Guest entry: Always make your enjoyment greater than your effort.
This week we have a guest entry from Hamish MacDonald, a writer who works for The Strategic Coach, who has managed to find an interesting way to make his enjoyment greater than his effort even in the often challenging and rejection-filled world of fiction writing.
I finished my third novel two years ago -- a quirky, alternative, magical realist tale about Scotland. I was pleased with what I'd done: I told the kind of story I like to read. But writing was the easy part. Now came the hard part: submission.
For two years, I sent the manuscript around to various publishers. One editor loved it -- but then the company sacked him and shut down their fiction imprint. Several others were bought out or underwent significant changes after receiving the book; I never knew who I was dealing with. Most presses simply weren't interested in unknown work or this kind of story.
While visiting Catherine last summer, I saw she had a bookbinding guide on her shelf. Fascinated, I flipped through it. Later that day, she and I had a long talk about The Laws of Lifetime Growth. I looked back over this period of rejection letters and frustration and saw that I didn't have a future bigger than my past. In fact, I had no future at all, because I was refusing to look forward: I didn't want more of the same.
During my stay in Toronto, I went to a paper store and bought all sorts of colored papers, glue, thread, and a manual on bookbinding. When I got back to Edinburgh, I started teaching myself to make books by hand, and wound up making all my Christmas presents that year -- journals, photo albums, and other books.
At New Year's, I sat down with a pen and a book I'd made and I plotted out the year ahead. "I'm going to have a future," I figured, "so why not invent one full of activities I enjoy? Then, no matter how it turns out, at least I'll have had fun."
In the time since, I've managed to expand my bookbinding efforts to the point that I'm now running a "micropress" from home, publishing my own work, start to finish.
When I was in Toronto this summer, I had a book launch for my third novel. I got to read sections from the book for a packed room full of friends and strangers, and to share all these characters, events, and images from my imagination with them. I even sold enough books to give me pocket money for the rest of my trip. The biggest payoff, though, was knowing that the story was out there, not wasting away as a Word file on my computer or in some editor's in-tray.
That was one of the best nights of my life, and it happened because I'd determined that this year I would make progress by having fun -- always making my enjoyment greater than my effort.
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Hamish MacDonald is the author of three novels: doubleZero, The Willies, and Idea in Stone. You can buy his hand-bound books or download free e-books of his novels from hamishmacdonald.com
Hamish lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
