard Rodriguez, and Terrance Hayes, this year’s obligatory sexy male poet, who I actually was previously aware of, but only because he had been a visiting writer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks when I was in the MFA program up there. 

Regardless of the fact that I was shamefully unfamiliar with this year’s amazing cast of writers prior to their coming, this year was, in my opinion, the best Lit Fest I’ve attended—and I say that even though I only, really, was able to go to Amy Hempel’s events (though I caught a little bit of Terrance Hayes and Denise Duhamel—completely missed Susan Orlean and Richard Rodriguez. Rodriguez, I hear, was absolutely REMARKABLE).

I’m not, as you probably know, a student at OU, but my friend Jolynn, who is going for her PhD in fiction there, got me into Amy Hempel’s fiction colloquium. During the colloquium I pretty much kept my mouth shut because I hadn’t read any of Hempel’s work and didn’t, as a result, know what to ask her. I kept my ears open, though, and very much enjoyed listening to her answer the questions the others asked about her writing process, her experiences publishing, and so on. She’s a real sweetheart, Amy Hempel, and incredibly friendly and down-to-Earth.

I picked up a copy of her first book, Reasons to Live (I know, great title!) and had her sign it for me, and I slowly worked my way through the stories last week. I say “slowly” and “worked” because, though these stories are incredibly short—most of them would definitely fall into the category of flash fiction—they are dense, and not in a bad way. They’re the kind of stories you have to sit and reflect on after you finish, the kind you read more than once just to make sure you caught everything, or because the ending sends you back to the beginning with a new filter through which to process the prose.

The most striking thing about Hempel’s writing is her close attention to the rhythm of each sentence. She said she focuses on the sentence, not the story as a whole, and you can definitely see this shining through in her stories. She, like me, is the sort of writer who begins with a line, a killer line that you just have to get down and that you know will inevitably lead to another line, and another. But, unlike me, she is able to feel her way through her language the way a poet can—in fact, many of her stories read as much like prose poems as they do like flash fiction.

She also knows exactly what not to include, how to give the reader just the bare minimum and let him or her put it all together from there. Hempel’s style of writing would be frustrating, I would argue, if she were a novelist. But she isn’t. She has never, she told us, had any interest in writing novels. She wouldn’t know how to go about it, she said. And as a short story writer—particularly a short-short story writer—her bare bones, sentence over story style works fantastically well.

Once, in a workshop, one of my UAF professors, David Crouse, mentioned that he could see his own writing as being on the same plane of existence as Rick Bass’s, but another writer—I can’t remember, now, which one—was on a different plane of existence altogether. He could admire what she was doing (I do remember it was a female writer), but knew he could never do it himself. That’s the way I feel about Amy Hempel. Hempel is, perhaps, the first writer who I felt that way about. Other writers whose work I admire I’ve admired in that, I-can-see-what-you’re-doing-and-I-think-I-can-learn-to-do-it-too sort of way. Not that I think I’m as good, say, as Rick Moody, but I feel like I can understand the mechanism behind Moody’s work, and if I keep at it and keep practicing, maybe someday I’ll be able to pull off what he can. Hempel’s work, though, is so unlike anything I would ever write, could ever write, that it really is like we exist on two completely different planes: I can see her from where I am, but as much as I keep walking forward, I’ll never reach her.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn from her.

I love this idea of focusing on the sentence. It’s, to be honest, a fairly foreign way of writing to me. From the workshops I’ve taken, with the varied and all fabulous workshop instructors I’ve studied under, I’ve grown accustomed to looking at story more than sentence. Character. Scene. All of these things tend to come before sentence. Focusing so much on each sentence is much more of a poet thing, I’ve always thought, but I think there’s a lot to be gained from picking a story apart the way you would a poem—paying careful attention to each individual word, each image, spending as much energy deciding what to leave out as what to put in.

It’s no big secret that the three years I spent in my MFA program were among the best of my life (or maybe I should change that to the last two, maybe two-and-a-half, years in the program, since, in fact, my first semester was pretty discouraging, so discouraging that I almost quit the program and gave up on writing altogether). While I was in my program, I grew immensely as a writer. I came to understand the role momentum plays in my output, and I became, for a while, a very disciplined writer, a writer who writes for a couple of hours almost every day, a writer who produces a lot of work.

From the time I began getting published—during my second year in the program—I’ve been scoring a minimum of two publications a year. Two a year isn’t great, but I’ve always felt good about the fact that, if nothing else, I’ve never dipped below that number. But this year, I fear, will be the year. We’re heading into May and I don’t have any impending acceptances. I’ve only just recently begun submitting again, after a several month long hiatus, and though I have four stories in circulation right now, it seems unlikely that two of them will get accepted soon enough to get published by the end of 2012.

The likelihood that I’ll probably break my streak this year isn’t really any big surprise. I spent the year after I found out my book was getting published leapfrogging from project to project, actually finishing very few complete drafts. Then, I had the baby—need I say more? I’ve only just in the past couple of months started tentatively writing in earnest again, and even so, I still feel like I haven’t found my groove yet. I definitely haven’t gotten my momentum back up, and I’m having trouble deciding which of the many half-finished stories, novels, and children’s books I have going to work on when I sit down to write.

I’ve entered into the awful cycle I was afraid I might enter into before I had the baby: I have very little time to write, and when I do write it all seems like crap to me. So then I feel down about myself as a writer, which in turn makes it difficult to write, which in turn makes me feel even more down about myself as a writer, and so on and so on. When you’re already feeling lousy about your abilities, every little failure makes you really questions yourself. Every rejection, every unwon contest, every job for which you don’t even land an interview—it all gets inflated and overshadows your successes. The negatives aren’t meaningless—I’m receiving sign after pretty clear sign that I still have a ways to go as a writer—but they’re not necessarily more meaningful than your successes—in other words, my failures prove that I’m not “there” yet, but gauging from my successes, I think I’m headed in the right direction.

So to pull myself out of this self-perpetuating cycle of self-loathing, I’m going to try to take some small steps to remind myself that I have control of my own life, and to remind myself, too, of the power of momentum:

1.      I’m going to start exercising again. I’m going to start small—just doing my arms every other day. I know that sounds inconsequential and irrelevant (to a blog about writing), but here’s the thing: exercise and writing are inextricably linked in my mind. My first winter in Fairbanks, Alaska, when I hit rock bottom and made up my mind to get on top of my life, I made two resolutions: to get in shape and to start writing more. By the next winter, I had lost close to thirty pounds and received my first couple of story acceptances. And—until very recently—I’ve kept both resolutions up pretty consistently. For me, now, exercise has become more than a means to stay in shape—it’s the way I keep my life balanced; it’s my way of reminding myself that my life is in my own hands.

I don’t need to lose weight. In fact, it would probably be dangerous for me to do so, since I’m breastfeeding. Though I had worried that having a baby might take a serious toll on my body, I came out of the experience with no stretch marks, and my body snapped back to its previous weight astonishingly fast (a result of A) not having over-gained while I was pregnant, and B) burning an extra thousand or so calories a day due to breastfeeding). I have no real problems with the way I look now, but if I ease myself back into an exercise schedule, I’ll feel better in other ways, ways that go much deeper and matter much more than my physical appearance.

2.      I’m going to try to focus on one project at a time for a little while. I have way too many half-written stories, too many begun but not completed book projects. It’s overwhelming. The hard part will be picking what to focus my attention on, but I think I’ll benefit from just working on one thing until it’s done for a bit. I crave that rewarding feeling you get when you finish something. I need it. And as much as I’m a believer in just working on what you want to work on and not forcing things, I really think, right now, I need to freakin’ finish something, for cripe's sake.

My hope is that if I can take these two, small steps, I’ll be able to slowly but surely pick up speed from there, and soon enough (well, it may take a few months, I’m sure) I’ll have my momentum back up.

I decided recently that it’s been quite long enough, and it’s time for me to get back into the writing game. Of course, the decision to begin writing again is one thing, and the actual beginning of writing again is another thing altogether. It was necessary, then, for me to formulate some sort of plan to ease myself back into the world I used to live in so completely.

I made the goal that during my winter break from classes (which lasts a paltry three weeks), I would write every single day for at least fifteen minutes. “Fifteen minutes? That’s nothing,” you say. “Not even enough time to really get the fire going.” True enough, but I settled on this goal for a reason: it would be easy for me to keep it. Anyone can scrape together a measly fifteen minutes a day, and because I would be on break from teaching, it would be even easier for me to make it work. 

My hope is that writing at least a little every single day will help get the wheels turning once again, after which it shouldn’t take me too long to get back up to speed. My break only officially began this past Monday, so it’s difficult to assess too thoroughly how well it’s working. I can tell you that on day two (Tuesday), I forgot to sit down to write. Forgot! I was so frustrated with myself on Wednesday when I realized my mistake, but on Thursday I wrote for a little over half an hour and made up for it.

I also contented myself with the knowledge that forgetting to write one day is not the same as choosing not to write. The fact is, I’m no longer so mired in the writing world that going a full day without writing could never escape my notice. Writing used to be, for me, like taking a shower: you do it pretty religiously every day, and if for some reason one day you can’t, you survive it . . . but you’re very aware that you missed a day. I’ll get back there, I know I will, but it’s going to take a little time.

In addition to the day I completely forgot to write, on Friday I didn’t get a chance (sort of). Even though the ideal time for me to write is fairly early on in my day, right now, with a three-month-old baby and a husband who doesn’t get a winter break from his main job (working as the Managing Editor of New Ohio Review), I’ve been taking my fifteen minutes at the end of the day, just after Amalie goes to bed. I probably could find time earlier in the day, but the end of the day thing was working well enough. Until Friday. The day Amalie, for whatever reason, simply would not go down without a fuss. She kept falling asleep, but the second I’d lay her down she’d wake up and start crying. Finally, at around 1:30 AM, she drifted off, but I was too tired to even think about writing (plus, it technically wasn’t Friday any longer).

Other than those two slips, I’ve enjoyed my few minutes of writing time each day, and am already finding myself thinking about this piece or that idea when I’m not physically writing. I may have to flush all the brown water out of my system before I can write anything very good, but still, writing at all again feels pretty great. It’s like I’ve been wandering lost for what feels like a very long time, but now I’ve stumbled upon an overgrown path that looks vaguely familiar. I have to beat the weeds and tree branches out of my way, but I feel fairly positive that if I keep heading forward, this path will let me out somewhere I want to be.

I spent a few extremely fun days in Pittsburgh last week, doing a couple of readings, getting to know some very interesting people, and even making a trip over to the Monroeville mall, where George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was filmed. At one of my readings, I met a fellow writer who puts out an email newsletter on writing topics. I signed up for the newsletter and was impressed with some of the practical tips she gave, so I thought I’d give the newsletter a plug here. It’s called Brite Lites Writer Gazette, and if you want to check it out, you can email SandraGouldFord at aol dot com.

The current issue of Brite Lites is all about National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, which, in case you’re unfamiliar, occurs every November when people all over the country attempt to write a first draft of a novel—minimum 50,000 words—in a month. The newsletter got me thinking about why I’ve never participated in NaNoWriMo, and probably never will.

First of all, I should say that NaNoWriMo is a great motivational tool. At its heart, NaNoWriMo is simply a goal to work towards, a concrete deadline to get people writing. By encouraging people across the country to set the same goal, NaNoWriMo effectively creates a sense of community for these writers, encouraging them to stick with it and holding them accountable if they don’t.

You know me—I’m all for goal setting. Without goals, I would never have produced enough work to publish a book, and I wouldn’t, probably, write anywhere near enough to legitimately call myself a writer. So why, then, do I have zero interest in trying NaNoWriMo for myself?

Well, while I see NaNoWriMo as an extremely valuable tool for new writers, the more seasoned you get, the less useful this kind of extreme goal becomes. I think part of the point in NaNoWriMo is to make people who don’t write very much, but who have always wanted to write a book, realize that they can do it. They can pump out a full-length novel if they just try. This isn’t particularly useful to more seasoned writers, who have written plenty of books before, or who have published fairly extensively. These people already know what they’re capable of, and they probably know how much they need to write and what sort of routine they need to keep in order to complete a particular project.

But more than that, the main reason I’m not interested in NaNoWriMo myself is because I feel it’s too stringent of a goal. That’s actually kind of the idea, right? Writing 100% new material for three or four hours a day, every day, isn’t something that even professional writers usually do. Most writers allow room for days when you spend three hours agonizing over a single paragraph, or when you realize something is not quite right about a previous chapter and you want to go back and revise it. The idea behind setting such a strict goal is to push yourself about as hard as it’s possible to push, like running a marathon or climbing Mount Everest.

The problems with pushing yourself that hard, in my opinion, are countless. First of all, just like when you push yourself to the brink physically, you’re likely to collapse at the end of it all. You’re likely to want, maybe desperately need, a break when you’re done, which makes the experience more like a crash diet than a lifestyle change.

On top of that, NaNoWriMo emphasizes writing a first draft, which I think de-emphasizes a FAR more important part of the writing process: revising. Savvy writers would have the sense to see that whatever they pump out in that frenzied month is likely to be absolute crap and that they need to revise it extensively if they want it to be any good, but a lot of amateur writers probably don’t understand that—they think of revising as proofreading and little more—and even those writers who do recognize the value of revision are going to have more work ahead of them when they get back to work on their sloppily thrown together manuscripts than if they had taken more time during the initial drafting stage.

Plus, it’s widely recognized that goal setting is most effective when you set reasonable goals that are within your power to accomplish. Like many writers, I have a job and a family. If I were to push myself to write roughly 1,667 words a day for a month—about how many words you’d have to write to pump out 50,000 in thirty days—what would most likely happen would be that I would be unable, through no fault of my own, to meet the goal. This would leave me, at the end of the month, feeling like a failure, stressed and discouraged, unsure of my own abilities as a writer. I would, in other words, be worse off for having tried. I’d be better off, instead, looking at my own life, my own specific situation and commitments, and setting a goal for myself that pushes me just hard enough but is still absolutely reachable if I just work at it. Now that, my friends, is a goal that will likely benefit me.  

I received this week what feels like the hundredth agent rejection for the novel that was my MFA thesis, this novel I’ve poured so much time and energy into over the past five years. This was another rejection from an agent who had, after reading my initial query, been interested in the manuscript and had requested a partial. Rejections from agents who actually requested to read some or all of the manuscript first are the hardest because they force you to accept that it’s not that you’re not getting a fair shake, it’s not that the agent just didn’t like your premise, it’s the writing, it’s the manuscript itself that brought on this rejection.

Naturally, this rejection was no exception. In fact, this rejection smarted even more than the other rejections for partial or full manuscripts I’ve received in the past because this one didn’t waste any time complimenting my writing abilities. The gist of it was that I have some “impressive” writing credits and an “interesting” premise, but this particular agent just wasn’t that into the material itself once he started reading it. I guess I’ve gotten used to the obligatory variation on, “You’re a very good writer, however . . .” and so this one pierced my rejection-toughened skin and actually stung a bit.

But let’s be honest here, the fact that this agent didn’t have time to waste stroking my ego isn’t the real reason this rejection hurt. It hurt because I’ve queried so many agents about this book, and I’ve had a fair number of partial or full manuscript requests—hell, I even had an agency solicit me after reading one of my stories in a literary journal—but I always end up getting nowhere. Many agents have been kind enough to take a look; none of them have been interested in representing me after they read the manuscript.

I’m at that point, of course, where I have no choice but to accept that this book just isn’t going to get published. Shelving a project you’ve poured so much of yourself into is maybe the most difficult thing a writer has to do. This time it’s particularly hard for me because I’ve done the set-it-aside-for-six-months thing—more than once—and still felt it was good when I came back to it. I’ve revised it so many times I’ve completely lost count, too. When I read through this novel, even now, I don’t understand why it isn’t publishable. Okay, it’s not the most brilliant novel ever written, but it seems good enough to me to get published. It seems just as good as a lot of the stuff that gets published every year. But I’m clearly missing something; there’s something wrong that I’m not picking up on.

I feel I would be deluding myself if, after all these rejections, I don’t admit defeat. I’ve talked in the past about the agent hunt being my first stop for this book, about how, if that didn’t work out for me, I would try my hand at small presses. In fact, I had already stopped querying agents (this rejection took several months to make its way to me and is from the last agent I had yet to hear from), and I had begun to submit to small presses and contests, but now I’m thinking maybe that, too, is a bad idea.

I know several people who have permanently set aside their MFA theses, accepting that the manuscripts just aren’t good enough and never will be. This may sound sort of pessimistic, until you realize that those same people are instead investing their writing time working on new projects, projects they do feel might have a chance of getting published. Giving up on their theses, for these writers, wasn’t, actually, like giving up at all; it was more like accepting that the thesis was a valuable experience, great practice, and now they’re ready to move on and apply what they learned to something better.

I really, really, really admire that mentality. I really, really, really want to know how to let go of this novel, at last. I’ve given up on projects in the past—this is not, after all, my first novel, just the first one I actually believed, after several years of close scrutiny and revision, was good enough—so why is this so difficult for me? One way or another, though, I have got to accept that it isn’t going to happen with this book. Researching publishers and crafting queries is taking up valuable time I should be spending on new projects, not to mention the fact that, as long as I continue to think of this book as publishable, it will be difficult for me to fully immerse myself in a new novel. Every time I try, I eventually hit a wall and get sidetracked by thinking about this book, whether I should revise it again, whether I should be bothering with a new one when this one has yet to be published.

So I need to move this novel to my “Failed Attempts” file, dust my hands off, and move on with my life. As difficult as this is for me, maybe it will be like a sort of release. Here’s hoping. On the positive side, anyway, I do feel very heartened by this final rejection’s admission that my writing credits are “impressive.” It gives me some hope that, while this novel, it seems, just isn’t going to cut it, maybe a future one will, and that I have built up enough of a publication history for agents to pause and take notice. Maybe the next novel will be the one. I’ll never know, though, if I allow myself to remain frozen in the world of this old, let’s face it, failed novel.

A few weeks ago I posted about how I’ve been struggling trying to catch my stride as a writer for the past several months. I received some excellent advice in the comments, which not only made me feel better (thank you! I really needed that!)  but also gave me some thoughts on what I might do to try to keep writing, even if I don’t feel, for whatever reason, that I can produce anything publishable right now.

So since then, I’ve been writing letters to my unborn daughter. It’s amazing how quickly this project opened me up and pulled me out of my slump. Since I started these letters two weeks ago, I’ve written 34 pages and still have plenty more to say. To give myself more practice writing a book length work (and so that it will be engaging enough that my daughter will actually want to read it!), I’m writing it in the style of an epistolary memoir and plan to revise it extensively after I finish a full draft. My goal is to have a complete draft done by the time my daughter is born in September.

This project has made me feel like a writer again, brimming with words I just have to get onto the page. I’ve once again recaptured that fantastic feeling of having my head half in a writing project throughout the day. Even when I’m not writing—I’ll be washing the dishes or doing laundry or lathering my hair in the shower—and some idea will come to me that I simply have to include: I should tell her about the time . . . I should talk to her about . . . I should share with her my experiences with . . .

I think part of the reason I’m so excited about this project is because it feels important. Anything else that I’ve tried to work on lately has raised the question, “What’s the point?” Because publishing a book was so anticlimactic. Because the novel I poured five years of my life into still languishes, unpublished, in a file on my computer. Because even the things I’ve published, hardly anyone will ever read. Because, now that I’m pregnant, I realize there are other things in life that are way more important than my career as a writer.

But this project feels, to me, like it matters. Once I started working on it, I was overcome with the feeling that my daughter has a right to know these things, that she needs to know these things. I want her to know me not just as her mom but as a human being, and I want her to know that she is not alone, that if she inherits my depression, my social anxiety, if she struggles with her feelings about religion, if she finds herself wondering why she doesn’t seem to belong anywhere, I want her to know that I understand, that I’ve been through it too, that I will do my best to help her along the way.

And so this project feels more important and meaningful to me than anything I ever wrote with the end goal of publication. And because this isn’t something I’m writing to publish, it’s very low stakes, which is probably another reason why it so easily opened that blocked writing passage in my mind. Maybe part of it, too, is that I’m doing something completely different from any type of writing I’ve ever seriously done—outside of a few assignments I’ve been given over the years, I’ve never attempted to write creative nonfiction—and perhaps just switching gears so completely knocked something loose in my mind. Whatever the reason, I’m writing again without having to force it, and it feels good. It feels damn good.

Success as a creative writer, like most (or perhaps all) artistic endeavors, requires many things: a small amount of inspiration; a small amount of talent; a large amount of determination (bred, perhaps, of naiveté and self-confidence); a large amount of plain, old fashioned, roll-your-sleeves-up-and-get-dirty hard work; and, more important than anything else, a very, very, very large amount of luck. And the truth is, while I wouldn’t urge anyone who didn’t possess all the first four qualities to get their hopes up, that last one is really the make-or-break you one, and you can, in fact, reach a ridiculously high level of success with luck alone (but you’d have to be really, really lucky . . .).

This, of course, is disheartening for those of us who don’t see ourselves as particularly lucky people. It’s frustrating to think that I can get inspired with a great idea, I can combine talent and hard work to get the idea down, and I can be determined, can plow through rejections and keep at it and keep at it, and still end up nowhere if I don’t happen to get lucky somewhere along the way. Can you imagine if other things in life were like this?

What if, for example, you were invited to a friend’s house, but in giving you directions to her house, she warned you that even if you follow all of these directions exactly, her house is under a Brigadoon style curse and is only visible to outsiders at random times; you’ll have to just hope that when you arrive, you’ll be able to see it and can come in. Let’s assume, also, that her house is very far away. To make the trip at all will entail several days on the road. Would you make the trip anyway?

Your answer to that question surely relies on your answer to another question: how badly do you want to see your friend? Like with writing, your answer to that question will at least decide whether or not you even stand a chance of making it. If she’s just an acquaintance, you probably won’t care to make the trip. If she, however, is someone very important to you, you might be willing to risk it, even if your chances of actually seeing her at the end are slim. At least there is a chance, and if you didn’t go at all, there wouldn’t be.

Perhaps the key difference between this analogy and writing is that many would-be writers don’t realize how much luck has to go into their success, so it’s a little bit like if your friend forgot to mention to you the curse. Many would-be writers, actually, believe that it all comes down to talent. I’m sorry, but there are far more writers with talent in this world than there are writers who will ever reach any notable level of success. Writers with talent are everywhere you look. Inspired writers are, too. Writers with enough determination (which is linked to wanting it bad enough) and writers who are willing to put the work in are less abundant, and the writers who have all of those qualities and will also get lucky are even scarcer.

For those of us who fully understand this and have, for whatever reason, chosen to stick to it, anyway, there is a glimmer of light at the end of it all, although to see it, you might have to adjust your glasses (read: expectations) a bit. If you are in this for fame, fortune, and validation, you might be heading down a long, dark road, at the end of which you may or may not be rewarded for your efforts. If you’re in it, though, because you love writing, because (to extend the previous metaphor to the breaking point) you’ve decided that it’s okay if you don’t get to see your friend—you’d like to get out and see a bit more of the world, and the journey will be your reward—then you might find that it was all worth it in the end, even if when you arrive, your friend’s house is nowhere to be found.

It’s baseball season again, a fact which really wouldn’t affect my life in any way except that I’m married to someone for whom baseball makes the world go ‘round. Even though in general, I still really don’t care about baseball (or any sport, to be honest, although sometimes certain events at the Olympics can be kind of exciting), I do like that baseball makes my husband so happy—almost giddy, sometimes—and when he really gets caught up in the heat of it, he tends to share with me all kinds of anecdotes about the game and its players, which I enjoy hearing.

He told me a story this morning that I think is the perfect metaphor for what it takes to be a writer (or to be good at any kind of artistic or sporty endeavor). It came up because we were talking about him playing catch with a friend of his; it’s an activity he loves to do, but it always leaves his body sore. “I’m no pro,” he said. “I can’t do anything athletic without getting sore.” But then we realized that probably pro players get sore too; they just power through it. They do it anyway because they love the game so much (I’m sure the fact that they make tons of money off of doing it doesn’t hurt their motivation, either).

Then he told me the story of Andre Dawson, a professional baseball player who had to have his trainers break his scar tissue before every game so that he could play. He said Dawson would excuse himself into a private room and close the door, but the other players still saw the tears streaming down his cheeks when he would come back out again. Breaking that tissue before every game must have caused incredible pain, but he had to do it if he wanted to be flexible enough to play. 

I’m sure if you want to go pro, some genetic issues have to line up just right, but I imagine there are a lot of people who genetically have what it takes to play. The real difference, I think, between the people who go pro and the people who play catch once or twice a week with a friend comes down to much more than just genetics. Part of it, obviously, is that you have to want to be a baseball player to begin with (my husband, and many others like him, don’t really want that—they want to watch and sometimes throw the ball around with friends, but they don’t really want it to be their careers). But even wanting to play is not enough; you have to want it bad. You have to want it so bad you’re willing to do it even when it hurts. You have to want it so bad you give up other things you’d rather be doing because you have to practice. You have to want it so bad that you intentionally inflict pain on yourself if it means you’ll be able to play.

Okay, maybe writing doesn’t require physical pain to get good. We writers don’t have to break our fingers every morning in order to be able to type fast enough or anything like that. But we do have to sacrifice. We do have to write even when we don’t feel like it, or even when there is something else going on that we feel like doing instead. We have to pick apart our own abilities, recognize our flaws and learn to overcome them. We have to understand that being sufficiently intelligent and wanting to be a writer are not enough. What it really takes is that extra effort, that drive to power through the pain, that will to get up an hour earlier than you have to in order to make sure you get at least an hour of writing time in every single day.

One of my husband’s peers in his MA program out here—a lit student, not creative writing—once told us that he used to want to be a writer, but then he realized that being a real writer took more than just writing a first draft of a story when he felt inspired. If he really wanted to be a writer, he would have to dedicate his life to it; he would have to push himself hard at it and make real sacrifices. So he decided not to pursue it. “I like the idea of being a writer,” he said, “but I don’t actually want to do the things it would take to be a writer, so I think I’ll stick to lit.” Not many would-be writers are that cool, I have to tell you. Not many hobbyists really understand that they are not putting in the same effort as the writers who are having consistent publication success.

This all doesn’t mean that people who don’t have that drive can’t dabble. There’s nothing wrong with being a now-and-then sort of writer, a hobbyist, and in fact, I think it’s a healthy way to get in touch with your creative side and explore the world around you, and it can be very rewarding. I think everybody who wants to write should do it, even if nobody but they themselves will ever read what they’ve written. But if you really want a shot at the big game, or even just consistent success in the minor leagues (since after all, let’s be honest, the big game takes more than genetics and wanting it bad enough; the big game takes a heavy dose of pure, unadulterated luck), I think you need to be pushing yourself harder than just writing when you feel like it or when you feel inspired.

One thing that has always interested me is how much time different writers spend, on average, writing. It’s difficult to get a straight answer from a lot of writers, and few writers mention hard numbers in their writing about writing—often, I think, because most writers probably aren’t as obsessed with the time question as I am, so they don’t pay as much attention as I do to the exact number of hours they spend in the act. Still, the fact that I’ve been able to find out concrete numbers from so few writers leaves the answer to the question even more elusive, and it leaves the question feeling ever more important in my mind. If I could just figure out what that golden number is . . .

Of course, the truth is there is no golden number. The fact that so few writers can give any kind of concrete time estimate is probably partial proof that the amount of time a writer actually spends writing is not the all-important factor, after all, that determines the development and success of a writer. Time spent reading, for example, is also very important, yet I don’t bother logging how many hours a day I read. Time spent living life and having experiences also factors in, as writers must have something to write about.

I do think that it’s important to physically sit in front of your computer and write fairly often. If you do not write, you can’t reasonably call yourself a writer (and if you look up the definition of writer in the dictionary, you’ll see that that is not my opinion but a cold, hard fact). But the question of how much time should writers spend in the act of writing and how much of our time should we spend in other, equally important and relevant endeavors, remains.

What I don’t think is useful is the “if you want writing to be your job, you should treat it like your job and do it for eight hours a day” mentality. This is advice that highly successful, bestselling writers sometimes give amateur writers, and it sounds good on the surface. Yes, if I were working at an office, I would clock in and work for eight hours a day, five days a week. But this logic is actually painfully flawed.

First of all, I want to point out that the “eight hours a day” idea might be true if you want to be freelance writer or a journalist or something like that, but I don’t believe creative writing works that way. But also, let’s be honest, if I was working at an office job, I wouldn’t actually be working for that entire eight hours a day. That eight hours would be filled up with some actual work, yes, but also, with countless trips to the water cooler and chats with my coworkers, not to mention the million times a day I’d refresh my email. And that’s just me—I’m pretty honest. A lot of people would be chatting on Facebook while at work, among other things. How much of that eight hour day is actually spent doing productive work? Who knows, but certainly nowhere near eight hours.

Already, the eight hour a day argument isn’t sound. On top of that, though, is the fact that a creative endeavor is different from, say, entering data into a spreadsheet or filing paperwork. I can force my mind to do mindless office-job work for a lot longer than I can force it to work on a piece of fiction. Some days, sure, something comes over me and the words just keep coming and coming for hours and hours on end, but most days, I can write for a couple of hours or so, and then the words start drying up. My mind just needs a break, or it needs to spend time on those other important writerly duties (remember? Reading? Having experiences worth writing about? Thinking about those experiences and analyzing them for meaning?). So even if it were true that you should spend eight hours a day in your capacity as a writer, that would include those other things—it wouldn’t be eight hours spent in front of the computer typing.

So how much time to spend writing and how much time to spend doing other things will probably just always be an unanswerable question, and surely if it did have an answer, it would have a different answer for each different writer.  For me, I think I’m just going to keep trying to find the right balance between actual writing time and the other things, like reading, that are so important to being a writer.

I recently watched George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead, which is an awful, awful movie, in case you haven’t seen it yet. I kind of figured it wasn’t going to be any good because Diary of the Dead was so lousy, but I make sure to give all of Romero’s “of the dead” movies a chance. This movie was awful not just because the plot was boring and uninspired (much like Diary of the Dead), but also, it just used a lot of cheap gimmicks and amateurish writing stunts—the sort of thing I would expect to see being submitted to an introductory creative writing workshop.

How is it that the person who co-wrote Night of the Living Dead, and single-handedly wrote Dawn of the Dead, could go on to write crap like this? In my opinion, since Dawn, Romero’s “of the dead” movies have gotten progressively worse: Day had some good things about it, but overall, it’s kind of boring; ditto Land, which was a little worse than Day, and then Diary and Survival are just so bad they’re really not worth watching unless you’re a hardcore fan.

It calls into question my entire view of how people become good writers: that if you practice, you’ll get good, and eventually you’ll theoretically get good enough that readers (or in this case, viewers) will be able to consistently count on you to always put out good stuff. Romero’s first feature length film, his very first, was the one that has gone down in history as the movie that defines zombie movies (prior to Night, let’s not forget, the word “zombie” meant a body—living or dead—whose mind is being controlled by a master). We could have perhaps assumed that John Russo (co-writer of Night) was the one that made Night so brilliant, except for the fact that Romero went on to write Dawn, which is, in my opinion, even better than Night (and is waaaaaay better than Russo’s version of follow-up to Night, the Return of the Living Dead movies, although some of them are fun and definitely worth a watch).

So the practice makes perfect idea did seem to apply to Romero’s career early on, but how do I make sense of the gradual decline of the series since Dawn? If it were true that you get better and better as you write more and that eventually you should reach a point where you can be counted on to always write good stuff, then Survival should be the best of them all. It just doesn’t add up.

And Romero here isn’t the exception that proves the rule. Many writers, if you look at their progression from early career forward, do not consistently put out good stuff, or perhaps it’s that they’re not able to always recognize whether something they’ve written is good enough to publish. Either way, there are many more besides Romero who do this (and I would also point out that there is a difference between the subjective nature of work—where I might think something is lousy but another, equally discerning reader might disagree—and the fairly universal state of “badness.” I’ve never met anyone who thought Diary of the Dead was good, and in fact, even though many of my friends are avid horror movie fanatics, I don’t know anyone besides myself and my husband who even gave Survival a chance; many people have simply given up on Romero’s zombie movies by now).

So it seems that my theory of practice getting you where you want to be is flawed, or at least, I think it’s partially true but is too limited. Something more is needed to explain how some people (usually the writers who only put out one book every several years) do seem consistently brilliant (and I wonder if those writers are writing other things inbetween, things that are not brilliant, things that we readers never see), while others can put out something amazing one year and something absolutely terrible the next.

The truth, I think, is far more complicated than that if you just keep at it, you’ll eventually get really good. I think even the best writers are still capable of writing crap, and maybe even very bad writers are capable of hitting on something amazing, by chance. Which means that writing will never get easy. There’ll be times where you have a great idea and it comes together perfectly, and times where, after several drafts, you just have to junk a piece because it will never work. But hopefully, knowing that will help staunch the pain of those failed pieces, and it might help us make sense of why sometimes the words seem to come so easily, and other times, inexplicably, we feel like we don’t really know what we’re doing all over again.

The past two weeks as I’ve been on winter break, I’ve been busily developing a half-online introductory creative writing course for the college where I work. I’ve been spending a good eight hours a day working on the course for the majority of the break, and it has, unfortunately, eaten into my writing time, which I had been so excitedly waiting for as the fall quarter drew to a close. Still, developing the course has been an interesting and useful experience.

As I’ve been preparing lessons and activities to introduce students for the first time to the craft and process of creative writing, I’ve been revisiting the basics myself, which has actually been extremely helpful. I’ve been stressing the importance of revision and suggesting concrete revision methods (like retyping the entire draft or doing several small revisions, each focusing on one specific layer of the text). To help students understand the creative writing process, I’ve compiled quotes from various famous authors talking about how writing is a lot of work, how first drafts are usually terrible, and how writing is, as Ernest Hemingway put it, “a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

It isn’t exactly that I forgot these basic truths, but somewhere along the line I began holding myself to an impossibly high standard. I suppose it came from my image of my creative writing career as a ladder, which I’ve been slowly climbing up, one rung at a time. Now that I’ve signed my first book contract (my book, by the way, will be released on January 15^th—the countdown begins!), I’ve been feeling this immense amount of pressure to somehow move another rung up—the next step, I guess I’ve always assumed, would be to land an agent—but not only does that next rung up the ladder still seem hopelessly out of reach, I’m afraid that I won’t even be able to remain on the current rung for long.

The result has been that I’ve been seized with a sort of debilitating fear. Or perhaps that’s too strong. I was writing for about an hour a day during the fall quarter, and the only reason I’ve hardly been writing at all during the break is because I’ve been so busy with other things (this winter break, oddly enough, has kept me busier than I usually am when school is in session). Still, I’ve felt as though my writing life has been at a standstill, and whatever work I have accomplished since I signed that book contract almost six months ago has felt, well, for lack of a better word, bad. I’ve been feeling like a very bad writer, and I’ve been worrying, I may as well say it out loud (or I should say, type it out . . . inky?), that I will never be able to produce anything as good as the stories in this one book, my first, which would also, then, inevitably be my last.

But what I realized while preparing the online lessons is that most of my final drafts are being published in my book. Which means that right now, every time I sit down to work on a short story, I’m working on a fairly early draft. It all seems like bad writing to me—and it is—but so were the early drafts of every single one of the stories in Peter Never Came. It took a lot of time, hard work, and feedback from others to get them to the point they’re at now, and just because I have a published book out there now doesn’t mean that my first drafts are suddenly going to be perfect, or that the writing process is going to get any easier or less messy.

Most of the quotes I’ve come across from successful writers indicate that writing never becomes easy. Writers never reach a point where their first drafts are solid gold; writers never become skilled enough that they no longer need feedback, or that they no longer need to spend countless hours agonizing over each new draft.

Or, to put it far more concisely and eloquently, I’ll leave you with the words of Thomas Mann, in my favorite of the quotes I came across when preparing my lessons: “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

Last week I talked about how much harder it is for me to work on full novels than it is to write short stories. As I was working on the second draft of my current novel today, I figured out, at least partially, where the trouble is coming from. It seems that my writing process is very different when I’m working on shorter pieces than full novels.

When I write a short story, I often have only a very vague idea in my head, or a line, or an image that I want to put into words. When I sit down and begin typing, I rarely have anything even remotely resembling a plot in mind, but that never worries me. I know that it will either come or it won’t. If it does, I’ll end up with a full draft of a story, if it doesn’t, I’ll chalk the experience up to practice.

When I work on novels, though, for some reason I seem to feel less comfortable with the vast question mark lying before me, and before I even begin, I try to map out the plot. This, I’ve realized, is a very bad idea. For me, anyway. This is just not the way I write.

My first attempt at a novel—the first one I actually finished and revised—was stilted and contrived; it was overwritten, overplotted, and thoroughly unoriginal. When I was writing the second novel I ever actually completed, my MFA thesis, I was able to sort of break free of these boundaries. I did map the plot out before the first draft, but when I wrote the second draft I threw it all out and started over from page one, with no clear idea of where it was going to go. I ended up, I feel, with a much better novel than I could have written if I had tried to plot it all out in advance.

On my current novel, though, I have a pretty clear idea of the overall plot in my head. This is partially because this is the second draft, and in the first draft I kind of hammered out all the kinks of what I want to happen in the story. But this is causing me problems when I sit down and actually write. What’s happening is that the pace of the novel is going all wonky. Because I know what’s going to happen next, and what’s going to happen after that, I’m racing through each scene, not taking my time and reveling in the details like I should.

If I don’t know what’s going to happen, see, the only way to find out is by writing it. I have to inch my way blindly through the story by spending a lot of time in the details of each scene. If I look closely enough, they’ll begin to form themselves into something meaningful, and the next key plot point of the story will reveal itself to me. If I already know the next key plot point, though, I tend to get antsy and move too quickly to it, ignoring those details and kind of deflating the entire story in the process.

For future novels, the resolution to this problem is obvious: stop trying to plot them out in advance. If I let my novels evolve organically instead of trying to mold them into something specific, I’m sure I’ll end up a better novelist. For my next novel, I’m going to make sure I begin without a plot in my mind. For my current one, though, the resolution is a bit trickier. I already know the plot of this story, and I like the plot. I think it’s good. I don’t know whether I should chuck it out the window to free up my more organic writing style. Maybe I should. Or maybe there’s some other way, some way I can keep the plot but force myself to revel in the details anyway. 

I’m a little over halfway through the novel right now. For the past few weeks, I’ve been going back through the first 150 pages to revise them as much as possible to enter them into the McSweeney’s Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award at the end of the month. I’m trying to flesh out the scenes, making changes as necessary but also adding details all over the place. It’s much more forced than it would be if I had written the details in to begin with, and I’m not really sure whether it’s working.

Once I get through the beginning again, I’ll work on finishing this second draft, and my goal is to try to forget about the plot as I’m working on each individual scene; I only want to think about the plot when I finish with a scene or chapter and am again looking at how the pieces fit together as a whole. It may be difficult to force the plot out of my mind as I’m actually writing, though, so this is likely to be an ongoing learning experience for me. I’m nervous, but excited, to see how it goes.

As I’ve been getting back to work on my new novel, I’ve been thinking lately about the difference between writing short stories and writing novels. I’ve heard a lot of different opinions about how to know whether you have a story or a novel on your hands, or which craft techniques are best for shorter pieces and which ones are best for book length works. I’ve heard, too, people argue that short stories are more difficult to write than novels, and I’ve heard others argue that novels are more difficult to write than short stories.

Here’s my take: from my experience, it takes a lot longer—and I mean a lot—to write and revise to completion a novel than it takes to bring a short story from inception to publication. I’m talking the difference between a few months for a 20 page story to a few years for a full length novel. Just banging out the first draft of a novel takes, I’d say at minimum, a month—and that’s if you work on it for two or three hours a day. You can throw together a first draft of a story, though, in a day or two, if you really buckle down.

But time doesn’t necessarily equal difficulty. Just because it’s more time consuming to work on a longer piece, does that automatically mean that a longer piece is more difficult? Or is it more difficult to work on a shorter piece, since every word, every single detail, must be very carefully chosen?

The answer I’ve come to recently is perhaps not very satisfying: it depends. It depends on which length the writer in question has had more practice with.

I’ve been mostly working on my novel lately, and I can say with absolutely certainty that novels are much more difficult for me to write than are stories. It’s harder for me to hold 300 pages worth of plot and character development and key details in my mind at once, to keep track of the entire thing as I work on any individual section. I’m also a firm believer in the importance of plot, and I find it much easier to keep the plot moving at a steady clip in a short work. In a full novel, I have to slow the pace down dramatically, and not every second of the story involves a plot point. It’s much harder for me to know what details to include and what to leave out, what tangents are appropriate and what ones will lose the reader?

Many of these problems are problems of early drafts, of course. Part of the reason why novels feel so much harder for me is probably because I can spend months tinkering away on a novel and still know that the final draft lies very far in my future; if I’d spent that time working on a short story, I’d probably have something ready to send out already.

But I think even more than perception, the reason why I find novels so much more difficult is because I’ve had a lot more practice writing short stories. I’ve written countless short stories, many of which were awful and have long since faded into the past. But after writing all those terrible stories, I eventually started getting a feel for how to craft a strong story, and I started publishing the stories that I wrote not long after. I still have more to learn—every new story I write is better than the stories that have come before it, which shows that I’m still learning as I go—but even so, I’m at a point in my story writing career where, when I sit down to work on something new, I feel fairly confident that it will eventually get published.

Not so with novels. I wrote, when I was younger, a handful of unfinished novels, and when I was an undergrad I wrote a first and second draft of what I call my “practice novel.” In grad school, I wrote a novel for my thesis, and have revised it and revised it (and am going to probably revise it again this winter break). And then there’s my new novel, which I wrote a first draft of in between drafts of my thesis, and I’m currently writing the second draft. I’ve had some practice, sure, and I do believe my thesis novel and my current novel have the potential to get published. But I also struggle a lot more in this form than I do in the story form, and of course, I’ve not yet had any publication success as a novelist.

But the nice thing about it is that, once I realized that this was probably the reason why I’m finding it so difficult to make this new novel gel, it kind of took the pressure off a bit. If the problem is simply that I need more practice, then that’s precisely what I intend to get. More practice. And the way to get it is by plowing ahead, by just working on the novel and not worrying so much about how good it is, or how hard it is to make it good. Because the more I work in that form, the more practice I’ll get, and little by little, the better novelist I’ll become.