So I’m in love with the idea of a writing bucket-list these days, not just because other cool people are doing it (you can also visit this gal), but because of an aspect of writing that’s difficult for nearly everyone:
Eternal . . .
. . . Waiting
freedigitalphotos.net by Victor Habbick
To explore the idea of Eternal Waiting, let’s compare writing to professional sports.
If you dream of being an NBA player, you start young, play a ton, get onto teams and end up in one of two categories by about age twenty-five:
CATEGORY ONE: You play for the NBA. (Everyone who falls into this camp can stop reading now. Or pay someone to read for you. Please live long and prosper.)
OR
CATEGORY TWO: Somewhere along the way from middle school ball to the Miami Heat, you are not picked up by a basketball team. You may try again for a maximum of three years, wherein you either bounce into Category One, or remain forever in Category Two.
You’ll notice that both of these categories contain what’s known as an ANSWER.
An ANSWER is when you know whether or not you are a professional NBA player.
Writers, on the other hand, have no idea what an ANSWER is because we’ve never seen an ANSWER. An ANSWER (in the negative aspect of it) involves mourning and re-identifying yourself and choosing a new path. In other words, moving on.
Writers are told never to move on. Did you get rejected by fifty-six agents? Query fifty-six more. Mr. Author BigShot was rejected by over two hundred. Besides, thirty-four of the agents you queried haven’t responded, so technically they could still say yes. GO CHECK YOUR EMAIL NOW!!
Editors are no better than agents. My agent recently got separate book deals for two projects that have been on the shelf of publishing companies for freaking five years. Five years. Now, that’s great news for everyone waiting. It really is. Wild success may still be written in your stars. But it’s also terrible news. Because it means there truly is no finality to anything. Didn’t make it on the best-seller list? Don’t worry, if Twilight fans become Next Generation fans—assuming a circa 2018 kick-butt movie starring Justin Timberlake and Barack Obama happens—your space opera could get a second-printing! Award-nominations didn’t happen for you, but there’s always the next year, the next project! Are you frantically typing? WHY AREN’T YOU FRANTICALLY TYPING? Don’t you know that success follows those who pop Adderall and donate their children to adoption agencies so they can WRITE EVERY MINUTE?
(Note: making it big-time in writing of course has finality and other benefits like money—please see Category One below.)
So basically the writer’s journey looks like this:
If you want to be an author, you start young (at least by age 4, or 76, or 92 at the absolute latest), write a ton, get into writing groups and end up in one of two categories by about age 106:
CATEGORY ONE: You get a book made into a movie. (Everyone who falls into this camp should stop reading and go hot-tubbing in gallons of dollar bills.)
OR
CATEGORY TWO: You continue trying to get into Category One.
It’s like breaking the space-time continuum in a time-travel book. “Oh no, Penelope, we’re stuck in a time-loop! We’re destined to live our search for Category One forever!”
The time-loop scenario is so embedded into the process of writing that sometimes, even when progress is made, you can’t see it. You jump directly from trying to get a manuscript written to trying to score an agent with no sense of accomplishment.
People. People!!!! We deserve better than that!
That’s where a writing bucket-list comes in.
See, you jot down a whole bunch of things you dream of doing, and then you celebrate when you’ve done them even if Taylor Swift hasn’t dated the main character of your novel/movie yet. You pin your accomplishments on your walls and print them on tee-shirts and beer mugs. (Heather Clark has a bumper sticker that simply reads “Writer.” Eric James Stone got more specific with his personalized license plate: SFWriter.)
Bonus: These days, we don’t have to wait forever on editors if we don’t want to. I personally have set a date (fall of 2017) when I will self-publish if other routes to publication haven’t panned out. I have a whole section of my bucket-list dedicated to self-publishing because I want some excitement to greet me on the flip side of mourning that no editor picked my project.
What about you? If you want bookmarks printed for your novel, then, dang it all, budget your own money now and plan to print them no matter what. I want to speak to a classroom. Guess what? I can. Right now. Sure, maybe no one seeks me out, but I can volunteer at a local school to teach a writing class. They worst they can say is no, right? And like I haven’t heard that before. Anyway, probably someone will be happy to lend me their students for an hour.
You might be like me. You might have all sorts of writing bucket-list items that don’t require reaching Category One. Don’t fall into the time-loop and lose out on them. Write them down. Do them. Celebrate them. The silly ones. The little ones. The big ones. And I’m not going to limit your imagination by listing sixty things below. This is about what you want. To get the ball rolling, however, I do plan to tweet a few of my items each Tuesday for the next month. Feel free to join in. I’ll use #WritingBL since #WritingBucketList is so long.
There. Did you see that? I just accomplished my Writing Bucket List Item Number 43: “publicly declare a new writing-oriented twitter hashtag.”
Try it yourself. It feels amazing!
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