Motivation.

Wow, 63 followers!  Welcome to all you new guys.  It's great to see you here!

Well, looks like I get a break from my rabid email checking. Last week I found out that the agent who has my full is on vacation until approximately the middle of May.  You'd think this would frustrate me.  Nope, not a bit.  My main emotion was one of relief. I now know that for a couple of weeks my email inbox is once again a safe, friendly place to visit and I don't have to hold my breath any more when I see the indicator that I have a new message.

Here's something I have been thinking a bit about that might be some food for thought for you aspiring authors.  Since finding out the agent with my full is out of town I sort of lost my momentum on my WIP.  It took me a while to figure out why, but yesterday I realized it was because I wasn't sure how much effort I wanted to put into my writing until I heard back from the agent as to whether she thought I was any good.  It didn't have to necessarily be that she wanted to represent me (of course that would be wildly out of this world awesome and it's what I hope happens).  However, I think for my current situation it would be enough if she said my writing showed promise or something along those lines.

That realization was a bit of a slap in the face for me.  Up until that moment I really believed that I was writing for myself, not because I love it (because somedays, let's be honest, writing is not loveable) but because not writing is more painful than writing.  The realization that I was holding back, waiting for someone to give me an opinion on my writing before I moved forward with my WIP really bothered me.  I don't want to be that kind of writer.  I want to be the kind that continues to practice and progress in their craft simply because they must, because to them to stop writing is to stop living. 

When I was writing my first manuscripts the thought of publication was sort of this amorphous blob that floated from the back to the front of my brain on an irregular basis.  It became pretty apparent pretty quickly that for various reasons these books weren't ones I wanted to send out in the world.  I enjoyed writing them though.  It was enough to watch them grow and change and become something under my fingertips. 

With SEEDS, as the story spooled out on my screen I had the sense that this was the novel I was going to go for it with. Even that thought, though, didn't change the way I wrote. I didn't freeze up in fear of what my hypothetical readers might think.  I didn't zoom forward in a fit of mad typing wanting to get it on some agent's desk ASAP.  I plodded foward, putting at least something on the page daily, in turns marveling at and railing against the creative process, researching, adding here, cutting there, revising until I felt like my eyesockets were going to bleed.  I never once thought of slowing down or stopping while I waited to get an opinion on whether my writing was good or not. 

To tell you the truth, I'm a bit disgusted with myself.  My writing is my own.  Up until now I thought I did it because it fulfilled a need in me, not because I wanted someone's stamp of approval, not because I wanted to see it all shiny and glossy on some shelf in Barnes and Noble.  I'm not entirely sure what to do with this newfound self knowledge, but I will tell you this.  Tonight my WIP and I are going to spend some quality time together and I'm going to see if I can recapture that sense of wonder, of a need fulfilled as I create something that's never drawn breath in the world before.  I hope to find that for me, that's still enough of a reason to write.