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Paying Dues

Janci

In the year 2000, I wrote my first novel. (This means that this year I’m hitting ten years exactly. Some of you may know that I’ve been saying for years I was going to give the trying to be published game ten years of my life. I’m not prepared to write that post today, though. Stay tuned.)

So ten years ago. First novel.

When I finished it I sort-of revised it and sent it to the Delacorte contest for a first young adult novel. And I got a form rejection–the first of many. This is not surprising, because while that first novel is not as bad as it could have been, it’s certainly not very good.

I knew that, at the time. But sending the book out was something I needed to do. If I was going to be serious about writing, I felt a need to keep my head in the game–to put myself out there and take the rejection.

I was honestly excited to receive my first rejection letter, because it meant I was beginning a journey. I figured there were years more rejections to come. I was paying my dues.

I still believe that was a good decision, as the practice taught me how to shrug off rejection rather than be crushed by it. (This staved off pain until 2009. Oh 2009. You were not my friend. Let’s just go our separate ways, okay?)

I told this story a while ago, and a friend of mine who has not been accumulating rejection for the last ten years looked worried. “I don’t think you have to pay dues,” she said. (I’m paraphrasing here.)

And I told her the truth: I really think you do.

But then I started to think about what I meant by that. Did I mean that I thought it impossible to get published without spending ten years getting rejected? This is certainly untrue: it’s a touchy fact with me that a great many of the recently published authors I know were not writing ten years ago when I started. (Every time I hear people talking about the long four years, or long six years that they worked for this, I want to cry. It doesn’t make me jealous; I’m happy for my friends. But it does feed the self-doubt voices in my head.)

Back to dues paying. I don’t believe that writing a publishable novel is something that just happens to people one day. There has to be some degree of dues paying, but the key here I think is to remember who you’re paying those dues to. The reason I haven’t been published in those ten years is not chance. It’s not bad luck. It’s not the impossibility of the industry. It’s me. I have not yet succeeded in writing a publishable novel. I’m still learning core things like structure. (Oh, structure. You are my nemesis.) My learning process has been trial and error. It’s been a good learning process. It’s getting me where I need to be. Slowly.

But that doesn’t mean that everyone needs to pay those dues to themselves the way that I do. I know writers who have come to fiction writing from all angles. Some wrote professionally in other fields, and were able to transfer over some of their skills from those areas. All that professional writing might not have given them the instant ability to write a novel, but it was certainly a form of dues paying, a form of practice.

I have friends who worked for years on a single novel, pushing at it until they got it right. For some of them, this was an effective way to hone their skills. (It comes with the danger of getting stuck in that novel forever, but that danger is not an inevitability.)

I know writers who hid their writing in their first years, incubating themselves before sending their work out into the world.

Some writers worked in publishing in one form or another, some wrote short stories before moving into novels, some wrote blogs. These are all ways of skill-honing, of dues paying, of learning the craft.

And of course I know other writers like me, who wrote a pile of novels, sent them everywhere, got rejected lots and lots. Some of these writers are now impossibly successful. So are some of the writers from all of these other backgrounds.

There are many paths to the same goal. I am happy with mine. I still think I made the right choice, but that doesn’t mean that my way of learning is the only way.

And if I believe that my choice was right for me, I have to be happy with the place it’s brought me. Frighteningly near ten years later. Holding my breath to see what will happen. Hoping 2010 will be different from 2009.

Sundance

Janci

Drew and I decided this was the year we were actually going to make it up to see some films at Sundance. We did the wait-list thing, which was surprisingly easy and efficient. Drew’s mom was in town, so we took her up on a Wednesday and got into Hesher at the Broadway Theater in Salt Lake, and Son of Babylon in Park City.

Hesher is an independant film about a man and his son who have just lost their mother/wife.  In their grief, they encounter an anarchist who presumably helps them deal with it.  This film follows in the tradition of films where an outsider comes in to help the protagonists deal with a challenge or problem, except that Hesher, the anarchist, isn’t exactly helpful.  When the film structure indicates that he’s about to pontificate about helpful life philosophy, Hesher instead tells disgustingly vulgar stories instead. 

The film was brutal and brilliant; I spent most of it with my jaw dropped.  But there are very, very few people I could recommend it to.  The forceful vulgarity is essential to the film’s impact, and incredibly well done, but I haven’t heard language like that since junior high.  It means to be offensive, and succeeds.  Still, brilliant.  I’m so glad we got to see it. 

oseph Gordon-Leavitt delivered a stunning performance as Hesher.  I’m used to seeing him in meeker roles, but he made Hesher intimidating through body language alone.  (If you haven’t seen him in 500 Days of Summer, you are missing out.)  This makes me incredibly excited for Inception–the new Christopher Nolan film with Leonardo DiCaprio and Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, coming out this summer.

 

We also made it into a late showing of Son of Babylon, which was Drew’s first choice of films to see.  Son of Babylon is the first film to come out of Iraq.  It’s about a boy and his grandmother traveling across Iraq just after the death of Saddam, looking for the boy’s father, one of thousands upon thousands of Iraqi soldiers who are missing–and often buried by their own government in mass, unmarked graves.  The film was surprisingly non-political, dealing mostly with the personal pain and grief of a people who’ve been torn apart by the wars.

I expected the film to be slow, and was pleasantly surprised at how engaging it was.  I’d highly recommend it, and hope it scores some kind of a release in the States.  We listened to the director talk afterwards.  He says there are no more movie theaters left–all of them have been destroyed–so the people who saw him making the film didn’t understand what he was doing, even when he tried to explain. 

There were no actors to be had, so none of the actors in the film are professionals.  He found the little boy on the street, and selected him mainly because he spoke both languages necessary for the film.  (The boy was an impressive actor.  This director must be amazing to get those performances out of actors with no experience.)  The woman who played the grandmother lost her husband in the same way the character lost her son.  This is more than a story–it’s a tribute to the daily lives of many, many women and children in Iraq.

We went up to see one other film, but didn’t make it in.  We’ve decided we need to try to see at least one film every year, though.  This is so my kind of cinema.

 

Thank You, Johns.

Janci

I like to read the news, but I regularly get frustrated. I’m a moderate politically, and I tend to get annoyed at both the extremes, wishing we could have more cooperation and less head-butting. I get annoyed at bad rhetoric, especially. There is nothing I hate more than a person making an argument I respect, and making it badly.

When I get myself tied into a knot over all the bad arguing going around, I turn to the Johns: John Stewart and John Scalzi.

The Johns are both excellent with rhetoric.  I may not agree with everything they say, but I sure agree with the way they say it. 

The Johns constantly remind me that someone in the world is capable of expressing their opinions effectively.  More often than not, I walk away from their arguments thinking: thank you.  Somebody needed to say it.  

And even more importantly, the Johns make me laugh.  At the end of the day they may not have solved the problems I’m frustrated about, but at least I’m smiling about them.

So thank you, Johns.  Thank you for your impeccably structured arguments and your well-aimed commentary. 

I appreciate you.

Janci

This whole month has been about that slow emerging from underneath the avalanche of stuff that was Fall/January. It’s the 16th. I’m out from under the revision and the taxes. All that’s left are the maintenance tasks I let slide over the last two weeks while I was focusing on writing. Little things like, you know, the January accounting. So yay.

One of my goals over the next few weeks is to catch up on all that blogging I didn’t do over the last five months.

Here is one of those thoughts:

Drew and I are really overt about our roles and responsibilities. This isn’t because we’re super rigid in our gender roles–quite the opposite. Neither of us is particularly interested in gender norms, which means we don’t have as many fundamental assumptions to fall back on in terms of who does what.

So we have lists. I’ve posted about them before. Drew paints eight hour days. I do the photography, and now the accounting. I direct the shipping. Drew carries out the rest of the shipping when I inform him I’m too busy. (That informing part is a role in disguise. It’s small but crucial.) We cook together one night a week and then spend the week reheating. Right now I do most of the cleaning, since I’m not working eight hour days. Drew has certain jobs that he does though–mostly the ones I hate, like making the bed. (You have no idea how complicated bed making can be. Our sheets aren’t deep enough for our mattress–even though they are a size bigger! how can this be?–and our duvet cover has to be washed and re-settled weekly. It’s a struggle, and currently my most hated chore.)

But I digress.

Roles. Right.

Sometimes I feel guilty that I go play with friends a lot while Drew is working. His days are really structured, which he needs, and mine are not. So I regularly do lunches and things with friends while he is hard at work painting commissions.

And then a week or so ago this occurred to me: one of my roles in our home is community maintenance.

We are each others’ co-workers, so it would be really easy for us to cocoon in and never see anyone else. I’m an introvert, so this possibility is frequently attractive. But the reason we still live in Utah County is the community here. We have so many wonderful friends here. The roots run deep. I want to make sure our communities here continue to thrive, and that we continue to be involved in them.

This involves work. It’s pleasant work, to be sure. It’s not like it’s a hardship to send out "hey, let’s do lunch" emails and then spend afternoons with fabulous people. But it is an investment of time in personal and community relationships. I sometimes feel guilty that I’m not investing more of that time in other important things, like writing, or getting a day job.

But then I remember how important those communities are to us. I don’t think I could handle the instability of our lives without the support of our friends–many of whom are in similar positions in one way or another. Drew needs the support, too. The time I invest in spending time with our friends is important. It becomes more of an important focus the farther we get from graduating and the social environments we had when we were in school.

I don’t usually think of that time so clinically. I love my friends. I want to see them. I know I feel better about the day to day tasks if I take some time away from them to spend time with other people. But realizing that I’m actually helping us achieve our long term goals by playing with my friends–it helps me feel less guilty about leaving Drew to work sometimes.

Because he benefits, too. We do evening stuff with friends constantly–so much so that an evening at home is becoming quite rare. (We have to balance. Nights off are important, too.)

I’m acutely aware that in the future I’m not going to have as much time as I do now. There will be children. There will be increased work load. I’m not going to have as much time as I do now for building community ties.

But hopefully my friends will understand. Hopefully the building of community ties that I’m doing now will sustain us in years when there is less time and energy to go around.

For a great post on building communities, see my brilliant friend Sandra.