This past weekend, the Detroit Lions lost a tough game in the playoffs. It was more like a collapse, as they had momentum and swagger all through the first half. It was their game to win.
After decades without a playoff victory, this seemed their year. I joined with the community to hope that they might win, that this might just happen. We shared in that hope.
I live in Michigan but I’m not a true Lions fan. I grew up in Cleveland and I’m a Browns fan. So I know about tough losses. And I know about dashed hopes. The Browns have had some great teams offer hope to Cleveland, only to lose in the playoffs.
In 1980, the Browns lost to the Raiders, and in both 1986 and 1987 to the Broncos. Each game an epic collapse, unique but all too familiar.
I’ve been let down by the Browns so often that I’ve made arrangements for them to act as pallbearers at my funeral, where they can let me down one last time†.
The hardest part is the hope. Like Red told Andy in Shawshank prison, hope is a dangerous thing.
To Write is To Hope
Writing novels is like having children: they emerge from deep inside you, they require enormous amounts of your attention, and they’re never going to be exactly what you dreamed they’d be at the beginning, but will surprise you with how they turn out.
Like with children, you hope that novels turn out great.
Once you get the hang of writing longform stories, you end up starting a new one before the first one is completed, like Irish twins. If you’re not careful, you could wind up with three or four novels in diapers, stinking up the place, driving you nuts, never allowing you to rest.
It’s not quite that bad for me right now. I have one novel polished in the query stage while I write a second draft of another. But the recently completed one started while I was completing two others, and then I started the fourth over a year ago.
I think it’s a truth universally acknowledged that it’s easier to start writing a novel than to finally, actually, truly finish writing one.
The other universal truth is that novels aren’t finished; they’re abandoned.
How these two novels were conceived
The novel I’m currently writing was cleaved off of the novel I recently completed, a fertilized egg splitting and growing on its own. The cleavering happened years ago, and I love that both these stories will have grown up together, story siblings.
It all started as a TV pilot—a dark and dismal comedy—I wrote 17 years ago. I had recently finished shooting a short film and was itching to sell something to Hollywood. I had a weird idea for a sit-com and thought, Who wouldn’t be interested in a dark and dismal comedy?
Turns out, no one is interested in a dark and dismal comedy.
The show was about two hapless office workers in nameless corporate bureaucracy with no hope for advancement and surrounded by misfit office workers. But they all form a sort of family. Except they hate their place of employment.
They were beyond the cynicism of Seinfeld. They were nihilists. My pilot was a show about people who believe in nothing.
I showed this script for a dark, dismal TV pilot to a few people. They weren’t industry insiders, knew nothing about television that I didn’t know, and couldn’t provide any solid feedback. But they gave me emotional reactions to the story. The reactions weren’t good.
One reader commented, “I think you should talk to someone.”
Another asked, “If this is a sitcom, shouldn’t there be jokes?”
Everybody is a goddam critic
Nihilists can be funny, but they need a shred of decency and the possibility of emotional growth. My characters had none of that. I had some personal issues to work through, and that’s what came out in the writing.
After decades of writing in shame (I hid my stories from all my personal friends) that little bit of feedback helped me improve. I realized I had a lot more work to do.
It was around that time that I started seeing a counselor who helped me understand a few things about my emotional well-being. Also, I sought the help of writing coaches.
It took a few years, but, eventually, I found my way to a story development editor who helped me piece together working story elements from that first script. The two clumsy office workers at the heart of the TV pilot—men past their prime—were replaced by two sisters—young and hopeful—trying to navigate a treacherous corporation in a novel of suspense.
Still, the story didn’t quite work. I did some soul-searching as I revised and rewrote. What emerged was two stories that had been asking too much of one novel.
The first of those two is a novel I completed a couple of months ago called Ashley Undone.
The second one, Cubicle Farm, is my work-in-progress. I’m writing them in close succession because the creative energy for each of them is forever intertwined with the other.
It will be nice to have both Ashley Undone and Cubicle Farm done and pushed out of the nest. For one thing, I’ll immediately work on other projects I’ve been planning for the past few years.
I’d like to think these two current novels are commercial enough to pay off somehow after taking up so much of my life, but it’s impossible to know. They’re basically my story children at this point, and I’ve raised them for going on seventeen years. That’s fine for raising humans but definitely too long for a story.
Still, I’ll be proud of them, and they’ll take a great deal of me with them when they go out into the world.
I can’t know what the world will do with them. That’s not the job of a writer. We conceive the stories, breathe life into them, and send them out into the world.
What happens after that is beyond our control. Still, I hope they do great things.
Meanwhile, at My Writing Desk…
Obviously, I’m chipping away at this work in progress while quietly thinking about the next stories I want to write. It’s a challenge but this current novel is basically out of high school, and I just need to get them into college where they’ll be out of the house for a while, and I can conceive a new one, if you know what I mean.
Maybe You’d Like
I’m joining with authors to offer you new books:
https://storyoriginapp.com/to/Kgon8EI
Resilient Sheroes: An All-Genre Giveaway for Stories with Strong, Positive Heroines:
https://storyoriginapp.com/to/t8wn516
Recommended Reading
I finished The Dawn of Everything, which is a massive tome about human civilization. Please make the time to read it if you care at all about humanity (no pressure, though).
I’m starting to leave reviews on BookBub, if you want to check those out.
Next Picayune
I’ll be back around Valentines Day, and I’ll have a story about that most cooked-up of holidays. Until then…
Thanks for reading the Mickey Picayune. All the best,
Mickey
† I first heard the Browns-as-pallbearers joke in an obituary printed in the newspaper, which was the penultimate way to tell that joke. The ultimate way, of course, is to hire actual Browns players to be your pallbearers.