Burn the Ships

I told my friend what I did and he called me a psychopath. It’s understandable. I wondered so myself.

I told my friend what I did and he called me a psychopath. It’s understandable. I wondered so myself.

I hit a wall with writing. Not writer’s block or the lack of imagination. Not even the work – I’m still writing everyday. It was my success rate. I went through the usual processes that I’ve trusted for the past few years; write, get critiques, re-write, submit. In the past, almost every story I wrote ended up finding a home. Not a pro-rated home, perhaps, but somewhere. But lately, the stories that I was really excited about were drowning in the submission pools. From pro-rated, prestigious magazines to little no-name token markets — rejected. Not even first-readers were nibbling.

In the past when that happened I didn’t waste time finding a new place where I could submit a story. Out the story went, and I started writing another. “Haha, reject this!” I would say. But that story would ultimately, too, come back with a autogenerated ‘no.’ And so the cycle repeated.

Until about two months ago.

I finally had some realizations. First, short stories aren’t what I want to do. My end-goal has always been to write novels. I only  started writing shorts to get experience and to learn how to write. But the more I wrote, the more my ego took over. I looked at every short story market as a challenge. I told myself “I’ll know I’m a good writing if I get accepted to X magazine,” or “If so-and-so can get published here, I have to, too.” So I made my priority getting shorts published, instead of working on a novel. And the novel went unwritten.

Second, the short rejections were messing with the single-minded focus I need to tackle a longer story.  When I would finally get around to novel writing, I’d give up every time a short story got rejected. If I can’t get a short published, I’d tell myself, what makes me think I could write a novel anyone would give a damn about? I’d trash however much of a novel I had — telling myself it was a stupid idea anyway — and set about writing another short. I’d do a novel when I knew I’d become a better writer.

Or maybe writing short stories was just procrastinating writing something bigger and much harder to do. I’ll let you puzzle it out.

But I got to the point where I knew I had to make a choice. Was I going to focus on shorts for the foreseeable future, and thereby become a short story writer? Or was I going to take the plunge and only write a novel? Which one aligned more with my goals?

Hint: I don’t think anyone really gives a damn about short stories beyond the people also trying to write short stories.

I was whipping myself to death over something maybe fifty people would read.

I decided to be like Cortés. In 1519, Cortés sailed across the Atlantic and arrived in what is now Mexico. His men were exhausted. Ahead lay dense jungle, the Aztec empire, unknown dangers. Easier, perhaps, to set sail for Spain and try again in the future.

For Cortés, there was no going back. He set fire to his ships. Now the only way home was forward.

So I burned my ships.

I deleted every unpublished short story that had yet to find a home. Every copy across every cloud account and email. I poured gasoline on them all and lit a digital match.

Poof. Gone. Adios.

I no longer have that little voice in my head saying ‘if you just fix this one thing, then sub it out again, well who knows?’

Can’t. They’re dead. I murdered them.

And I don’t miss them. If they weren’t good enough to even make it past a first reader, there was no use in them existing at all. I learned the lessons I could from writing them, but time to move on.

Am I a better writer for it? No. But I’m a more focused one.

The only way forward is forward, with a burning Spanish galleon at your back.