Starting over (again)

I had just about quit writ­ing alto­gether. I’ve been try­ing to build up enthu­si­asm for a num­ber of dif­fer­ent writ­ing projects recently, get­ting just a lit­tle enthu­si­asm before los­ing inter­est in each. I had nowhere near the spark nec­es­sary to see an entire novel through to com­ple­tion. Basi­cally, writ­ing wasn’t fun any­more, and it hadn’t been in years. And I’d got­ten to the point where I was almost ready to give it up completely.

Yes­ter­day I noticed on Twit­ter that one of my favorite authors, James Rollins (@jamesrollins on Twit­ter), hap­pened to be here in Den­ver and was going to do a book sign­ing at The Tat­tered Cover, Denver’s awe­some inde­pen­dent book­store. More to the point, he was going to do the sign­ing on my side of town, at a store I didn’t even know they had. See­ing as how I didn’t have to take my oddly-​overheating car all the way down­town, there was no way I could pass that up. I even hap­pened to be read­ing his lat­est book (fin­ished it today).

I’d admired Rollins for many years. Like me, he had no for­mal train­ing in Eng­lish or Lit­er­a­ture, and con­tin­ued his vet­eri­nary prac­tice for many years before switch­ing over to being a full time nov­el­ist. He writes exactly the sort of books I enjoy most, a mix of adven­ture and really inter­est­ing sci­ence. He’s one of the authors pub­lish­ing today whose books I’ll buy as soon as they hit the shelves, sight unseen. I’ve got a num­ber of inter­est­ing obser­va­tions about the talk (which will be avail­able as a pod­cast soon), but that’s not the point of this post.

After the talk, I walked up and had him sign my iPhone (get­ting his auto­graph in Sim­ple­Draw, then send­ing a screen­shot of that to my cam­era roll) and asked him my ques­tion. I told him I’d been a sto­ry­teller in one way or another most of my life, but that I’d started to lose the faith. Writ­ing wasn’t fun any­more. What advice did he have?

First he told me to keep send­ing out queries. Sub­ter­ranean, his first novel, didn’t find an agent until his 50^th try. He’d send out ten queries to ten dif­fer­ent agents. If he got back a rejec­tion, he’d imme­di­ately send out a query to a new agent. If he got two rejec­tions, he sent out two new queries, always keep­ing 10 in cir­cu­la­tion. This is good advice, but in and of itself didn’t help much as I’ve already pub­lished all my fin­ished works, and indeed did so a decade ago.

But the corol­lary to this first bit was what really got me think­ing. He also said to keep writ­ing, because once you were writ­ing some­thing new you weren’t quite so attached to what you’d already sent out, and it get­ting rejected didn’t hurt quite so much. I con­firmed that this only really worked if you were writ­ing indi­vid­ual sto­ries, not an ongo­ing series in which every­thing you wrote was depen­dent on every­thing else, and you could be sunk if the first item in the series didn’t sell.

I thanked him, shook his hand, and wan­dered out of the book­store with my mind rac­ing. It occurred to me that I hadn’t really had a new story idea, well, this cen­tury. Or at least since Josh Curry and I were work­ing on Heroes 101, back in 2003. Every­thing else I’ve done this decade, even my NaNoW­riMo 2006 novel and my attempt this year at Script Frenzy, were ideas I had a long time ago and just finally got around to doing. I haven’t come up with a new idea, a char­ac­ter I don’t already know, in years.

And sud­denly, I knew why writ­ing wasn’t fun any­more. Because there was no sense of dis­cov­ery, no sus­pense, no adven­ture. No mat­ter which project I tried to work on, it was all well tread ground. I hadn’t fin­ished any of these works (although I got 80,000 words into the sequel to Between Heaven and Hell, just a few scenes from the end), but I’d been pick­ing at them for so long they were lit­tle more than bleached bones.

I need new sto­ries, new char­ac­ters, new ideas. And I’m start­ing to believe I can find that well­spring of cre­ativ­ity again. That I don’t have to keep cling­ing to ideas I came up with in my 20s. More impor­tantly, I’m start­ing to believe I want to.