Eric Shaw Quinn

The hardest part of writing is believing in yourself.

Writing is very solitary.  Alone you create a world, a universe, that exists nowhere outside your head.  Without validation or any other human interaction, cruel or kind, you create beauty, tragedy, joy, love, terror, all the colors that seem to you to make up the cosmos you have yourself divined.  With no authorization and no special powers, you play God.

It’s a bit of a high wire act and it keeps me in a state of duality.  Because I earn my living as a writer, there is the flight or fight anxiety of wondering whether a book will “sell” or if I’m just kidding myself about whatever I’m writing about or being a writer at all.  But there is also an incredibly seductive quality.  Spending time in a world of my own choosing, where things work out the way I want is irresistible.

There is a point a few weeks short of the ending of whatever book I’m writing where I probably shouldn’t drive or operate heavy machinery.  I get behind the wheel, sing along with Duffy or Michael Buble on the CD player and wonder idly about a scene I’m planning or a character I’m in the process of discovering.  Suddenly, the CD is repeating and I’m miles from where I started, occasionally not even where I’d intended to go.  The experience is that intense and complete for me.

To be fair, I can also lose an entire afternoon to updating my Netflix Queue.  Perhaps that’s just the way I think and possibly it’s thinking that way that makes me a writer.  I don’t know.  I do know that once I’ve discovered that place, the more I long to be there.

And then it’s finished.

Possibly that’s the most uncomfortable for me.  The world I’ve created is complete.  Returning only leads to editing and does not lend itself to escape in the same personal way.  The only way to achieve the feeling of departure to my fantastic new world is to recruit other visitors – I have to get other people to read what I’ve written and see what I’ve seen.

It’s like that Jody Foster character trying to get other people on the plane to believe she has a daughter.  It’s painful, uncomfortable, frustrating, dispiriting and very difficult.  But it’s also imperative.

My first novel, Say Uncle, was completed around 1985.  For ten years I was told it was a bad book, not the sort of thing people would want to read, unrelatable, too experimental, too edgy, not edgy enough.  Often the rejections were personal as in, “you seem to hear a drummer I cannot hear,” or “yours is a vision the world does not share.”

Say Uncle was published in 1994.  It was well received.  The critics liked it.  A studio optioned it for film before it even came out in print.  My publisher betrayed me, did nothing they had promised in the way of promotion, killed the project and then refused to publish the sequel I wrote or even pay me the royalties the book earned, but it was out there.  I could talk about the world I had created with other people who had been there.  My dream became more real and my return to the world I had created and longed for became an open-ended journey no longer solitary, but shared.

I’ve written and published a number of books since then.  Until now, none so personal for me as Say Uncle.

My new book, Star Crossed, contains my vision of a world that was or might have been 3000 years ago and a love that I have never known in my own life.  I ache for it.  I long to return.  So far, I’ve been told that the book is too modern, too historical, too long and too short.  One man, a purported professional told me that he had not read the book and did not plan to, but he felt I should cut it.  It was just too long he explained.  I wondered where exactly someone who hasn’t read your book might think you should cut.  Maybe I should just randomly tear pages out and toss them away.  Too long, that’s the big complaint.

There are two new books coming out this summer one a web published adolescent memoir that is as long as my book and a fantasy novel, the first of a planned trilogy that is longer and, it would seem, promises to triple in length before it’s done.  Yet, it earned a press worthy advance.  Star Crossed is shorter than most of the Harry Potter books and lighter by 400 pages than then most recent historical best seller that is being made into a mini-series to be out next month.

Still I am told that mine is too long.

I tell this story not to prove I’m right.  I may not be.  And God knows I love editing.  I shortened Say Uncle by 200 pages in the editing of it.  I tell this story because it best describes what is, most often, the hardest part of writing.

It’s not coming up with the idea.  It’s not writer’s block — I’m not even sure what that is and suspect it’s mostly laziness or at least self-indulgence.  If I waited around until I felt like doing something to do it, I’d probably only ever get around to masturbating and chocolate.  I feel sorry for people who seem to hate the act of writing so and wonder that they don’t get into a different field.  Creativity is not the challenge for me.

Nor is the sort of afterthought place to which writers are relegated despite the fact that there would be no movies or television or advertising or newspapers or magazines or even the internet without writers.  It’s not even the bad pay or the always limited and shrinking opportunities for success.

The hardest part of writing is believing in yourself.