Parable of the Pedestal
I've done it again.
I've put my story on a pedestal. A shiny, glowy Roman column of a pedestal, representing the pinnacle of literary grace, depth and passion. A place quite out of reach for a writer of my meager talents.
My story is too good for me. I don't deserve it. I might as well give up on it now, because it's obvious I will never earn the right to even shine the boots of my story. My story contains a glimmer of the empyrean, it tinkles with chimes from the music of the spheres. I, on the other hand, am an eyeless, earless invertebrate lacking any capacity to translate the transcendent notes of my story into a form comprehensible to normal mortals. I suck.
There is a solution. I will wait to write this story until I have mastered a style which is more complex, more mature.
In the meantime, I will start another story, a B Class story, which is humbler, simpler, more appropriate for my lowly talents. I won't aim high with this story, I won't put Story B on a pedestal, I promise. I won't even try to have it published. I'll just write it for my own amusement, and for my own education. Story B will be my practice. It will train me to write Story A.
But Story B has hidden charms I didn't see at first. I was too shallow; Story B is exquisite. Story B deserves so much more than I realized. Story B should be polished and perfected, not simply shoved full of garbage and dumped at the curve like a plastic trash liner.
Story B deserves a pedestal too.
I can reach it. Just not yet. I'm not good enough.
Story C....
Comments
Get back in the ring. You can do it! Without you, that beautiful story of transcendant glory would only be a wisp of a dream floating around in the nethersphere. It's because of you that the story has a voice at all. :D
But then I realized after reading many writer's blogs that their first, second and third stories...didn't always sell until their fourth or fifth one sold. And then and only then did they go back and get the first or second sold. BUT had they waited that long and wrote mediocre stories in the meantime that they didn't plan on publishing, they could be waiting an eternity.
Write the story you are passionate about...give it the time it needs to progress into a masterpiece and while you are querying...move on to the next one.
You can always go back to it years later and read it to see if you can spot the reason it didn't get pub'd. But at least you don't have to waste the time again writing the whole thing. ;)
I guess the important thing is to just keep working on all of them. They'll eventually be awesome through work and time.
I have an idea for a book that I have put off until I've written another, "easier" book first, because I'm "not ready" for the other book yet. Which is total bollocks. We only grow as writers by writing things that are hard to write. So let's go grow as writers, already.
Go with A. By the time you get around to B you'll be much better equipped to exploit those hidden charms. And yeah, then when you're done with B you might want to glance back at A just to be sure you took in all the pleats properly.
And I wonder... I bet no one's first story is ever one's best. So putting it off can't help much, can it?
(Loved this whole analogy btw.)
Stick with story A until it's done. One of the hardest parts about writing a novel is getting it done. That's why so many people WANT to write a novel and never actually do. You can edit it and make it better, or you can move on to story B. But finish it.
There will always be a pedestal. There will always be that next idea. And you will always be smack dab in the middle. Arg.