Gone Fishin’: A Writer’s Guide To Confidence

by Darren Greer

I’m not afraid to admit that for a long while I had trouble getting published. I would send out everything I wrote - stories, poems, essays –– only to watch them come back in the mail months, or even years, later, in an envelope addressed to myself in my own handwriting (the dreaded SASE). Sometimes they wouldn’t come back at all, which was worse; kind of like hearing about a death of a loved one but without the actual closure of seeing the body –– always the faint winter hope exists that one day the story will return from the dead.

I engaged in desperate acts. When I got a computer and the internet, I hung out in writers’ chat rooms, filled with the equally desperate, all of us trying to find that golden key that would let us into the inner sanctum of published authorship. Some of us were in our forties or fifties and still hoping that it would one day happen (I swore to myself at the tender but wise age of twenty-seven that I would not be one of those. If I hadn’t "made it" by the time I was thirty-five I would quit, though just what else I thought I would do never occurred to me.) When people asked me what I did for a living I told them I was a writer, in the hope that just saying it might make it be true. Sometimes I lied about what I had published, naming obscure or imaginary magazines in the mid and far west that no-one would be surprised they hadn’t heard of. I subscribed to Writer’s Digest and countless other "How-To" magazines, and read every book on writing I could find.

I watched for signs, in myself and in the world at large. Certain personality traits, such as forgetfulness, anxiousness, fear, nervousness, guaranteed I was cut out to be a writer, didn’t they?

At the same time I questioned my own ability constantly. My imagination seemed poor. I was dull, uninspired, uninteresting, boorish, cloddish, uncool. Everything I wrote excited me at first, and then caused me to slip, upon re-reading, into a deep depression. I read the words of published authors and wondered what separated me from them? I struggled with my own material, most of which seemed out-of-control, stronger, unwilling to be wrestled onto the page.

Secretly, at heart, I knew I was wasting my time.

Secretly, at heart, I knew I was going to be famous.

Once I was struggling so awfully with a short story that I gave the whole thing up and went for a bike ride to a near-by park. It was April, and just beginning to get warm. I found a spot beside a shallow pond under a great weeping willow tree that had given me some comfort in the past. There was an old black man sitting before me on the grass and fishing in the pond, like a character out of a Norman Rockwell painting. It gradually occurred to me that the water was un-fed and stagnant, the pond man-made, and only about two or three feet deep. There were likely no more fish in that water than there were living dinosaurs.

I asked him what he was fishing for.

He shrugged, his back still to me, and said, "Just fishing."

"But is there any fish in there?".

"Don’t know," he answered. "And don’t care."

I took this as another sign, raced home, and finished the story.

Another time when I was again at the height of despair (a place I went to at least once a month) a friend told me the story of a teacher she’d once had in college. The teacher was 55-years-old when he got his first story published in a small magazine, after thirty years of trying. The story both inspired and depressed me, that someone could be so persistent and yet at the same time so desperate. Later that very evening I happened to come across the story of John Kennedy Toole on the internet. Toole committed suicide when his novel Confederacy of Dunces was rejected 13 times in a row. His mother kept submitting the book after his death when it was finally accepted eleven years later by a small publishing house and went on to win the Pulitzer prize.

Who the "real" writer –– Toole or the teacher?

What constituted a writer? Talent, or bloody-minded persistence?

I absorbed these lessons, and kept going. Once, when I was working on my first novel in my small apartment in Ottawa and tossing and turning in bed wondering, as usual, if I was wasting my life, I heard a voice, clearly and distinctly, from across the room. It was a man’s voice, but not mine, nor anyone I knew. I got up to find that I was, as I suspected, alone in the apartment.

"It will get published," the voice said, a writer’s variant on a Field of Dreams.

For months, when I felt on the edge of giving up, I thought of this mysterious voice (what I now believe was simply an aural projection of my own desperate desire to succeed) and felt comforted. I used anything to keep myself going in those days. Hand-written rejection notes with a scrap of encouragement scribbled on them buoyed me up for weeks. Compliments from friends, family, even stray comments from teachers in high school repeated to the self in those darkest and most despairing hours in the middle of the night were enough. If I felt really low I would find something I had written that I liked and read it aloud to a friend, who usually knew what I was looking for: fulsome praise. People who were realistic, or worse, discouraging, I quickly dropped. A psychiatrist told me once that seeking success from writing was a hopeless pipe dream –– a million-to-one odds -- and that a man of my limited talents would be better off focusing on something in the earthly plane.

I made the decision to stop going to him that very day.

And then, amidst all of this, something unusual happened. I met a published novelist. This guy wasn’t famous, but he was getting there, and he was, at least, well respected and so was his publisher. I told him I was writing a novel. He asked me to let him have a look.

"At least I won’t tell you it’s any good if it’s not," he told me. "At least you’ll know."

I gave him the manuscript, and for three weeks waited for him to call. I had decided that this was it. If the novel was any good, he would tell me. If it wasn’t, I could find something else to do. (At the time, the only career move I could think of other than writing was something akin to that of John Kennedy Tooles, though I would be smart enough to burn all my work before I did it.)

Finally, he picked up the phone and called me. He said, "It’s a good book."

"Does that mean you like it?

"I just said it was good, didn’t I?"

"Do you think anyone will want it?"

"It will get published," said the writer, eerily reminiscent of my mysterious voice. "I’’ll recommend it to my editor and my agent."

The road to publication, as always, was a little more rocky than that. The book would get published, but only when everyone would turn it down and I would publish it myself. The agent would take me, but three years later and on the merits of another book entirely. The editor would get fired before the novelist/friend could even mention it to him. And the novelist/friend himself would turn out to be more trouble than he was worth –– a practising alcoholic who couldn’t separate the fiction in his books from the fiction of his own life (a common problem, I’ve since discovered, with many writers.) In other words, the dream would turn out being just another version of reality.

There is a certain tendency, among writers especially, but perhaps among all artists, to pretend that where they are now is where they’ve always been. That they were never hungry, or despairing, or at a stage where no-one paid any attention to them or their work. I notice it most often now when I am at writers’ festivals and other literary events –– among what we so often refer to as a "community" of writers –– this cool acceptance of our own talents and abilities, a certain intellectual arrogance that when I was younger and struggling with my own material used to make me despair that I would ever be able to pull off. All the so-called successful writers I met then seemed so assured, so confident in their right to be standing up on the stage in front of us. They spoke and read with authority, chatted easily with editors and agents and reporters and fans, and seemed to be made of some sterner stuff than I.

Most often, if I convinced myself I wasn’t cut out to be a writer in those days, it was because I felt, not that I didn’t have the talent, but that I didn’t have the personality. I would listen to writers being interviewed on TV and radio and hear them make broad sweeping generalizations about what writers do and what writers don’t do, as if we were all cast out of the same psychiatric mould. I would desperately look for such traits in myself (most often coming up short) and once again convince myself that I was wasting my time, forgetting, or never learning, the undeniable fact that the act of putting words on paper is the only true qualification for calling yourself a writer.

Two things happened over the years to change all that.

The first was that I read a book by the American author Ralph Keyes called The Courage To Write. This book was filled not with pointers on how to improve your writing, but how to harness the anxiety and doubt that all writers feel and make it work for you. More important, it was stuffed with quotes and stories about renowned writers expressing constant doubts about themselves and their abilities, the kind of thing you never heard at the writers’ festivals at all. I was shocked to discover that E.B White felt as much of a fraud as I did (he constantly worried, according to Keyes, that his vocabulary wasn’t adequate) and that Joan Didion was no nervous in front of interviewers she couldn’t look them in the face. In even bigger news: the writers Keyes interviewed admitted that the confidence they displayed was often an act, a public construct. Swaggering arrogance masked fear. Blankets of blustering self-confidence were thrown over mountains of poor self-image, uncertainty and doubt. It was such a shock, that all writers, successful writers even, felt like I did. Maybe I was cut out to be a writer after all? (Shortly after I hunted out Keyes address on the internet and wrote to him, starting an e-mail correspondence between us that continues to this day.)

The second thing that happened in my evolution is that I published my first novel, and to everyone’s surprise, it actually did OK. The next thing I knew I was the writer at the festival acting all cool, calm and collected and giving the impression that I was born to this, that I had always known one day that I would get here, smiling and laughing and singing copies of my book for admiring fans.

Since I knew for a fact that I felt no more confident now than I did then, the revelations in Keyes book were confirmed: it was an act, all of it. We all felt this way. The real battle, whether you have one novel or twenty or none under your belt, is sitting down to the same white page everyday and facing down the hydra-headed monster. We all have the voices inside that tell us we stink no matter how many good reviews we get. That feeling of total panic you get when you sit down to write and there isn't anything there is universal, and all writers are susceptible to it. Ironically, this was, to me at least, a tremendous relief. Now, whenever I do have these days (and there are a lot of them) I try to go back in my mind to that place I was at before I was published, when no-one knew or cared what I did with my mornings, and when I used to worry that my words would never get read by anyone at all.

I try and remember the old black man, casting his line in shallow, muddy waters and seeming, from the outside at least, to be happy and content.

Just casting, I tell myself as I sit down at my computer each morning, waiting for a story to rise.

Darren Greer is the author of the novels Tyler’s Cape and Still Life with June, both available in Canada from Cormorant Books. Still Life With June was nominated for a Pearson Canada Reader’s Choice Book Award in 2003. A book of essays, entitled Strange Ghosts: Essays, will appear in Canada in the fall of 2004. The U.S. edition of Still Life with June will be available from St. Martin’s Press in the spring of 2005. Darren lives in Toronto. Visit his website at www.darrengreer.com or e-mail him at info@darrengreer.com.