Extrospection

I’m supposed to be doing my taxes now, but it’s after 8:30, and after 8:30 I become officially useless. Nevertheless, every night, as that witching hours approaches, I steel myself and resolve that this time it’ll be different; this time, I will lower my head and barrel through my limitations. No: I will gore my limitations with my mighty horns of industry!

And, every night, I wind up parked in front of my computer, flipping listlessly through the internet and tending to my burgeoning gut with massive infusions of cornsyrup-laced pastasicles.

So, tonight, I’m going to try a different approach: I will engage in “introspection.” Introspection is the act of self-examination, a sort of private inner status check. But I will be doing so out loud, in print. Thus: extrospection.

The subject of tonight’s extrospection is a mistake I made today. I sent a story to SciFiction, an online fantasy/sci-fi mag. This was a mistake for several reasons, but most of them boil down to this: the story is not very good.

Why would I submit a story I know to be bad? Well, a couple of reasons; but, again, they all boil down to one: I couldn’t stand having it in the house anymore. I’ve been working on this thing for a couple of months now, revising and editing, cutting and adding, eliding and expanding, moving sections around in an endless game of musical paragraphs. Every time I looked at it, I found something that needed fixing, and every time I fixed it, it got either not better, or just plain worse.

The story was flawed from the start, I think. It never had a chance. Sometimes it happens: an idea that looks promising comes out stillborn, and you have no choice but to bury it, spend a couple of days mourning what it could have been, and then moving on. This was that kind of an idea, but I couldn’t put it aside. I just kept hacking at it. Over time, it did get better, but I don’t think it ever got good. I don’t think I had the power to make it good.

I couldn’t finish it, and I couldn’t abandon it, so I did the next best thing: I sent it away, where it will almost certainly be reviled by an editor who will quickly enter my name in her “auto-reject” database. Or maybe not. I don’t know. Because, after having toiled at it for so long, I find that the objective distance between me and the story has narrowed to a hairline crack. All of my efforts may have transformed it into a masterpiece, or — far more likely — twisted it into a broken monster, a drooling halfwit troll that roams the gaps between the circles of hell, looking for spent bottles to redeem for a nickel a pop.

But there’s just one more wrinkle. I find that, nestled underneath all of this self-conscious gloom & doom, there’s an irrational, unreasonable hope that it really is good, and it’s been fooling me all along. Hunter S Thompson got his big break when he gave up on the linear story he was writing for a newspaper and just sent in a mad set of scribbled notes; he was convinced he’d get fired, but the story was a hit, and Gonzo Journalism was born. Stephen King’s wife had to fish his first novel, Carrie, out of the trash, where King had thrown it in a fit of pique, convinced it was shit. That novel became a huge bestseller, and launched what is arguably one of the most successful careers in the history of literature. Khafka, who never sold a thing in his lifetime, instructed his friend to burn all his stuff after he died. His friend published it, instead.

I’m not equating myself with these geniuses, of course: I’m just saying that you to need to give yourself a chance, even when you know you don’t deserve it. Because maybe … just maybe … you do.