The markets that publish me that have made me feel like a ‘real writer,’ have a 20k suggested word cap, which I have successfully pushed out a few thousand words a few times. But my shorts have grown longer and longer, and now everything I write becomes a novella, which I sell every other time or so.
I write novel starts… and hit a hard wall at 40k. The unpublished novellas I believed in so much haunt me. I stare at the wall. I don’t write.
My supports, writing community, friends and editors haven’t, as yet, been able to shove me up and over that wall in the spec fic genres.
I have endings in mind that call to me, and my scattering of milestones that I pants my way toward. I have finished a few short novels in other genres. But with SF, which I feel is my true calling, I stall out.
Nothing in my work has ever been called ground breaking. And that, for a long time, was what I thought was the point of SF. To be something new under the sun. Gradually I realized I read a lot of entertaining SF, and loved it, that explored old tropes in new-ish ways, or simply executed well on old tropes—with great plots and characters. Good world-building. And I liked that stuff.
Everything I liked wasn’t a part of this huge tapestry of extrapolation that SF has woven through my world, through my understanding of the odd future we now live inside, and the even odder ones to come. Sometimes what I love is just good writing and enjoyable reading. Reinforcing that fabric. Overlaying it. Singing in harmony with it, to abruptly abandon the cloth metaphor.
I first first realized this while reading SF magazines, and it let me write. I didn’t have to be a genius. I could be me. There were stories I could write, that maybe only I could write. In Nancy Kress’s Beginnings, Middles and Ends, she says that all writers have the Dostoevsky problem. Eventually realizing they will never be Dostoevsky, and wondering, what the fuck is the point of this difficult activity?
This is often after the writer comes face to face with the reality that most authors do not making anything like a living. At best, fiction is a part time gig. Those that do it full time usually have patrons. This is one reason we get too much white het cis rich guy fiction. We also get fiction from their white het cis wives, and their white het cis children. But whether you are struggling to make a living, or another well-supported white het cis guy, the Dostoevsky problem remains.
Writers are haunted by reviews. Writing workshop critiques can be painful, and professional rejections sometimes worse, but a review on a finished published work takes the psychic horror to a new level. This is a reader, who took a chance on you. You failed them. With this thing you loved.
One of the hardest reviews for me, was a 4 star review which said, “nothing groundbreaking, but my favorite story in the issue.”
I nodded. I knew that, didn’t I? I beat this problem before, didn’t I?
But after 40,000 words, knowing that my editors that believe in me are no longer in the loop, I lose steam.
I revise a lot now. Even 40k is an endless abyss of editing, which isn’t painful at all, it’s sort of fun for me, but I shudder to think how long my novels are gonna take to write. Will I get faster? I’m fucking 58. Why would I get any faster?
So I struggle. Hoping always to become that person that climbs that wall. Maybe tomorrow. If I am lucky to live long enough, maybe I get there.
You write to because you have to. Why else would you do this irrational thing that makes little practical sense? There’s a little bit of sense, however, in writing for markets that could conceivably make you a living, one day. That’s novels. Novels can also get optioned for media properties. There’s more money in that, maybe enough to live on. I write because I must. I write novels to have it make a little bit of practical sense. Keep going. You can absolutely get over the wall.