In movies, struggling writers are portrayed as trying to come up with ideas. In my experience as a writer and teacher of writing, that isn’t the hard part. Ideas are easy, and are much better in our head than on the paper, so a very, very hard part of writing is to getting the smart and elegant ideas in our head to be comprehensible to someone else, let alone either persuasive or admired. But the even harder part is submitting something we’ve written—sending it off to be judged. It feels like the first day of sending a child to middle school—will they be bullied? Will they make friends? Will they change beyond recognition?
And I think there’s another reason that submitting a piece of writing is so hard. Our fantasies about what is going to happen when we submit a piece of writing are always more pleasurable than any plausible reality.
Somerset Maugham has a story called “Mirage,” about someone he knew when he was a medical student. Grosely was spending his time and money on wine and women, and eventually came up with a scam to get more money. He was caught, arrested, and kicked out of school. He became a kind of customs official in China, and, desperate to get back to partying in London, was as corrupt as possible: “He was consumed by one ambition, to save enough to be able to go back to England and live the life from which he had been snatched as a boy.”
After 25 years, he did go back to England, and he did try to live the life he’d lived at nineteen. But he couldn’t, of course. London was different, and so was he, and it was all a massive disappointment. He started to think about China, and what a great place it had been, and what a great time he could have there with all the money he’d made. So he headed back. He got almost to China, but stopped just shy of it (in Haiphong). Maugham explains:
“England had been such a terrible disappointment that now he was afraid to put China to the test too. If that failed him he had nothing. For years England had been like a mirage in the desert. But when he had yielded to the attraction, those shining pools and the palm trees and the green grass were nothing but the rolling sandy dunes. He had China, and so long as he never saw it again he kept it.”
I read that story as a graduate student trying to write a dissertation, and it resonated. As long as I didn’t finish the dissertation, I could entertain outrageous fantasies about its reception, quality, and impact. Once submitted, it was what it was. It was passable. (And unpublishable.) It was not anything like what I’d imagined it could be.
I have felt that way about every single piece of writing since (including this blog post)—I’m hesitant to finish it because of not wanting to give up the dream of what it could be.
Every writer of any genre has a lot of partially-written things. I knew a poet who actually had a drawer in his desk into which he dropped pieces of paper onto which he’d written lines that came to him that seemed good, but he didn’t have the rest of the poem. I don’t know if he ever pulled any of those pieces of paper out and wrote the rest of the poem (he did publish quite a bit of poetry). There’s nothing wrong with having a lot of incomplete projects, and lots of good reasons to leave them incomplete.
I once pulled out a ten-year old unsubmitted and unfinished piece of writing, revised it, and submitted it—it was published, and won an award. It took ten years for me to understand what that argument was really about, so leaving it unfinished for that long wasn’t a bad choice at all. There are others that will remain forever unfinished—also not a bad choice.
But there are times when one should just hit submit. The dreams may not come true, but there will be other pieces of writing about which we can dream.
I’m saying all this because I hope people who might be stuck in their writing will find it hopeful. Just hit submit.