Visiting Day

I've had too much time with my own words lately. I'm spending today visiting around other blogs. let me know if you've got one I should see!

The Long View or No Quick Fixes

We live in a world that rewards our need for instant gratification. That's not news, but it is the topic of the next chapter in Writing from the Inside Out by Dennis Palumbo.

He starts this chapter with a thought-provoking description of a commercial he saw - a guy in some sort of new age looking head phones with the headline "You'll be meditating like a Buddha in thirty minutes." (p. 91)

Think about it.

And then wonder - are we like that in our writing?

Do we expect it to be something we can learn in a week? A year? Ten years?

One of my favorite tweets from RWA was this:

Definition of "hope" = just met an author who shopped manuscripts for 15 YEARS! This year - sold nine books.

I'm going to think of this the next time I feel overwhelmed by how long I've been at this and the difficulty of breaking in to publishing.


But back to the chapter - so much wisdom, so much to think about.

Take this quote -

Being a writer - with all its successes and failures, raptures and rejections - is a life long endeavor. Less a career choice than a calling, its rewards are often so private and ambiguous as to be inexpressible. It's as much a perspective on things, a way of organizing one's experience as it is a job. (p. 92)

He goes on to quote from John Fowles about whole sight and summarizes that

Seeing things whole, having the long view, is the only way to live the writer's life. It's committing yourself to a concept of writing as an integral, ongoing part of your life, omstead of ust a series of external events - good or bad reviews. deals made or lost, great or awful days at the keyboard. It's seeing your writing life as though it stretched to the horizons - all the ups and downs, hills and valleys, smoothing out from this lengthened perspective. (p. 93)

Finally, Palumbo advises to listen to your instincts; take a workshop when you feel you need one, write feverishly when the impulse is there, but do it with a view to expanding your writer's life, not in a frantic chase after the hot technique or genre.


What particularly speaks to me about this is that it seems to allow for those burnt out times when you need to pull back. Fill the well, if you will, so as to have something to write about.

I had to back up and live life for a number of years because writing had depleted me. It was a chore that I dreaded rather than the life I wanted to live.

As I type that, I'm struck by the apparent contrast of this wisdom with what I've heard quoted from the keynote address Nora Roberts gave at RWA10. I don't have the exact words but the common paraphrasing I heard was that writing is hard, sweaty work that you just have to do.

I agree with Nora (after all, who am I to argue?), but I have to wonder what she'd think about Palumbo's long view.

What do you think?