Writing from the Dark

The dark maze between…

...completion of a novel and publication. I finished my novel in December, 2005. On January 13, 2006 (my grandson's thirteenth birthday), I began a shotgun approach to finding an agent. Got lucky (providence does play a role in such things), and signed with a great agency in June. My agent (I got such a thrill when I first said that), using the same shotgun technique, sent my manuscript to six publishers...the rejections began to accumulate, but each one was framed in language that titillated and sucked me into believing an acceptance was just around the corner: "…persuasively written and deeply feeling…this is simply too literary for our list…a talented, accomplished writer…if the author had published previously or had a platform…a wonderfully gracious and lyrical writer…even a few years ago, I would have taken it quite seriously…a touching and well-written novel…but in today’s climate of fiction publishing…." Ah, well.

What happened next surprised and dismayed me--a total block. I haven't written much since the rejections began rolling in, and am hoping that blogging about this will get me over it. My mentor/teacher/friend--a fine novelist who’s been a midwife to the birth of over a dozen published books, and with whom I’ve been working for twenty years—said I wasn’t blocked but just going through a fallow period. So I looked up "fallow": dormant, quiescent, hibernating...a field waiting for seed. Whatever I call it, my natural story-telling voice has laryngitis, and I must quit straining it, wait out the quiet.

When I titled this blog "the dark maze between..." I had to resist what I really wanted to call it: "Ruminations from a Black Hole," which is what I'm feeling these days. But talk about negative...

My mentor also said that she’d never seen it fail, that writers almost always go through a spell of slumbering when a novel is finished. There are exceptions. I’ll cite two extremes--Stephen King, who writes 363 days a year, taking off for Christmas and the opening day of the baseball season, and Herman Melville, who was inactive for almost twenty years after MOBY DICK and before BILLY BUDD, although he did publish poems during his fallow period.

A few months after the first rejections of my novel rolled in (there’ve been about fifteen in all), I was so down emotionally that I sought counseling; a wise psychiatrist helped me see that I wasn’t so much depressed as I was in mourning over the completion of a project that had consumed me for eighteen years. Again, just changing the label of my mood from depression to mourning made all the difference. I took his advice and burned a copy of the manuscript in a ritualistic manner, breathing in some of the smoke to inspire me to write another, and wafting some of it northward, hoping a few molecules would make it to New York publishers.

Okay, that’s it for today…writing this has been therapeutic, and I’d love to hear from any other writers who’re in the doldrums or in the morass of waiting, waiting, waiting…