I suffer from the medical condition known as ICP ( Impulse Control Problem). This usually manifests in saying the most hurtful and/or obnoxious thing that pops into my head at a holiday gathering or dinner party.
I’ve noticed that a lot writers also suffer from ICP. You finish writing something and bang! you send it to the New Yorker. Or to your editor, or agent. Or your bff. You know you should sit on it for a month, or a couple of weeks, or hours, even ten minutes, but the desire for feedback is overpowering, the desire for confirmation that you are, indeed, on fire. One symptom of ICP is sending multiple drafts before hearing back from the person you sent it to. Stop! Read this draft instead!
Writing takes time, even when it comes out in a torrent. You need to understand your work and practice your craft before seeking feedback. Plus, having other people read your work too soon fucks with your head, to put it plainly. It’s like a giving a patient a diagnosis before all the test results are in. If you need immediate feedback, ask someone on a date or, my tried and true, step on the scale. But your writing, protect it. There is always time to expose it to the sharp air. If you can: wait.
A lot of people ask me how to know when it’s ready. How? How?
Filed under: Writing |
Betsy Lerner 
Fuck you.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
I never know when a project is ready. I just know when I positively absolutely cannot _bear_ to face it one more time. That’s after the seventeenth draft and the 92nd polish, or whatever. Far, far into the process, when I discover that I positively HATE the fucking thing: then I’m ready.
Because by then, I hardly care anymore. I just want the awful thing off my desk.
This is when it is good to have crazy writer friends who understand and will read it and tell you how wonderful it is even it is the same 3 words every other line.
But they are truthful enough to tell you there is no possible way you can edit it one month and send out. No matter how much you really really really want to.
Lol, How do you know? I mean, how can you know?
But, when you think it’s ready. (For me, that means I’ve done multiple revisions) Sit on it.
Then do one more revision.
Then, if you still think it’s ready, send it out.
If you send it too soon, all you get is feedback about stuff you already know how to fix.
Simple. Toss the I Ching. If you get “Before Completion,” you know it’s not ready; and if you get “After Completion,” you know it’s ready.
Woops. Sent that too soon. Accidently hit Enter. See, I wasn’t ready. If you get “Abundance,” fifth line, “blessing and fame draw near,” then you know you’re really ready.
Did someone say toss?
Jeez, I hope I didn’t forget to turn off my webcam last night!
How aptly and tactfully timed with the end of NaNoWriMo and the beginning of a long month of submissions. =P I certainly agree.
When you can read it yourself without smirking.
I often send stuff off half baked, but I send it to friends for feedback to keep me going, as long as I can bear to hear that it’s not yet working.
Is there ever a time when anything is absolutely ready? We can always make changes and depending on our subjectivity as editors we might keep on forerver, unless someone else intervenes, and says enough is enough .
It’s good to hear this though, Betty. It’s my experience exactly. Too heavy on the accelerator.
Betsy Lerner, you read me like a … well, like a rough draft.
Great post!
When you’ve finally eaten the whole box of year-old chocolate candy aunt Ida brought you for Thanksgiving, the one you know she bought on sale at Walgreens and was probably regifted at least three times; when the sound of the garbage truck annoys the shit out of you- especially since you forgot to put it out and all the leftovers are in there, in there! stinking away, so you figure you’ll open the top and let all the stray cats have their way with it; when; when you’ve run out of Paul Newman’s organic coffee and you remember he’s dead and you cry- you cry, tears falling on the keyboard—you know in your heart it is time to send it out and get on with life- life meaning writing another book that, however wonderful, will be rejected day after day after day until you wish you could join Gorky in hell;when you scream wasted life! wasted life! and the neigbhors hear you and you spend the next two weeks in the behavoiral center (crazy house) for the second time and you meet other local writers who have self-published and see Oprah around every corner. And you are scared, scared, your OCD kicking in big time because,fuck, Oprah will just not shutup!
Meds?
I know I’m ready for someone else to read my work when I think I’ve polished it as much as I can. Only then do I send it to a crit partner or a beta reader, so they can find all those things I was too close see. The thought of sending something off – when it’s not as good as I can make it by myself – makes me shudder.
Interesting… This might explain why I called my waiter a passive agressive fucking bitch the other night for taking his sweet ass time in delivering my second beer to the table. I wanted to debate the whole incident with him right there at the table but he told me he was my waiter and not my psychologist and walked away.
Oh, despair beyond belief! the two asswhipes (a la John Stewart)who crashed the WH dinner are getting a book deal! It’s at auction!
All fiction writers beware! no money for you!
This information will make me quite cynical for at least the next six hours. Maybe it’s just another example of ICP (within publishing world). I suppose ICP could also stand for Immediate Cash Please. I have not been looking at the best seller lists for a while for this reason.
Question: Can we all take a vote on which current best sellers in the NYT’s various lists would qualify to be ICP books?
Ok, I just looked over the list and there are a few questionable ones on the nonfiction list of 16 (Glenn Beck, Mitch Albom, Mike Huckabee) but nothing as potentially insipid as the WH dinner crashers.
I quit.
Sorry, it’s me again. I got a plan, whose with me? We’regoing to crash the editorial offices at Harper Collins, Little Brown,…help, what other big publishers? Then we’ll immediately get a book contract. It will be called’: Thumbs Turned Down: the Memoir of Ten Rpudiated Novelists….a story signaling the death of literature in the 21st Century. But, but….it’s a memoir! Wait, let me go, it’s a memoir! Isn’t that hot right now??? Whose with me? Where did you all go???
After PW slammed my first novel, I came -this- close to starting a brawl at the PW booth at BEA that year.
I’m still pretty sure that would’ve helped sales. (Nothing could’ve hurt them, they were so bad …) Helps that the only people at the booth were two 100 pound young women. A short stay in jail in exchange for a lot of press? Some days I think I should’ve taken the long view, and started punching.
The White House party crashers are getting a book deal? It’s days like this that I wish I’d stayed at my first job at K-Mart instead of striking out for a more creative life. They GIVE you those smocks, you know, once you’ve been promoted to Head Cashier. And they let you carry all kinds of keys that give you the power to hit the “Cancel Sale” button. And pockets, nice pockets in those smocks. Not to mention, you got to call the cops when you caught a shoplifter and nobody would even THINK of giving those crooks a book deal. Yeah, I should have stayed in the retail industry, where they have VALUES for christ’s sake.
I LOVE smocks and pockets. Thank you, Vivien. I’m outta here.
The next time you get rejected, be ready!!!
The third edition of Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word is a must for anyone interested in the most notorious of English obscenities. This is not one of those pro forma “revisions” that correct a few errors, toss in a few added items, and add a new preface; the text of the dictionary is twice as large as the second edition, over a hundred new words and senses have been added, and it now aims to cover the entire English-speaking world. This book makes me proud to be a part of a civilization that could produce such a thing.
666
December 2009 is the new December 2012.
I still struggle with knowing when it’s ready. But for sure, I know when I’m rushing it: my eyes glaze over and my face heats up and my thoughts bombard each other in my head.
Patience is painful, so I needed your last line:
“But your writing, protect it. There is always time to expose it to the sharp air. If you can: wait.”
Yes, yes, the WH wannabes will get a book, and Palin’s gone platinum. I had the razor blade drawn to the wrist just now–and then Betsy and the rest of you made me howl. Ah, a sweet dose of levity and laughter, and you forget you’re a loser…
“Art is never finished, only abandoned.” —Leonardo da Vinci
Yeah, well, Leonardo was a notorious non-finisher. You’d better be a certified genius if you’re going to behave the way he did, with warlords and kings writing to inquire just where that Madonna is that you promised six years ago. So he really had the opposite problem: DPS, or Delayed Painting Syndrome.
Well, it’s ready after I’ve made the corrections my mother suggested. I send it to her after I can read it out loud without stumbling over any words.