Words by Raffaella Migliore
You’re writing and it’s like magic pouring from your fingertips. It’s genius. It’s effortless. It feels like some of your best work yet.
So you take a mental step back, steady your breath and go in for a full first read… and it’s average, at best. Far from anything you’d consider feeling good about. You pass it along to fresh eyes and even your mum agrees that “it’s…nice”. Nice? You’re already six nice months into what’s expected to be an eternal rut and start considering the possibility that it might be time to throw in the pen. Try something else. You’d make a promising sales assistant.
But you are not destined to be a full time sales assistant. You are a writer. And you are not the first of them to, as Margaret Atwood would say “have a wet arse and no caught fish”. She’d set aside the winter of 1983 to write a novel, 6 months of writing, rereading and reverting to the rubbish bin.
In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find an author who doesn’t attribute their best works to a healthy and generous serving of failure and rejection. Stephen King had Carrie rejected so many times he took to collecting his rejection letters on a spike in his bedroom.
But it’s not those stories of tribulation overcome by triumph that mean all that much to us when we’re sitting on the 30th day of the slump, knowing very well that the pages in front of us contain no Carrie. What is of value to remember is that we are not the only ones to write things that aren’t destined to be the greatest work of our time. Not everything we write is just waiting on the right reader to fall in love with. Sometimes we write things that are just bad; that are average without redemption.
It’s known that J.K Rowling’s first manuscript of Harry Potter was refused by 12 major publishing houses and that it took over a year to find someone willing to take the chance on her book. What is even more encouraging to know, is that despite all the success that followed the beloved Harry Potter series which solidified Rowling’s title as Queen of 21st Century Fiction, in 2012 Rowling published The Casual Vacancy, a fictional tragicomedy that landed up being… meh. It was… nice.
We’re all entitled to our nice days. We are also entitled to our not nice at all, but actually very bad days. Not only are we entitled to these days, but they are completely necessary. We alternate between nice, not-so-nice and actually quite good until we stumble upon a day or even a stroke of genius when it’s as if magic is pouring from your fingertips. It’s effortless and it feels like some of our best work yet.
So we take a mental step back, steady our breath and go in for a full read. And it’s exactly what we’ve been waiting for.
“Perhaps it was those six months of futile striving, tangled novelistic timelines, rotten Tudors, and chilblains that caused me to break through some invisible wall, because right after that I grasped the nettle I had been avoiding, and began to write The Handmaid’s Tale‘.”