Perseverance
This essay first appeared as a blog posting on The Bradford Bunch two weeks before I got The Call.
This past summer, my family took a ferry from the fishing village of Galilee to Block Island, a fabulous throwback to the simple life located off the southern coast of Rhode Island. While we were waiting to leave on the ferry, I wandered with my eight-year-old son to the rail so he could get a closer look at the fishing boats. Glancing down to my left, I noticed a single boat sharing the pier with the ferry. The name of the boat? Perseverance. (The photo to the left, of the SAME boat, appeared later in The Providence Journal. Thank you to my husband Dan for spotting it and cutting it out for me!)
Did I take it as a “sign”? Hell yes! Since I’m Irish and superstitions run my life, there was no way this message from above was going to slip by me without a moment to celebrate the confirmation—in the form of a smelly fishing boat—that I’m on the road I was meant to take.
What keeps us going, through the physical process of writing a novel—and it is physical as much as mental—through the editing and revising, through rejection, and through long, endless months of waiting for something, anything, to happen?
As I pondered this topic, I recalled a particular event that kept me going when I was three-quarters of the way through the overwriting of my first novel. I had run out of steam, enthusiasm, and worst of all, belief that I could actually do this. A friend took mercy on me and offered to read it. I sent it to her and tried not to think about the real person who was out there somewhere reading the book of my heart.
After a few days of silence, I figured she was struggling with how to let me down gently. Then she e-mailed me first thing one morning to tell me the damned thing had kept her up half the night—on a work night, no less—and she had to know the ending. I was told to get my butt back in the seat and finish that book! I often wonder if I ever would have finished it without the early-morning message that lit a fire under me. The right words at the right time, and I’ve never looked back.
Do you let non-writers read your work? If not, consider this: Writers read to critique. “Civilians” can bring insight to your process by providing the reader perspective. I wrote my second novel because almost everyone who read the first one wanted to know more about one of the characters. I resisted at first. I was done with those people! But as I took the ax to the overwritten tome over the next few months, the sequel idea percolated. I decided to give it a whirl and ended up with not only a sequel but also a part three that sprung from number two. This three-part series that started everything remains my proudest accomplishment as a writer.
Recently, there was a great discussion on an RWA loop about perseverance. A fellow writer had received three rejections on the same day and was standing on the precipice, towel in hand. Rallying around her, we reminded her that every one of those rejections has value. If she were a general marching down the battlefield, each rejection would represent a star or bar or ribbon on her chest, each of them validation that she is a working, professional writer.
Through all the ups and the downs, through the endless waiting and hoping, the only thing I know for sure is if I give up on my dream of seeing my books published it’ll never happen. The people I’ve met on the journey, those “signs” that crop up from time to time, and the moments of sheer magic that happen on the computer when everything comes together just the way I imagined it—these are the reasons I write. They’re also the reasons I persevere.
The Latest
Coming Feb. 6, 2012
Currently Available:
