Writing Tip #3: A Song for My Garden

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As a desperate young writer, scanning author blogs and writing books for drops of genius, I often read that the most important trait for a writer is optimism.  Sending manuscript after manuscript to agents, we keep punching against that brick wall until our knuckles are split and bleeding.  And then we return to our laptops, bloodied fingers typing like mad at the next story, the best story yet, the one that will delight agents, editors, and readers alike.

 

At a UCTE conference I attended several years ago, the guest speaker was Shannon Hale, a storyteller I much admire.  My favorite of her books, The Goose Girl, is beloved by young readers the world over.  She taught an important lesson about rejection that day, and surprisingly, the wordsmith taught that lesson in visuals, not in words.  She pulled out a long skein of sheets of paper patched together, letters laminated together into one long ribbon.  She unrolled it, and it stretched across the floor.  Each of the papers was a rejection letter, and I was shocked at the length of the roll.  What absurdity was this?  Who would reject that book?  But it's true.  This gem of a novel received dozens of rejections from agents and publishers before finally finding its place.  

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This list of tips, I suppose, is another shrine for optimism, another story of a foolish writer and a brick wall.  Why write a list of writing tips when there's no one to read them?  Why start writing posts when my manuscripts remain unpublished, unloved?  Why sing a song if there is no one to hear it?

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 I like to see myself as a gardener, alone among my precious plants.  Singing to my garden, urging my plants to grow.  Maybe someday I'll be published, and actual readers will stumble across my website and read a few posts.  The writer's optimism in me thinks that will happen, eventually.  But even if I'm the only one who ever stands in the midst of my garden, the only one who sees the way the delicate petals lean in just slightly as my melody cascades over them, that's enough for me.  I'm going to keep on singing. 

 

Why?

 

Because I'm a writer.