Sure, I had lots of excuses and distractions and I did make a pretty good effort of it. In the end, I have over 25,000 words of a story that I’ve been trying to get out of me for years. But it’s still a failed attempt. And I’m OK with that.

I’m not going to beat myself up over it because I came out of the experience with a few new and reinforced ideas and tips for anyone who is thinking about doing it again next year (including myself).

1. Writing is goddamn hard.
   Remember that. Balancing storytelling, craft, concentration, and (in the case of Nanowrimo) a focus on writing as many words as possible in a sitting — that’s difficult work. And for the most part, when I sat down to do the balancing act for two or three-hour spurts, it worked out OK. I just needed to do more sit-down sessions.
2. Writing is rewarding.
   When I did it, it felt great. When I wasn’t doing it, I was thinking about it. If it hadn’t been for a few weeks of career woes in November (one of those aforementioned excuses/distractions), this positive feedback loop would have kept me at it. So, feel good about it when you’re doing it, no matter how crappy the work is.
3. Know your capacity.
   One of the things I was most curious about when I started the project this year was exactly how many words can I write in an hour. The last time I did Nanowrimo — back in 2002 — I used a spreadsheet to keep track of my progress and in general it took a couple hours a day to do my daily goal of 2,000 words. Being that was 8 years ago, I wondered what, if anything, had changed in that aspect. Generally, I was able to write around 1,500 words in an hour. What does that tell me? Well, when I do sit back down again and tackle the rest of this work, I should have a pretty good idea of how much of a time commitment I’m looking at it.[1]
4. Feel your story.
   I say “feel” because I have a tendency to over-think my stories. It’s easy to get into “this has to happen” or my story must have such-and-such element to it. But that can end up putting the story in too tight of a box. And it can also make you inflexible and stifle your imagination. Things I was very clear about before the writing began ended up being put to the test as I started getting deeper into the story. I actually brought a dead character back to life in the middle of the story.
5. When the “real world” calls, answer.
   Yes, I’m disappointed that I didn’t complete the project. But I’d have been even more disappointed if I hadn’t dealt with the conflicts that arose. Maybe the most important thing I learned is that I don’t have to make my self-worth and esteem dependent on the outcome of a writing project.

Now that I look over this small list, I’m not sure how useful it will be as a set of tips for Nanowrimo, but it certainly helped me look at the bright side of failing. If I can’t learn something from my failures, well, I may as well just give up.

[1] I have discovered this is a useful bit of information for me. It’s often the unknown that keeps from fully committing to a project. If I tell myself, in order to finish this novel, it’s going to be X amount of hours over Y days/weeks/months, that’s the kind of data that helps my analytical side shake hands with my creative side. I need both sides to win.

A few years later I tried to go back to the frenzied writing source, but something came up. Details are fuzzy.

This year, I’ve been mentally focused on finally writing this novel springing from a MFA-era short story, and publicly declared I was going to make this shit happen in 2010. Turns out a bunch of stuff happened this year and I have approximately zero pages logged in on that novel project.

But here we are again. Back near November.

So I am now declaring that I will go toe-to-toe with nanowrimo in 2010 to finally figure this fucking novel out. Get out of my brain and on digital paper. For once and for all. I mean it.

To be honest I was just too depressed last year to do it. New York and cold and rain were bringing me down. Thanks to climate change I’m still wearing linen in late October. So temperature is taken care of.

As far as motivation, my daughters are getting older and loving storytelling more and more. I need to put my effort where my mouth is in the parental inspiration department. And that takes care of the passion and commitment portion.

Finally, a friend of mine recently opted out of life. At this point in my own life, I can’t ignore events like this. It is clearly time to make good on unresolved potential, whether I am bound for failure or not. While I doubt his mortal decision was to help us get off our ass and do something, that ended up being the effect in my particular case. RIP, Aaron.

Are you doing the nanowrimo thing? Let me know in the comments or email and let’s connect and keep each other properly motivated.

EDIT TO ADD: My user name on Nanowrimo is choquito. Please add me as a buddy, if you like.

Because of a plague of spam I had forced all comments to go through approval before going on the site. I didn’t realize people had actually been saying stuff I would have loved to have seen. Damn spam.

Thanks again, for the comments on my last taking stock post. Big thank you for the thoughts and encouragement.

Things are still as busy as ever, but I hope to start writing a bit more on here in the future.

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

“The proper manner of calligraphy is nothing other than not being careless, but in this way one’s writing will simply be sluggish and stiff. One should go beyond this and depart from the norm. This principle applies to all things.” — “Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai,” pg. 42

View all my reviews.

I have to admit that I’ve been fairly lucky as a writer. From time to time, I’ve been favored by flashes of good fortune, but the possibility of not selling my book is starting to get to me. I’m beginning to question my writing skills. I’m questioning my timing. I feel like my short stories must be too long. I feel demoralized. I’m afraid I’m going to run out of agencies, contests, and publishers to submit to. I check my inbox all the time looking for some sliver of hope. I realize the short fiction market is small, but that’s little consolation. I feel stupid for not having written a novel instead of a short story collection–I mean why didn’t I get a clue? Nobody buys short fiction anymore. I wonder whether I wasted all those nights writing a collection of (I think) thoughtful and well constructed stories that will sit in a drawer (well, not even in a drawer but on an external hard drive) until I die.

I feel stuck between things: on the one side a homeless short story collection and on the other a novel that probably (if I’m good and productive) won’t be finished until 2010. Yep, I’m officially depressed about writing.

So I turn to the awesome After the MFA community. Any thoughts? Anyone feel the same way I do? Any suggestions? How do you deal with the constant flow of rejection? How do you deal with frustration?

Cheers
Armand

Carlson guides us through the writing of one of his stories, “The Governor’s Ball.” He describes where the initial idea came from and then walks us through the process of completing the first draft.

The book is only 112 pages, but in those few pages Carlson uses his obvious, and proven, storytelling skills to construct one of the most engaging explorations of the writing process I’ve read lately.

What makes the essay/narrative so effective is Carlson comes back to a number of specific ideas about writing. Here’s a few that stuck with me:

• Stay in the room.
• Slow down, be specific, don’t stop writing.
• Solve your problems through the physical world.
• Stay there until something happens next.
• Introduce a character by considering the least likely thing he or she may do. How can the character surprise us?
• “My job is to have been true enough to the world of my story that I was able to present it as a forceful and convincing drama.”

The idea that stuck with me the most, and I suspect the idea that Carlson was really trying to emphasize is, no matter how much you want to stop writing after that first good sentence or page or scene, keep going. Stay in the room even though your coffee is cold. Stay in the room even though the phone is ringing. Stay in the room to write your first draft. And maybe even more importantl, when you’re stuck, when you don’t know where the story is going, stay in the room inside your story. It’s there in the physical surroundings of your fictional world that you will find what you’re looking for. And Carlson goes on to prove all that using his own first draft as evidence.

At the end you realize it’s all so simple—yet we know that more often than not keeping your butt in the chair is probably one of the most difficult things to do. This book serves as a useful reminder how important it is to, no matter what, stay in the room.

This is what I’ll remember next time I want to get up and refill my coffee cup (or wine glass):

“All the valuable writing I’ve done in the last ten years has been done in the first twenty minutes after the first time I’ve wanted to leave the room.”

Morbidly, I watched and learned about a brilliant writer from the Iowa Workshop, who published a first novel in 1972 called “The Stones of Summer.??? The novel receives a handful of reviews, they are mostly strong.

We later learn that the Mossman burnt himself out writing his first novel out of grad school. “The Stones of Summer??? isn’t published by one of the big houses. Mossman doesn’t promote the book. Then novel winds up filed on the Obscurity shelf. The writer goes on to a life of anxiety attacks, 20 years of welding, and caring for his elderly mother before the film director tracks him down.

All of this is woven around the discussion of one-hit wonder novels, from Harper Lee to Joseph Heller (sort of) to J.D. Salinger (technically) to a few other writers I had heard of but haven’t yet read. Now many of those books are on my Amazon list and I somehow, strangely, feel more charged (or thankfully just as charged as I did before) about keeping up with my craft.

I could have shuffled off to bed after watching “The Stone Reader??? feeling like the game is tricked against me and so many of us post-MFA writers. I could have looked at the view of the publishing world as the driven-by-chance, cannibalistic venture that it appears to be. There’s plenty of testimony to that effect. In the moview, the writer’s teachers, colleagues, even his agent add evidence to the fact that Mossman was an inevitable victim of the writing and publishing process. But — and here’s the rub — for all of them he was also that brief champion of art, unforgettable yet forgotten, burning like fire, and yet ultimately dimmed. We could all end up like this. But the trying, the effort, the possibility of one person reading that book and feeling something… It’s all worth it.

Check out the film, if you haven’t. Let me know what you think.

“Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” — Kurt Vonnegut

On submitting

What follows are suggestions for submitting your stories and/or excerpts to small literary journals.

Build an extensive list

I have a list of just over 100 literary and electronic journals that I submit to, and that’s a fairly small list. One guy I met told me that he had a list of 240 (where he found the other 140 journals—I don’t know).

The least number of times that I have submitted a short story before it was accepted was about 12 times. The most was about 65, so I’m of the opinion that you will have to submit a short story—even a well written one—to many journals before it will find a home.

If you don’t have a list you can start with mine (see ‘THE LIST’ below) and edit as needed.

About the list

This list is a little bit of a mess (and highly personalized—I tried to take out my personal comments, but I might have missed some, so if you see some notes that don’t make sense, just ignore them).

Tiers

Entries are divided into 5 tiers according to my (and other folks’) sense of the importance, relevance, circulation, and payscale of the journals. In addition to five tiers, there is a sixth tier for contests. I usually submit to contests between the times I submit to Tier One and Tier Two.

My advice is to start submitting to literary journals at Tier One, then go on to contests (if you are so inclined) then work your way down to Tier Five.

By dividing the literary journals and e-journals into tiers, I don’t mean to insult anyone. There just has to be some way to account for the fact that I would rather have my story rejected first by the New Yorker, then rejected by Bat City Review before finally being rejected by threecandles.org You gotta have publishing priorities.

Word Count

Throughout my list you will see things that look like this: 2,000-8,000 words. Other times I might just write this: 10,000 words. These are all indicators of the word count that the journal will accept. This is pretty straight forward. If you just see one number like 6,000 words, that means the journal will accept stories of up to 6,000 words. Any length means that the journal appears to have no limit on the word count. Any length could also mean that I was unable to find out whether the journal had a word count.

When you can submit (reading periods)

As many journals are published from colleges and universities, they often have schedules that correlate with academic semesters. Many small journals will not accept submissions sent outside their reading periods, so (unless you like wasting postage) it’s important to know when they are open for submissions.

Again, these notations are fairly obvious. I have attempted to note inclusive date ranges like Sep-May. Year round either means that the journal is open for submissions year round or that I was unable to find information as to when they accepted work. Year round? (with a question mark) means that I guessed that they accept work year round, but in truth, I have no idea.

To contest or not to contest

It is my impression that people are divided about whether you should enter contests or not. This is because—many of you probably know this—most contests hosted by literary journals involve some sort of fee. Some writers believe that contests are a good way to strut your stuff and have editors take a closer look than they might have under other circumstances. Other people just think they are a big rip off. In the end you have to decide whether contests are right for you. For many years, I refused to enter my stories in contests—mostly on principal. Last year, however, I changed my mind. I have come to view contests as a chance to have my stuff taken a little more seriously than when I send unsolicited submissions. And I’ve done okay for myself in that area. So a few years ago, I regarded contests as a waste and now I’m sending them $20 checks. Go figure.

Always update your list

Whether you use my list or make one of your own in your trials to make those literary journal submissions, it’s important to remember that the literary journal scene is constantly changing. Journals move, shut down or change their submission periods. Additionally, there are new small journals cropping up from time to time. I try to add about 6-12 new journals to my list each year by checking Newpages.com, The Writers Chronicle, The Writer’s Market, and other sources. This helps balance out the small journals that have shut down over the years which I’ve had to remove from my list.

Another excellent tool for keeping track of changes in small journals are rejection notes. Rejection notes will often note changes in address or reading periods. For example, for the longest time, I thought that The Iowa Review’s reading period was from Sep-May. Last year however, I got a rejection notice saying that they only accepted work from Sep 15 to Dec 15 (short window). So I updated my list and resent the story after Sep 15. It was promptly rejected, but that’s beside the point.

Tarry no longer—here is the list [Ed. Note -- Armand’s list is so extensive, I have included it here as a PDF rather than posting it all online]: Armand’s List (PDF 164kb)

“Every man has his own patch of earth to cultivate. What’s important is that he dig deep.??? — José Saramago