Chip on Your Shoulder

RELATED RESOURCES

Want to learn more? Check out our reporting, writing, and editing seminars. Sign up to receive Chip on your Shoulder by e-mail: * Click here (sent Tuesdays)

Why haven't I finished yet? Why does it always take me so long? What's wrong with me? I must be stupid or lazy. Maybe I just don't have any talent.

Sound familiar?

When a writer friend talked that way the other day, it was like looking into the mirror. How many times has the same hyper-critical loop played in my head as I looked at an unfinished piece of writing?

If I could only change one thing about myself it would be my impatience. The root of my perpetual disdain for delay, I read recently, lies in a simple miscalculation: how long something will take. And the fact is some stories take longer than the writer would like.

This isn't a thinly-veiled defense of turning stories in late. Obviously, there are stories that have to be finished when the clock strikes deadline.

What I'm talking about here are stories that are self-assigned, or those more ambitious assignments that editor and writer agree will require more than the time-driven work that constitutes so much of the writing life.

There are some stories that set their own deadlines and the writer has to just hang on for the ride.

Andrews McMeel Publishing

This struck me last week as my wife and I proofed the galleys of a forthcoming book that we first conceived shortly after we met in 1975. Yep, 30 years ago.

I wonder how I would have reacted during the '70s, '80s, and '90s if I had known that it would take that long to find an audience, first as a serial novel in more than 40 newspapers, this fall as a hardcover novel, and -- if someone with the ability to write a huge check likes its charms -- a television movie.

Actually, I don't have to wonder. I would have thrown up my hands, tossed the drafts into the trash, deleted all the computer files, and started something else. Actually, that's not true, either. I would have boxed it all up and added it to the pile of other unfinished stories, where it could haunt me for being such a failure. I could never have accepted the idea that, for whatever reason, I would not be able to finish the story or find an audience for it at the precise moment I wanted (tomorrow, next week, at the end of the year). Instead, I would have to spend countless hours over three decades working, failing, losing faith, going back to it.

This is important because there's another story like that sitting in file folders, taking up disk space in my computer and head. It's a book I conceived in 1994 that remains unfinished. Not for lack of trying. I've researched it, planned it, drafted 100,000 words, and about six months ago got bogged down in the latest revisions. 

What I'm learning is you don't have to give up on ideas even if they're slow to take shape. As much as I'd like to be in charge, I must accept that some stories have their own timetable.  

About five years ago, one of our daughters wandered into my office. "Daddy, how do you write a novel?"

"Well, Lianna, there are lots of ways. Some people write an outline. Others just start writing and then there are..."

"No, Daddy, how do you write a novel?"

"Oh," I said. "Well I haven't actually written one yet so I can't tell you."

But I had just finished writing a textbook, and so I thought I had an answer.
 
I'm not sure how you write a novel, I told her. But I know the way you write a book is to keep working on it until it's finished. You just can't quit.

So I've stopped telling myself it's not going to happen, and, in the spirt of the season, look at those literary incompletions as flowers that bloom when their time comes. Perhaps this is one of the consolations of aging. If you can survive and keep doing the work, you will finish those stories.