Nancy Springer's Blog: Last Seen Wandering Vaguely - Posts Tagged "writing-process"

Let’s hope I get this right, because I know my mossy brain tends to blur the plot and bury the details of things I read long ago. But this is what I recall: A young actor sought advice of Sir Laurence Olivier about a difficult role in which he needed to convey the quality of a character’s being not quite good enough. Olivier told him, approximately, “My dear fellow, if I had to be not quite good enough, I’d simply go out there and do my very utmost, as always.”

What a piercing insight from a truly great artist. It penetrated my mind and stayed there, obviously, even though I don’t remember where I read it and at the time I did not understand it. I was still a young writer, and so far everything I’d written had been published, thanks to editors willing to work with me, and had done well. Moreover, thanks to the coaching of my (I now realize) extraordinary editors, I could see my writing improving as if I had put it on steroids, and I truly thought (please forgive me) that once I learned to write well enough, I could by the magic of my mystical prose make any topic, even a visit to the dentist, so fascinating to readers that it would sell.

Although now accumulating rejection slips, I persisted in this notion of my own talent until my literary agent read some work of genius over which I had labored long and hard, then sent it straight back to me.

Owwie.

My agent said my masterpiece was “slight.”

Slight? What did that mean?

Eventually, when I had gotten over my owwie snit, I asked. It turned out that agents and editors have developed a kind of summary jargon regarding common manuscript flaws. “Slight” means the writing is okay but it doesn’t say anything to speak of. It seems that even well-written words ought to say something.

Duh.

Still, it took me several more “slights” before I became willing to admit how important a good idea is, and even then, I learned, sometimes capital-G Good is still not quite Good Enough. I can attest to this. I have about fifty novels published now and I have received some honors and awards, but I still receive rejections too. I can think of at least a dozen novels I have written that were not quite good enough. Most of them were shopped around for a long time before my agent and I gave up on them. But some of them were owwies, rejected by my own literary agent.

But nowadays my misfit manuscripts are usually waaay the opposite of “slight.” My personal pendulum seems to have swung to the opposite extreme. Nowadays I go “over the top.” Even when I base my stories on events that actually took place, “over the top” is a problem, because reality is way more bizarre than acceptable fictional entertainment.

Even worse, I keep wanting to write characters who are “over the top.” Flaws can be too flawed. Good is not good enough if the main character is depressed, needy, bigoted or otherwise “not sympathetic.”

Also, I must face it, the world is not ready for some of the things I’d like to write about, such as alternative angels with butterfly wings, or dyslexic cats in search of Dog, or. . .well, ideas are important, all right, but too often I mistake mere flatulence of the brain for an exciting, new, good idea.

I’m writing about this topic partly to reassure my creative colleagues out there that hey, misbegotten manuscripts happen all the time. Risk and fallibility are intrinsic to the creative process. Good is often not good enough, no matter how good you are. Ask Sir Laurence Olivier.

So what are we to do about it? Why, just try our very utmost, as usual. Nurture the next idea. Write the next book.