Just write it and worry about the rest later, when you’re no longer worried about worrying about all that other stuff (the stuff about fame and fortune).

I did not mention this during our recent poetry workshop, but I supported myself as a visual artist by spending some thirty years as a book editor (Random House, Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill) and as a managing editor of two university presses (Stanford, Washington) before embarking on my current path, and I still consult with writers of all kinds. The best advice I could offer has already been given by Maia, above. It’s the same thing I’ve said to countless writers (especially the part about NOT talking about it and NOT showing it UNLESS talking and showing are indispensable elements of your process). So all I will add here is a suggestion to reread Nathanael West (especially “Miss Lonelyhearts”) and Jane Bowles (especially “Two Serious Ladies”). It’s fiction, but it weaves the serious with the humorous to produce something dark and deliciously quirky.

Good luck!

X.P.

Ditto Tanya–get it down, then revise like hell. It’s hard for us poetry types to look at the work that way, I think, because we’re thinking so much about shape and form as we work. Prose is sort of a different situation, but the wild writing and studious revision are sort of the gift and curse of the form.

But I can also talk to you about the other side of this – and that is that you have to, HAVE to learn patience and never rush this stuff. Because when you have just finished writing something, and it’s sitting there all new and pretty and still steaming from the oven – you’ve got absolutely no perspective on it whatsoever. Zero. It’s like your newborn baby who, when she’s first placed in your arms, she looks like a god damned golden glowing seraphim and smells as sweet as fresh bread, but actually? Her head is all misshapen and pointy from the trip down the canal, she’s covered with that white smudgy stuff, her nose is squished, her eyes are swollen… she barely looks human and she smells like afterbirth and shit. Later on, after your baby has had a bath or two, lost her pointy head and grown all plump and cute and not covered in that vernix stuff, you’ll look at pictures of your newborn and go, “Wow, yow, that baby was a little bit hideous!” but in the glow of the moment? She was the most beautiful thing in the world.

Works the same with writing. You’re all excited, you think it’s the best, most funny thing you’ve ever written (in fact, it might be the funniest thing ANYONE has ever written, right?) but if you put it away and come back to it in a month or two, you’ll be able to see the pointy head.

I have learned this the hard way with my screenwriting. (My screenwriting partner is an impatient dame as well. We tend to egg each other on in this regard). Rushing stuff out there never amounts to anything good, and might very well be downright disastrous.

My advice? Stop showing your work. Take that fire you’ve got lit and charge through your first draft. I don’t know your process – but either let it all flow, or edit as you go, or do what you do, but every time you finish another chapter – put it aside, forget about it, and just start work on the next one. Things will become clear as you move along. Themes will emerge, cracks that need to be fixed will show up, your voice will gel, your pov will solidify. And, if you do this right, you will probably end up rewriting, to the point where the first draft should practically just be thrown out at the beginning, because it’s going to be invisible – it’s only going to be, like, the basement of your book. The foundation that you can’t even see anymore once the whole house is built, painted, and roofed.

Write. Write. Write. Finish a chapter and throw it over your shoulder and move right into the next one. Don’t talk too much about it. Don’t write too much about your process. Just keep writing. (and reading. But only read the works that really speak to you, so your influences are the proper ones). And then, after you’ve written that first draft, give it one good read, pat it on it’s little head, and hide it for at least a month. Then come back and read it again and your most immediate problems will be clear. Then do your first rewrite. And THEN send it out for notes. And then listen to the people that ring that little bell inside of you – who point out the things in the manuscript that you KNEW were flaws (but were hoping nobody else would notice so that you could be lazy and not have to fix them). And then rewrite it again. And then again. And wring notes out of everyone you can think of. And push it and clean it up and cut it down mercilessly and get it so polished that it’s perfect. And then, and only then, can you can start shopping it out to agents.

But you must allow the time for it to happen. You must allow yourself the time to get perspective. And you can’t get bogged down with every new chapter by handing it out and taking notes and then rethinking the whole project. And you really, really can’t rush. I mean, yes, you can write as fast you like right now. You SHOULD do that. But then you have to schedule in the down time. The time that has to pass so you can see just how ugly your baby really is. Otherwise you’ll end up like a crazy new mom, showing off your kid’s pointy little head and crossed eyes and drooly little mouth and asking, “Isn’t she the most BEAUTIFUL baby in the world?

If you haven’t read Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, I would recommend it. Also Stephen King’s book on writing is pretty amazingly good.