Whit Porter asked Olen Steinhauer:

I saw your advice to write and read every day, and it's good advice. The only thing is... if I read Le Carre, or Alan Furst - or a guy you may have heard of named Steinhauer - in the middle of a project, I can get hopelessly discouraged. What did you do when you were starting out - or even now - to keep positive?

Olen Steinhauer That's a really good question, Whit. I think it has to do with your perspective on what you read and your own writing.

When I started out writing, I went in with the (correct) assumption that I wasn't very good, and that it would take years before I'd write anything worth publishing. I'd made my peace with this assessment because writing well was more important to me than actually being published. I believed that one would lead naturally to the other, so worrying about publishing wasn't even on my radar yet. (And history proved me right--I knew when I had a publishable manuscript, and that was The Bridge of Sighs.)

Also, I kept asking myself why I wanted to write for a living. What did I hope to gain? Money? There are far smarter, and easier, ways of doing that. Publication? Yeah, that would have been nice, but what I wanted--what my ego wanted--was to be _respected_ as a writer. And that would only happen once I'd learned to write well.

So when I read something that was light-years better than my writing, I saw it not as competition but as something to aim for. I saw it as a lesson, and tried to figure out why it was so much better than my stories.

One thing that really helped a lot was an internship I had with Mercury House, a small press in San Francisco. It was an unpaid position where I spent the bulk of my time reading unsolicited manuscripts that came to us in the mail. I learned a few things:

First: Publishers are overwhelmed with manuscripts, 99% of them no good at all--over three months I was only enthusiastic about one manuscript. (And this was in the 90s, before email made submitting so much easier.) I learned that an unpaid intern is looking for reasons to turn down a manuscript because he or she has, say, 5 novels that he's supposed to read through EACH DAY. (So whatever you do, don't misspell a word on page one!)

Second: I was able to gauge the quality of my own writing against the general populace rather than the great writers. At that point, I wasn't convinced I would ever be very good, but through the job I saw that I was better than, say, 80% of what came in. That gave me the confidence to keep going.

Third: So many people write for what seems like the wrong reason: They're writing to show off themselves, how clever or wise or poetic they are. In fiction, there is only one thing that matters: the story. Everything else--the clever phrasing, the erudition, the showing off--is spice. But if the story doesn't grab and hold the reader, no one will be interested in the spice.

Fourth: It's an uphill battle. And it's hard. I was in the midst of my 10-year apprenticeship period when I worked at Mercury House, and I still had years to go. I can't say I was entirely aware of how much work still lay ahead of me, but I was getting an inkling. And I had to decide if I was up for it. Again: Why did I want to write? I asked myself that all the time. Sometimes I lost the thread and wrote for the wrong reasons, forgetting that story is paramount, but seeing all those manuscripts making the same mistakes helped bring me back in line.

So, how to keep positive? Maybe keep in mind that probably misquoted quote from Hemingway about needing to write a million words before you're really an author. I know I did. I wrote innumerable short stories and three novels before the fourth novel took, and looking back I have no regrets about those years. Whatever mistakes I made then became the lessons that helped me get to wherever I am now.

Good luck!

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