Reblog: If Only I Had Connections

Yes I know I posted something less than little over 12 hours ago, but I just discovered this article and it just so happen to relate pretty perfectly to the last post, Hard Work is Hard :(. 

It's a long reblog. But trust me, it's well worth the read.

"If Only I had Connections", by Rick Riordan, Bestselling Author of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, Heroes of Olympus series, and the Kane Chronicles series. 

A few notes on getting published, for what it’s worth, expanding on some of the tweets I offered yesterday morning. Much of this I’ve said before, either on the blog or on my website, but many aspiring writers are interested in figuring out the enigma of getting published, and I don’t blame them.

I don’t offer these ideas to burst bubbles or discourage, but I think it’s always best to have a clear picture of what you are dealing with.

The assumption:

The main reason I’m not getting published is because I don’t have a foot in the door. If only I knew an agent or an editor or someone important to give my manuscript the attention it deserves, I would get published.

My take on it:

Connections, at best, might get you a slightly longer and more polite ‘no.’ They help much less than you might imagine.

The first time I got published, my only connection was a local novelist whose six-week writing course I had taken. I paid her to line-edit my first manuscript, which was very helpful, and which anyone can do if you’re willing to pony up the time and money. Most communities have adult education classes in creative writing at local colleges or high schools.

At any rate, when the time came to query agents, I asked permission to use my teacher’s name, then wrote in my query letter that so-and-so, author of x novel,suggested I contact this agency. Did this help? It’s hard to know. I got many, many rejections from agents. The agent who eventually accepted me as a client had never heard of the novelist who recommended me. She just liked the premise of my book. After I got an agent, she shopped it around and got rejections from thirteen publishers before one said yes. I considered myself lucky. My first manuscript was published! That’s better than many aspiring writers manage, but I certainly had no inside track.

The second time I launched a series, Percy Jackson, I still used no connections. I intentionally sent out The Lightning Thief anonymously, under the pseudonym Ransom Reese. I wanted the manuscript to sink or swim on its own, without relying on the people I knew in the business (though honestly, I didn’t think those connections would make a difference either way). The result? Lots more rejections from agents. One agent liked the premise enough to give it a shot. She had better luck with the publishing houses than I had the first time around, but it had nothing to do with who I was or the people I knew. It was all about the book.

No agent or editor will say ‘yes’ to you simply because they know you and think you’re a nice person. Publishing is a business – a bizarre, sometimes maddeningly convoluted business, but a business. If an editor takes a risk on a novel, his or her job is on the line. The editor has to love the manuscript and believe it will sell. Whether or not you have a personal connection is irrelevant. In fact, I’d venture to guess the submissions that editors dread most are from people they know. It makes it awkward to say no, but ‘no’ they will say, unless the novel is dynamite.

Similarly, agents have to make money by representing books that sell. They build their reputations by finding new authors who turn out to be successful. Whether or not they know you -- that means nothing. I recently spoke with an agent about writers’ conferences. Often I will encourage aspiring writers to go to such conferences, where you can listen to editors and agents speak about the business, schmooze with publishing industry types, and practice making your pitch. I asked this agent if meeting an author in person affected her decision to represent them.

The answer: no. At best, a personal meeting will assure that she would agree to look at the query letter and sample chapters (which she would do with any project that intrigued her). But if the idea or the writing did not ‘wow’ her immediately, she would reject the project just as fast. I then asked how many new clients she had found at writers’ conferences, since she had attended dozens. She looked rather sheepish. “None. Not one.”

My point: no number of connections will get a bad first novel published.

The flipside to this may seem radical: A good novel will find an outlet one way or another, whether you know someone or not.

Yes, agents and editors say no 99% of the time. But remember they are activelylooking for great writing. That’s the whole point. They would be in heaven if every novel that came to them read like The Next Big Thing, or even just a moving novel with quiet appeal. The sad fact is (and every editor and agent I’ve ever spoken to will quietly confirm this) most submissions they get are nowhere near publishable. The writing is clunky and garbled, showing a poor command of grammar and style. The ideas are tired and cliché.

I hear the embittered writers out there, because I used to be one of you. You’re thinking, “Ha! That description sounds like the last bestseller by X #1 New York Times novelist I read.” Sure, we’ve all read successful books and wondered how they got published. Taste is purely subjective, right? “Why, I could write better than this!” we confidently declared. Easier said than written.

Even mainstream or genre blockbusters, so easily dissed, have some quality that made them successful in the first place. The pacing is good. The plot has twists that no one else has quite mastered. The settings and characters are memorable. Most of all, there is a certain level of technical competence to the writing. Even if he or she isn’t Shakespeare, the writer knows how to craft readable prose. This is no small feat, nor is it something that every (or even most) aspiring writers can do.

When an agent comes across a novel that reads like . . . well, a real novel, it is a rare and joyful event. The agent will not care if they know you. They won’t care if you are twelve years old or ninety years old. They will get on the phone and offer to represent you.

Which raises the awkward question: “Um,” you say, “but my manuscript is amazing and awesome and I write so well! Why have all these agents said no to me?”

Explanation 1:

It’s possible you are writing a book that the publishing industry would find difficult to sell. If the editor doesn’t see an audience for your story, he or she will most likely say no. A story about your grandmother’s struggle as a waitress in Louisiana in World War II? Well . . . aside from your immediate family and/or waitresses in Louisiana, who will want to read this? Maybe they will! Maybe you’ve managed to elevate family history into an art form, touching on the human condition in such a way that it will leave readers everywhere in tears. But the market is flooded with memoires that simply didn’t catch on. Everyone thinks they have a family story that the general public is dying to read, just like people so often think their guests are dying to see their pictures from their recent trip to the Grand Canyon. Most of the time – not so much.  We are not interested in your story just because it’s your story.We are only interested if you somehow find a way to make it our story.

In a similar vein, if you write Cyberpunk zombie novels set on Mars and involving dinosaurs, the publisher may have a hard time marketing such a novel. (Hmm, actually it sounds pretty good to me!) These niche markets are small and difficult, unless again you somehow manage to make the story appeal to a broader range of people.

Explanation 2:

Taste is somewhat subjective. We all know that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels were rejected by numerous publishers. In retrospect, I’m sure those editors feel like idiots. Some publishers rejected The Lightning Thief, too. The less said about them, the better! But to be fair, editors have to go with their guts. They have to feel a strong connection with the novel in order to accept it. Once an editor acquires a book, they must defend it to everyone in the company. They have to represent it to the sales and marketing team. They have to fight to get the book a proper cover and a proper marketing budget. Most of all, they have to fight to even get the other people in the company to read it and be excited about it. You can’t do this unless you are wild about the book. Sometimes, books are simply sent to the wrong agents or editors.

To solve this, be very careful when submitting your work. If you write romance, make sure you are only sending to agents who love romance. If you write books somewhat similar to X author or Y author, find out who represents those authors and try those agents. If nothing else, this shows the agent in question that you have done your homework. Agents, in turn, try to be careful about which editors they submit manuscripts to, but they aren’t always right or successful.

So what if you target your submissions carefully, and still the agents and editors are ignoring you? Is this because you are so far ahead of your time, so avant-garde and original that no one recognizes your true genius?  Well, maybe. Or maybe . . .

Explanation 3:

That well-written, brilliant manuscript of yours? Uh . . . how to say this. It’s not as well written or brilliant as you think it is.

It is exceedingly hard, nigh impossible, to be objective about our own work. You have to believe in yourself and your own talent. You have to have a thick skin and persevere in the face of rejection. But you also have to listen to criticism if that criticism seems well founded. If twenty different agents have told you ‘no,’ something is wrong, and it’s probably not with the publishing industry for failing to acknowledge your brilliance. For some reason, your query letter isn’t getting their interest. Your sample chapters are not grabbing them.

It may be (I cover my head to avoid bottles thrown at my face) your writing simply isn’t there yet, and/or you haven’t found the novel you need to write.

I said earlier that my first novel-length manuscript was accepted for publication, and that’s true. But that wasn’t the first thing I wrote. I started writing short stories when I was thirteen. For years, I submitted stories to magazines and collected rejection notes. I would dabble with manuscripts only to give up halfway through. The truth was, I wanted to get published, but I had nothing much to say, nor did I practice writing enough to say things well.

It’s a Zen thing. You have to forget you want to be published in order to get published. At least, that’s how it worked for me. I went into teaching. I kept writing just for fun. Then, one day, the story I needed to write came to me. I was homesick for my native city of San Antonio. I’d been reading a ton of private eye novels. I decided to ‘visit home’ by writing a detective novel set in San Antonio. Suddenly, all these disparate things came together – my pleasure reading, my writing, my knowledge base, my yearning for home. And ka-bam. As I wrote Big Red Tequila, I knew it would be my first published book. It just felt different from anything else I had ever written. It grabbed me. It compelled me to write. It wasn’t something I could fake or force. It simply happened.

That’s not to say it wasn’t a lot of hard work. I went through a full two years of edits, and it was still rejected many times.

After it was published, it did only modestly well. A private eye novel set in San Antonio didn’t appeal to a vast audience. I kept my day job. I gnashed my teeth at the unfairness of the publishing world. Why wouldn’t more people read my work? Why wouldn’t the publisher promote me better?

But in truth, I still hadn’t arrived. I was publishable, but I wasn’t yet good enough at my trade to be truly successful. That took another ten years. Finally, another novel grabbed me. The Lightning Thief combined all my skills at writing, all my years teaching middle school, and my desire to tell a story for my son that would keep him interested in school at a time when he was really struggling with ADHD and dyslexia. The ingredients all came together, and I was ready and skilled enough to capitalize on them. Finally, I managed to create a story that appealed to a lot of people.

Looking back, I see now that the only variable I could control – and the only one that mattered – was my own craft. Connections did not matter. Perseverance did. Practice did. And learning to accept that maybe, just maybe, I still had a lot to learn about writing. I still do, for that matter.

I firmly believe that quality will be recognized. It may not be immediate. It may not be through the channels you expected, or in the way you expected. But if you truly have a wonderful manuscript, it will find a publisher. It will find an audience.

You do have to accept, however, that sometimes it takes a long time. Sometimes the manuscript you have written is not, ultimately, the manuscript that will make you successful. I needed seventeen years to get published, and ten more years before I could become a full-time writer. Maybe your quest will be shorter than mine. I hope so! However, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the world of publishing is against you. Publishers very much want to find new, exciting novelists and make them famous and filthy rich. But that requires a brilliant compelling book. Sometimes we convince ourselves, “Hey, I’m that guy! I’m brilliant and compelling!” But maybe we’re not – at least, not yet.

One thing I’ve discovered. People who believe they are awesome and wonderful at their profession are often . . . not. People who have more self-doubt, who question themselves and are always examining what they did wrong and how they might do better – those folks are often better than they think they are, and they are much more likely to improve. It’s a difficult balance, between self-confidence and self-reflection. No wonder writers are a little barmy. But it is an important balance to strike.

So What’s the Secret Formula?

There isn’t one. There is no shortcut or path to success that will circumvent years of hard work and uncertainty.

So many times, aspiring writers have asked me to lunch to ‘pick my brain.’ They have the impression that I have some secret knowledge to impart. Some of my magic will rub off. If I just put in a good word with the agent, or read their book and gave them a blurb, their career would be made!

Sadly, I have no magic. I don’t know anything you don’t know. I just have more practice banging my head against the wall of the publishing industry, wringing my hands, and staring at blank screens. You can have this wonderful experience, too!

Blurbs – those little quotes on the covers of books – help very little if at all. I’ve been blurbed by wonderful authors. I’ve blurbed many other authors. I have yet to see any evidence it affects sales at all. In fact I recently came across a novel blurbed by none other than J.K. Rowling. A dream endorsement! The novel was one I’d never heard of. It was languishing in the bargain bin. No one, not even the Mother of Wizards herself, can wave a magic wand and make you a success.

“So, yeah!” you are saying. “Great pep talk! Thanks a lot, Riordan!”

But in a way, this knowledge can be reassuring. You aren’t missing anything. There is no secret being hidden from you. You are not being rejected because you missed a meeting of the Secret Society of Successful People. You do not need to know a publisher or an agent or Rick Riordan to get your novel published. You just need to labor long and hard, like all the rest of us, until you build your chops, pay your dues, and find the novel you need to write.

It’s human nature to look for shortcuts and easy answers. The twenty-billion-dollar diet industry is counting on this! Everybody wants to believe a secret food or pill or no-pain program will make you healthy and attractive. Nobody wants to hear the truth – eat less, exercise a lot – because that’s hard.

Writing is the same way. Like dieting, it is something many people talk about doing, many people try to do, and very few will succeed at. Like the weight loss industry, the creative writing industry will try to sell you all sorts of secrets and tricks and special insider knowledge. The truth is a lot less appealing and glamorous. Writing is hard. Not everyone can do it. It requires a combination of innate talent and lots and lots of practice and endurance. It also requires the right story, and publishing that story at the right time.

Most people will not get published. Most people who do get published will never make a living at it. These are simply facts. But your chance is as good as anyone else’s – assuming you have the talent and the story and the drive to put in the hours, days, years to hone your skill. It doesn’t matter who you know or what writers’ group you belong to. It doesn’t matter where you got your degree, or if you even have a degree.

So forget about shortcuts and magic coattails. Forget about meeting so-and-so, who might introduce you to so-and-so. It’s all about the quality of your book. Now get out there and make a quality book.

Oh, right . . . I knew there was something I was supposed to be doing.

Hard Work is Hard :(

Am I right or am I right?

Hard work is hard! That's kinda the thing about hard work. It tends to be hard. Which is not fun. I don't like hard work. You probably don't like hard work. Most people don't like hard work. Why?

Because it's hard.

This seems really simplistic. Simplistic ideas are actually usually the ideas that really stick in your mind though. It's pretty easy to understand why hard work is hard. By definition, it's supposed to be hard, or else it wouldn't be hard work.

However, it is a fact of life that hard work is kinda sorta a key part of pretty much anything worth having/experiencing/doing in this world.

Writing isn't an exception.

It's hard. When you come to that writers block or you realize you have too much plot or you don't know how to incorporate a plot element or a character that you actually really need. Or when you're just tired or bored and you don't want to write anything, especially not this STUPID PROJECT THAT YOU'VE SPENT MONTHS OF YOUR LIFE ON AND ITS STILL NOT GOOD ENOUGH; WHY WILL IT NEVER BE GOOD ENOUGH.

It's hard to move past that. And it's hard when you know that it isn't good enough and you can't figure out what to do to make it good enough.

And do address your fears and questions I will give you two responses.

Hard work.

And this video link: http://vimeo.com/85040589

It's a really great video that I find very inspirational. Especially because it's a problem that a lot of people probably deal with. So enjoy!

Name Hunting

FINALS ARE OVER. YAY. I did really well (see what I did there?) on all of my finals, just so you know. I’m still finishing the semester with a B in Chemistry, but the rest of the grades are As. And the B is a 89.4. My teacher doesn’t round up until 89.5. A tenth of a percent. It’s really annoying, but oh well.

For today’s post, I’m going to be making a throwback to one of the earlier post, True Names- Naming Your Characters. This was actually originally going to be a part of that post, but it ended up being really long and it wasn’t really needed to get the point across.

If you remember or want to go back and reread that post, we essentially set a handful of guidelines/suggestions for finding names for you characters.

• ·         The name should have some sort of relevance to the character. Whether that’s the literal meaning of the name, or just giving him a really ordinary name because you’re trying to give the impression that he’s a normal kid that got stuck in a crazy situation.
•         The name’s “weirdness level” should be more or less level with everyone else, unless there’s a particular reason why it’s weird. You typically should avoid a world full of Johns and Michaels with a main character named Mortsfy.
• ·         Likewise, you should not have a main character with a Japanese name living in 20 century Germany unless his/her parents are Japanese.
• ·         You should like the name. Not necessarily about to name your child that, but you should like it.
• ·         Balance the length and normality of the first and last names. If you give him/her a long first name, give them a shorter last name. Same with normality.
• ·         Please don’t use more than one middle name unless your character comes from a culture where you typically have more than one.
• ·         Even if your character does come from a culture where multiple middle names are common, don’t ever use words for a middle name.

Now with these guidelines in mind, let’s name a character together!

The character we are going to be naming is going to be a character I am literally coming up with on the spot right now for the purpose of this post. If you're looking for help or wondering if your character is good, you might want to try looking at a post that Margaret wrote (yes, she does actually write stuff) How to Make a Non-Cliche Protagonist

Our character is male. He is 14 years old, has brown slightly shaggy hair and brown eyes. He has freckles and, like most 14 year old boys, is gangly and awkward. He is dealing with an acne problem.

For simplicity's sake, he lives in our world during the 21st century. He attends a public high school, and has two or three really close friends. He'll probably never approach you, but if you approach him, he will try his best to be friendly and have a conversation. He has fairly good grades and he's in honors English and History. He is aspiring to become an author (*wink* bet he reads this blog too).

And... he's about to find out that he has the power to make things come true by writing about them. Why not?

So he writes a short fiction piece about finding dinosaurs on the moon and all of a sudden astronomers are going crazy because they swear they found a dino bone in a moon rock.

Time to name him.

Normally you are going to know your character's name better than I know this kid, considering he's only existed (in my head at least) for the past 3 to 5 minutes, which will make it a bit easier than this might be. Or it might make it a heck of a lot harder because you care more about him/her and want them to have the best name possible.

Margaret and I worked on naming him together, and surprise, surprise, she ended up doing most of the naming. I really hate naming characters. I really do.

Usually we/I start with a first name, but in this case Downes came up first for a last name.

Downes means "poet or storyteller". So that fits. It's also not ridiculously long or short, it's simple enough that most people could pronounce it, though if you're going to try to get away with a unpronounceable name, go with the last name rather than the first.

As for his first name, she said that she really wanted an A name. I was personally thinking of giving him a more feminine name, so when she suggested the name Adrian, I thought it was perfect.

Adrian Downes

We have meaning in his last name, he fits the parameters that we both wanted his name to fit into ("A" name and a slightly feminine one). It is something that you could expect to hear at a 21st century high school, but it's not so ordinary there will be two other boys in each of his classes with the same name. Both his last name and his first name are slightly out of the ordinary, but not so drastically that it’s too weird. And he doesn’t really have a middle name, so we don’t have a problem with too many of them.

I wanted to give you an example of the type of conversation we usually have when we’re naming characters together/helping each other name, but it was actually really easy to name him, so there’s not much to show.

I hope this was helpful for some of you as an example of the process!

The Difference Between Good and Well

This is going to be another short (and late) post due to the fact that I am moving, but one that I feel very passionately about.

Here’s a bit of information that might be a bit of a shock to some of you.

The word “good” and the word “well” are different.

And sometimes you want to use one instead of the other.

Shocking, right? Who would have thought?

I’m not usually a big Grammar Nazi, but there are certain grammatical mistakes that drive me up the wall. This includes but is not limited to “funner/funnest”, “I vs me”, and “good vs well.”

And before anyone start arguing about not needing your novel to grammatically perfect that’s what editors are for, just don’t. Most editors don’t even deal with grammatical or spelling errors or anything of like. They’re mostly focused on your characters, or your plot, or your flow. Some of them will correct stuff like that, but most editors, especially in a big publishing company, won’t bother at all. In big companies, they can usually get copy editors to go through and fix all of that.

So to a degree you’re right. But more to the degree of “Worry more about your plot than your grammar”, not “Who cares about being grammatically correct?”

No one wants to read something with horrible grammar or spelling. I’ve never been employed by a publishing company to read, edit, and oversee the publishing of a book. I’ve never had to read a ton of manuscripts. But I have read and edited a lot of stories and essays… and it’s painful when they make a lot of grammatical and spelling mistakes. Believe me when I say that it automatically makes you think certain things about the author and those certain things are not always kind. That is a really bad way to start of a relationship with anyone, let alone someone who has to really like something you wrote over the dozens/hundreds other submissions s/he’s gotten in the past few weeks.

Also, when there are a lot of grammatical/spelling mistakes, it’s hard to focus on fixing those rather than issues that might be more important like characters and plot.

Not to mention that if you ever want to consider self-publishing, that you have to make everything absolutely perfect yourself.

So yes, you do have to pay attention to this when you’re writing.

(The easiest way to avoid making the mistake in your writing is by avoiding making the mistake when you talk. That also has the added bonus of not annoying people like me.)

The easiest way to tell the difference between the two is that good is an adjective and well in an adverb.

Good always refers to a noun and well always refers to an action.

I did a good job.

I did my job well.

See the difference?

Job is a noun, and the job was good.

Doing a job is an action. To do is a verb. The job was done well.

In math the other day, my friend told me that she thought she was going to do good on the test we have next week.

This was incorrect unless she was planning on using the test to do some act of good in society like teaching a high school dropout off of it.

Do is a verb. Use well.

She runs (runs is a verb) well.

Fun fact: Disney teaches children incorrect grammar.

At the end of Mulan after Mulan has saved China and been honored by the Emperor, Shang runs up to her and says what? “You… you fight good.”

Wrong. He should have said you fight well.

There are a few exceptions. When you’re talking about your or someone else’s health, always use “well”. When talking about emotional state, use “good”.

I don’t feel well today. I feel sick.

I don’t feel good about cheating.

Please, please make an effort to keep these correct. Believe me; it will make you look a lot more intelligent in your writing and talking to other people.

(Here’s a little secret though: To avoid having to make a decision about good vs well, use the word fine or great ;))

Be Wrong As Fast As You Can

It's only week two and I've already failed on my Resolutions.

But you know what, that doesn't meant that it's over! If you give up after one mess up, you're never going to accomplish your goals!

And I do have a legitimate excuse. 

I had to move this week/end. 

The landlords kicked us out for renovations, so we had to get out and get out we did.

Guys. Don't ever move. It's not worth it.

And because of the move, this post is probably going to be a little lame. It's a reblog. We had to read this article in English and I think it's absolutely brilliant and worth the read. I think there are more than a few of you that will really be able to connect with the author and take his advice to heart.

"Be Wrong As Fast As You Can"

by Hugo Lindgren, for the New York Times, January 4 2013

Here’s a partial, redacted-for-the-sake-of-my-dignity list of stuff I once aspired to write but never did: a “Mamma Mia!”-esque rock opera called “Bastards of Young,” based on the songs of the Replacements. A sitcom set in Brooklyn that inverts “I Love Lucy,” so that the wife plays the stable, amiable breadwinner while her lovable loon of a husband hatches ridiculous schemes, often involving the production of artisanal goods. A thriller about the ultimate rogue trader who concocts a single, diabolical transaction to blow up the financial system. An HBO show, called “Upstate,” about a burned-out corporate raider who returns to his hometown outside Buffalo to save his father’s failing liquor store and ends up trying to rescue the whole town from the double scourge of unemployment and alcoholism. Too depressing? How about this: A reality show in which retired hockey greats like Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier compete against each other coaching teams of — ready for the deal clincher? — inner-city kids who’ve never been on ice skates.

If you had the time, believe me, I could flesh out these ideas for you, explain their origins, describe in fine detail my vision of the characters and plots and how it would all coalesce into something awesome.

Or not. For at least 25 years, I’ve been serial daydreaming like this, recording hundreds of ideas in a sequence of little notebooks that I have carried around and then stacked in a shoe box in my closet, a personal encyclopedia of undone to-do’s. Sometimes, when I’m searching for something in my closet and I see the box, I have a flashback to my first-grade report card: “Hugo has the gift of a rich, active imagination, but needs to work on his follow-through skills.”

My situation, I know, is not unique. Who doesn’t have big plans they never get around to acting on? Everybody swaps ideas with his friends about the excellent TV show they’d make or the groundbreaking movie they’d write. And a couple of my grand schemes got an inch or two off the ground — an agent lunch, a pitch meeting, a trip to L.A., a flurry of e-mail filled with exclamation points — though never much higher than that. And along the way, I also became editor of the magazine you are now reading, so it’s not as if I became mired exclusively in a world of delusional ambition. It’s just that for way too long, I held on to the fantasy of a completely different professional life, and I can’t help wondering why certain creative endeavors just seemed impossible to make happen.

I know, writers have been complaining for eons about the weight of their burden, and it’s not attractive. But I’ve been around it long enough to know that writing anything good that’s longer than a paragraph isn’t easy for anybody, except for maybe J. J. Abrams. You can’t explain how people do it. Some of the most successful screenwriters, novelists, television producers and rock-opera librettists I know are about a hundred times lazier than I am. They take long afternoon naps, play lots of pickup basketball and appear to accomplish little or nothing for months at a time. And let me tell you, their ideas do not all crackle with scintillating originality.

So what am I missing? What is that elusive thing that turns some people’s daydreams into their next novel for F.S.G.?

#

Earlier in my professional life, as I began to do all right as an editor, I naïvely discounted it as something I never intended to stick with. A respectable occupation, I thought, while preparing myself for the Masterwork of Spectacular Brilliance that would eventually define me.

One of my pet theories about why I could never actually produce anything of brilliance was that I was cursed with a comfortable existence. What might have been my creative prime was spent in New York City in the 1990s, a flush time for the young and college-educated. Magazine-editor jobs paid O.K. and were relatively easy to get, especially compared with now. Maybe I would’ve been better off in the 1970s, when a young person with ambitions like mine had to take a hard job as a means to his artistic ends. Would such sacrifice, I wondered, have sharpened my desire to make it as a writer?

All you have to do is read Mark Jacobson’s classic New York magazine depiction of cabdrivers in the 1970s to know that’s a joke. The story is about nighttime cabbies who aspired to be actors or poets or playwrights. Jacobson was one of them. His original plan was to drive three nights a week, write three nights a week and party one night a week. But as he watched his fellow drivers get sucked in to the working life, he realized how the daily grind slowly robbed them of their dreams.

“The Big Fear,” Jacobson writes, “is that times will get so hard that you’ll have to drive five or six nights a week instead of three. The Big Fear is that your play, the one that’s only one draft away from a possible showcase, will stay in your drawer. The Big Fear is thinking about all the poor stiff civil servants who have been sorting letters at the post office ever since the last Depression and all the great plays they could have produced. The Big Fear is that, after 20 years of schooling, they’ll put you on the day shift. The Big Fear is you’re becoming a cabdriver.”

My big fear, of course, was that I was becoming an editor. I won’t lie. For a long time, I considered this an unacceptable outcome. I don’t know if anyone ever told me, “Those who can’t write, edit,” or if I made that up on my own, but that little aphorism haunted me. Meanwhile, my grandiose writing projects were all going nowhere for the same tedious reason. The minute I tried to commit them to paper, or otherwise turn them into something tangible, my imagination coughed and sputtered like the cheap Renault convertible my girlfriend drove in college. I’d write a bit of dialogue using that miraculous software that automatically formats it into a screenplay for you, and I’d be instantly paralyzed from the neck up. Here was incontrovertible evidence that I wasn’t half as good as I imagined myself to be. The voices I heard so clearly and powerfully in my head became inert and alien on the page. I was surprised by how mortally embarrassed you can be by writing something nobody else will ever read. Even looking back over those one- sentence descriptions of TV ideas in the first paragraph of this essay, I am humbled by how inadequately they convey the vividness they had as I conjured them. It’s like hearing a recording of my own voice. That can’t be how I sound. Oh, but it is.

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I recently saw a Charlie Rose interview with John Lasseter, a founder of Pixar, about the creative process behind his movies. Pixar’s in-house theory is: Be wrong as fast as you can. Mistakes are an inevitable part of the creative process, so get right down to it and start making them. Even great ideas are wrecked on the road to fruition and then have to be painstakingly reconstructed. “Every Pixar film was the worst motion picture ever made at one time or another,” Lasseter said. “People don’t believe that, but it’s true. But we don’t give up on the films.”

Hugely successful people tend to say self-deprecating stuff like this when they go on “Charlie Rose.” But I heard something quite genuine in Lasseter’s remarks, an acknowledgment of just how deep into the muck of mediocrity a creative project can sink as it takes those first vulnerable steps from luxurious abstraction to unforgiving reality.

I could never forge through this. My confidence always collapsed under the weight of my withering self-criticism. I couldn’t bear the awfulness and keep going. Even as I’m writing this essay, I have to stop myself from scrolling back to previous parts and banging my forehead against the keyboard as I see how short I’ve fallen of my expectations. My mind goes uncontrollably to whether it might be better to scrap the whole thing and write a different Riff — like, I’ve got a few stray ideas in my notebook here about the glassy office tower they’re building next door to where I live and how it obliterates what’s left of the spirit of Greenwich Village. Or about this ’80s band called Talk Talk that started out making bland pop hits like Duran Duran but then rejected fame and made a couple of crazy, weird, beautiful records until mysteriously vanishing. That Riff will practically write itself, I just know it.

A promiscuous imagination like this is dangerous for writers. As an editor, I can see that clearly. I know that the next brilliant brainstorm is never going to be the one that will just write itself, any more than the last one did. Ideas, in a sense, are overrated. Of course, you need good ones, but at this point in our supersaturated culture, precious few are so novel that nobody else has ever thought of them before. It’s really about where you take the idea, and how committed you are to solving the endless problems that come up in the execution. The more I experienced this frustration firsthand, the more I came to appreciate how naturally suited I am to the job I used to think I never wanted to have when I grew up. Magazines give me a healthy, satisfying amount of creative license, as well as a very defined responsibility. Journalism keeps my imagination from flying off into the ether. At the core of everything is reporting, a real event. And editing allows me to collaborate with people whose talents make up for my weaknesses, especially writers who don’t seize up at the sight of a blinking cursor.

At the same time, the protracted period of realizing all this has been necessary. Struggling with my own creative process has helped me appreciate the difficulties that others go through, while fighting to subdue my own self-criticism has left me open to the possibilities of fledgling ideas that look wobbly out of the gate. Daydreams, weirdly enough, have made me a better editor.

Plus, if I’d understood this all perfectly when I started out, embraced editing right from the beginning, I’d be ready to move on to something else now. Like maybe I’d open a civilized sports bar that served only bourbon and sold vintage Pendleton shirts —

But now I must contend with my editor for this story, who just stopped by my office to see when I’ll stop beating my head against the keyboard so he can get this to the copy desk. There’s no chance of backing out now. He insisted it wasn’t as dreadful as I feared, gave me good advice on how to end it, and also remarked that my reality-show idea is not bad, but does it have to be about hockey? Well, no, I said, suddenly diverted into fantasy land, the conceit could be broader, maybe about how to coach amateurs more generally, so that the competition changed season to season — badminton, bobsledding, roller derby, square dancing. Rock operas!

We had a laugh and then got back to work.