It is something of a cliché in the land of academics that grad-school advisors are horrible. Mine was a grumpy man, distant and, well, professorial. I would’ve been convinced he didn’t like me, much less respect me, had it not been for his colleague, a close friend of his and an excellent mentor to me, who occasionally passed along a snippet of praise. “Dick is so impressed with your research,” he’d say. (Yes, of course my advisor’s name was Dick. What of it?) Every time this happened, I would beam, and I would hate myself for wanting to impress this cold man who hadn’t done anything to deserve my specific admiration.
There was only one area of encouragement in which my advisor excelled, and I have to say, he was better at this than any of my peers’ advisors. Every time I presented him with a draft of one of my dissertation chapters, we’d talk for a few minutes, he’d offer a number of criticisms, and then he’d say, “This is fine. Don’t worry about it now. Keep going.”
I would walk out of his office buoyed, those two words — keep going — somehow soothing the sting of all the things I’d done wrong. I found magic in the phrase, encouragement in its promise that whatever I may have botched, I could fix it down the road, and it was sufficiently minor that I shouldn’t permit myself to be knocked off the rails.
That was nine years ago. Today, I’m nearing the end of a novel, the longest I’ve written and the first that looks likely to top 100,000 words. I feel I’ve been writing it for ages, though it’s only been a few months. I haven’t been re-reading as I go. While I have some memory of writing the last four or five chapters, there are twenty-two of them behind me, and the early ones are a distant dream. I’m often convinced I’ve produced a plotless, lumbering monster of a book. I wrote the middle seven or eight chapters in a fever, desperate to get the elements that troubled me most out onto the page so I could expel them from my brain. Now, as I try to wrap up the story and give my characters the happy ending they deserve, I’ve slowed to my version of a snail’s pace. This morning, I wrote a third of a scene. At lunchtime today, I’ll delete it and try again.
Once I get the words down on the screen and polish them up, though, I’ll send them off to my friend Serenity. She’s in New Zealand, so she won’t receive my latest attachment until she wakes up sometime this afternoon — her tomorrow. But when she does, she’ll find the time to read the new stuff, and she’ll send me an e-mail that says a few kind things, along with the words, “You’re doing great! Keep going!”
I’ll check my e-mail obsessively all afternoon, and when I read her message, I’ll sigh with relief.
Writing is wonderful. If I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t do it. There’s nothing quite like the rush of making yourself tear up with your own damn Dark Moment, or of putting words down on the page and thinking, “This is hilarious. This is brilliant. This is so. much. fun.” There’s nothing quite like hearing from your aunt Marian, an avid reader whom you’ve respected since you were, oh, five, that she loved your book and can’t wait for the next one.
Writing is isolating and difficult and depressing. With every new criticism comes doubt that you’re doing it properly. Every rejection — Nice try, but maybe next time you could write a story with some external conflict? Okthxbye! — brings its own tramload of doubt. Every time I read a really great book, my own manuscripts begin to look grubby and unoriginal.
To write successfully, you have to be able to cope with oscillating back and forth between fawning over your own words and regarding them with white-hot loathing. You have to find your own work fantastic and terrible, because if you don’t love what you’re writing, it’s nearly impossible to sustain the creative energy needed to keep producing it, but if you love it too much, you won’t be able to see what’s wrong with it and make it better.
It’s exhausting.
But it’s so much easier, so much better, if you have someone who will tell you, Keep going.
