Work in Progress #2: I Have No Idea What I'm Doing

Hi. I’m Frank. I’m a writer, and this is Work in Progress, my shamelessly self-promoting blog on my even more shamelessly self-promoting website. If this is your first time here, welcome! Grab a seat, have a drink, read some stuff. Leave a comment or a note. Don’t worry, it’s all free.

If this isn’t your first time around here (hi, Mom), then you might have noticed that I started calling this blog, Work in Progress. It seems appropriate; I’m always working on something, be it a short story, a novel, a dream, or just myself. And since the point of working on something isn’t always the finished product—especially when it comes to working on myself—everything is really just a work in progress.

And that brings me to the title of today’s little rant. I have no idea what I’m doing, and I think that is clear.

Let me start from the beginning. In 2005, I wrote a novel called The Fab 5, which chronicled the last summer that five lifelong, basketball-playing friends spend together as high school ends, and their subsequent reunion ten years later. I was 26, and you could not tell me that I wasn’t going to parlay my love of storytelling into a fulfilling and lucrative career.

Except (insert wry, ironic laughter here)… it didn’t quite work out that way.

The Fab 5

I was rejected by everyone I solicited, either with a form letter or a total lack of response. One particular critique was infuriating; it suggested that my main characters weren’t Black enough. More literally, it suggested that the characters—student athletes and varsity ballplayers—shouldn’t have the level of analytical know-how for the sport as displayed on the page. The critique also stated that their socio-economic status meant they shouldn’t have been as polished as I made them. My favorite was the correction they suggested to a line, describing an opposing ball player:

He was one of them big old slow white dudes, couldn’t run a lick, ain’t had no footwork, either, skinny. Wasn’t even a thinkin’ player like they always sayin’ ‘bout a white boy can’t keep up with the brothers. Your basic pussy.

I took that particular critique personally. I grew up in the ‘hood, around people some would call “unpolished,” and no one I knew talked like that. Enraged, and convinced that no one would get me or my work, I did the most logical thing 26-year-old me could think of. I ignored the criticism, saved $1000, and rolled the dice with a Print-On-Demand publisher.

So, after six months of failed marketing ideas, which at the time included promoting it on MySpace (remember that?) and hawking it car-to-car on the B-Train to and from Manhattan, before and after work, I cut my losses and tried to analyze what went wrong. It was hard to come up with something more substantive than it wasn’t good enough (and by extension, I wasn’t good enough). Eventually, though, I did come up with a some reasons why it didn’t work out.

For starters, I didn’t understand who I was doing business with. I won’t name names, but I thought—as I’m sure many people did at the time—that the POD people would be more helpful, that they were the Solution to an Author trying to break into a market. That expectation was lofty, and while I avoided the messier parts of them fulfilling their business model, I had to recalibrate my expectation of the role they would play in my success. Secondly, I tried to do everything myself. I had no platform, no plan, no reasonable definition of success. I did four rounds of editing solo, based on the commentary of maybe a half-dozen of my closest friends at the time. Also, I’m not an editor and despise the process, so the end result was, admittedly, a bit of a mess. Overall, I didn’t put my best foot forward, on a lot of fronts.

Several years later, the death of my father emboldened me to make another go. I self-

The Favorite

published for a second time, figuring that I could try again using what I’d learned in my previous effort. I did multiple rounds of self-editing before bringing it to a pro. I had alpha and beta readers give me mountains of feedback and did a lot of shameless self-promotion. The Favorite was a much stronger effort according to the dozen or so reviews I got, and hundred-plus copies sold. In the process, I did a couple of things I always wanted to do, like a book signing (I did three that summer). But as far as making a living? Well, I still have my day (night?) job.

Since 2014, though? I haven’t released much of anything. I have multiple manuscripts with at least one draft complete all over the place in my office. As of this writing, I have four novels with at least one completed draft. But I find myself uncertain as to where to go and what to do with them. I mean, of course there are edits and rewrites to do. I can tweak this and tighten that; I can query agents and small presses until my keyboard wears out. But I’m coming to the conclusion that after almost 20 years of trying, I don’t really know how to be an author.

I’m not 26 anymore. Back then, my life could absorb an expensive failure. I could take a big swing, fall on my face, dust myself off and try again. At this stage in my life though, it’s harder to recover, and I have much more to lose. It’s not just money. It’s time and effort, resources that are much more finite and much less renewable than money. I have responsibilities now that I never even started to think about 18, 19 years ago.

Weird thing, though; I have people in my life that have my back, that want me to succeed. They seem to believe in me. They won’t judge me if I were to stop, today. However, I might judge myself. I may have responsibilities to attend to, but if I were to quit without giving this a proper go, I’ll always wonder if I gave up too soon. And that level of regret is the kind of thing that shortens lives.

I may have no idea what I’m doing, and I may have no idea how to do it, but does that have to be a bad thing? No two journeys are exactly the same, and clearly there is no blueprint for how to succeed at storytelling, because every story that is accepted as a classic has its critics, and every bad book we get from a bookstore ended up in the bookstore. So maybe the biggest asset I have is that I’m doing it my way. After all, if I’m making this up as I go along, whether I’m doing it right or wrong is going to be a surprise at the end. Everything will be fine at the end, and if it’s not fine, it’s not the end.

I don’t know what I’m doing. And I think I’m okay with that.