A Novel Idea

In my twenties, I was incredibly naïve.  I sent out a manuscript and before I knew it, a letter arrived from New York, announcing an editor’s intention to publish my middle grade novel.  I took for granted that this first manuscript had sold on the first time out.  When the editor requested revision of certain portions before it could be published, I had to admit that I didn’t have a copy.  I’d sent her my only one.

Yep.  That naïve.

By the time I was ready to send another novel-length manuscript winging a few years ago, I told myself I knew the score.  Years of exposure to journals, literary organizations, and a critique group provided me with a grim view of a changed publishing world  — from start (many houses no longer accepting unsolicited manuscripts) to finish (a book given only a brief amount of time to capture an audience’s attention before going out of print).  Independent bookstores continued to go belly up. Conglomerates gobbled up smaller houses, diminishing the pool of prospective publishers.

I listened to fellow writers’ tales of woe – one’s editor changing jobs and leaving her manuscript in limbo, another’s book manuscript languishing, untouched, in an editor’s office for six months, then a year.  Suffice it to say, there seemed to be an infinite number of possibilities for dashed hopes.  So I entered the fray with my fists up.  In no time, however, I became too depressed to even hold my head up.  I had a persistent sense of struggling against insurmountable odds.

In his book Infinite Possibilities, Mike Dooley observes that “most people have no idea how many limitations they automatically attach to even the simplest of their desires.”  If you’d asked me two years ago about any manuscript’s chances, I’d have been only too happy to offer a pragmatic assessment that was one part doom and two parts gloom.  But I’m past that now.  Way past.  Not because conditions in the publishing world have changed, but because I’ve had a change of heart.

I’ve come to acknowledge that energy flows where attention goes.  Pay attention to every negative thing that happens and more negativity will show up on your doorstep.  Pay attention to the chances of a manuscript being in the right place at the right time and, whoomp, there it is.  Call me naïve but I believe that one’s attitude — along with the kind of energy that underlies it — plays a huge part in what transpires for a writer.

The visionary Bucky Fuller had it right.  In this world, it takes a certain amount of daring to remain “naïve” enough to ignore the odds and expect success.  It’s not as if this is new thinking for me.  It just took some time for me finally to act upon Fuller’s challenge, as it applies to writing, not to mention a life lived in line with one’s dreams.

Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn’t be done.

Amelia Earhart

This entry was posted on October 29, 2009 at 11:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.