Odds and sods

I bought myself a printer this week—an HP 1012, designed pretty much just for b&w printing. I have made a few promises to myself: I am going to finish the rewrite of my novel this month, and I am going to get the Final Rewrite (let’s be Hollywoodesque and call it a “polish”) done soon. One of my big goals for this year is to start getting some Real World feedback on my writing.

Getting the Real World feedback is the scary part, of course. On the other hand, it’s the most useful, too.

I’ve been reading the amazingly great “Learn Writing with Uncle Jim” thread over at Absolute Write—it’s insanely long, but well worth the effort—and one of the things James McDonald says, over and over and over again, is

If you’re capable of writing two consecutive pages of grammatical English prose with standard spelling, you’re already in the top ten percent of the slush heap.

Terry Rossio, over at Wordplay, says much the same thing. People forever quoting the same statistics about how many screenplays are written per year versus how many get bought and assuming that any given screenplay has x% chance.

No, says Terry: it’s pretty much all or nothing:

For some reason, folk are unwilling to think of screenwriting in terms of being a very ‘performance based’ profession, like hitting baseballs, or performing open heart surgery. In those professions, people never talk about odds, they just ask, ‘can you do it?’ And if you can, you are employed.

People understand that there’s a difference between a good script and a bad one, and that a good script can improve their odds. But there’s also this residual belief that there are a lot of scripts out there that are all relatively the same, some will get chosen just out of luck.

I don’t think that category is statistically significant. I actually think that there are some folk who have ability, their work is so good, and they have so much talent and drive, that the odds of them selling is near 100%. And other folk who just will never get it, and their odds are closer to 0%.

Over time, you can look back and figure odds with enough data concerning a group of people. But on an individual basis, I think it falls out more along the lines of the 100%/0% division.

This seems intuitive, although of course it isn’t, because people always want to know how big the pool of potential rivals is. Your pool is ONE: you. You’ve either written something that people want to buy (or at least see more of from you), or you haven’t.

When it comes to sending my baby out into the world, my fear is not that I will get cease-and-desist letters from agents or editors. No, my fear is that no one will notice. You know: my stuff isn’t even interesting enough to send a form letter back about. I don’t know why I’d fear that—if I’m going to be brutally honest (and I will, thanks), I have never gotten a lack of interest on my writing. I sold the first short story I ever sent out (for $400!—and then I promptly stopped sending out short stories). I got a well-known manager with the first script I ever wrote. Of course, we all know how well I’ve parlayed that into a career.

But I’ve been in my little cocoon for so long. When we first moved back to NoCal, I wanted to join a writing group mostly so I could meet other adults. But I decided that I didn’t really want to join a group, because I’ve found, overall, writing groups to be more harmful than useful for my writing process—I would get feedback on something before I honestly had any clue what I was working on. Writing groups and classes are good for setting deadlines to make you write something, but (for me) they’re deadly to the nascent work.

There was a gigantic pitched battle on Wordplay on this very topic recently. There were two camps: you need feedback from others to grow as a writer and truly understand your writing, and You Must Be Your Own Expert and not accept what anybody else tells you. (And varieties of each stance, of course.) I’m not quite as virulent in my opinion of the either/or as some of the do-it-yourselfers, but over time I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to make my own assessment of my work before getting opinions from the outside.

So, my goal this year is to a)finish this novel and b)start sending it around. Whoops, forgot the last one: c)start writing something else. Because that’s what this is all about, of course. You don’t just get to do this once. You do it over and over again.