I don’t know about you, but as a writer I tend to think every idea I have is brilliant, at least for a while. There’s the sunburst of inspiration, a period that can last anywhere from a minute to a year, wherein I am convinced I just changed literature forever. Then there’s a variable period of actually working on the idea, which as every writer knows usually involves suddenly realizing just how worthless and tired the idea actually is. And then, if you’re lucky, there’s the discovery a nugget of something shiny in all that collapsed shit, something you can polish and melt and cast into a book you want to write.
That’s not the hard part.
The hard part is when you finish a book after going through that process and someone—a Beta Reader, your agent, that insistent voice in your head, tells you that it’s not ready for prime time. Simply put, effort doesn’t always equal brilliance.
Patience, Grasshopper
This happens to me all the time. One specific example is a book I wrote long ago. Shortly after being signed by my agent, I was pretty psyched and confident. So I thought about what my next book should be—after all, once my agent sold Chum and it became a worldwide literary phenomenon, I would need to quickly offer up my next novel to my publisher, right? So I started working on an idea I had, and a few months later I sent it off to my agent, fairly confident she would be excited.
She was not.
Gently, she told me it just wasn’t ready. What she actually said is that it felt like half a story. Looking back, she was absolutely right, because what I wound up doing with that book (ten years later) was combining it with another not-quite-finished novel, and that Frankenstein’s Monster of a book did win my agent’s heart (we haven’t sold it yet, but give it time). The point is that being told your novel isn’t ready for prime time is far from the worst thing someone can say. And sometimes it’s going to take you ten years to figure out exactly what your book is missing.
In other words, just because you wrote a bad book doesn’t mean it can’t be a great book—someday. Uncork a bottle of something inebriating and drink until you can be honest with yourself, then start working again.
Be careful with the drinking-until-you’re-honest thing, though. Trust me: You can become too honest with yourself.