One of
the bad things about writing is that when you attain success, it becomes easy
to get anything
published. Sometimes you lay an egg. It might be a novel, and
short story, or perhaps the local newspaper asked you to write an essay.
The Toronto Globe and Mail recently published an article on what Barack Obama learned when he forgot to show up for the first debate with Mitt Romney. Obama went on to prevail in the election, and you can recover from a bad writing experience, too, by following the same strategies
Maintain your perspective. After a bad second novel there is a temptation to pull a Truman Capote and pack it in. You can live off your celebrity status like Capote did.
Fat chance.
Remember the rodeo rider: Get right back on that pony and ride her again. There is another novel or story in you. You just need to write it. Remember that people remember the last thing you did for them. If that last thing was coming back to write a better novel, then that’s what you have to do.
Take responsibility. This is going to be hard to avoid because writing is a solitary act. If you find yourself blaming your critique group or your editor, then maybe it is time to replace them. It might not have been their fault, either. Sometimes you just wear out your welcome.
- Conduct a thorough review. Go back through your notes and the drafts of the manuscript. Did you edit too much, delete a chapter that maybe should have stayed, or blew off the input of a reader?
- Some folks counsel never to read your reviews. Perhaps this is a time to break that rule.
- Read the Novel. Yeah, this might be painful, and maybe you should not do this right away. A re-read, though, might lead you to recognizing what you did wrong.
- Get back to the keyboard—soon. This could be part of a slump, or just a bad experience. The longer you wait to start writing again, the more you are going to run the risk of getting psyched out.
- Entertain the possibility that it wasn’t that bad. Hollywood is rife with movies that never made it big at the box office, but went on to become cult classics, and also mainstream classics. Frank Capra’s It’s Wonderful Life was considered a box office flop but now you will find it on numerous lists of the best movies ever made.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Photo by AMmagill (Flickr) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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