It was good. Kind of weird to be at a mostly-professional convention. Aside from the autograph session, there were no fans in site. Most everyone was pretty much my colleague. And it did, to some extent, do what it said on the label: I talked with people about agent stuff and book deal stuff and all kinds of stuff that’s a little bit beyond “What are editors looking for” and “How can I make my story jump out of the slush pile.” It was also much less awkward than I normally feel at a convention. Still a little awkward, but, you know. I imagine that once I’ve gone to three or four more of these, I’ll feel even more tapped-in. Or maybe I’ll be totally over it =)

Well, I got here! I am exhausted. But I also had a really exhilarating five day drive. I got a lot of great thinking done. Whenever I drive cross-country,  people always tell me to take it easy and maybe see something along the way (or they tell me to try to do it in three days, which is just insane). But I don’t know how people do that. I always get so zoned into the highway that stopping feels out of the question. The closest I came to a sight-seeing stop on this trip was taking fifteen minutes, at a highway rest stop, to stand on Utah’s Bonneville Salt Falts (they were awesome–you’re basically standing on a sea of death. There are dessicated insects all over the top of it).

The thinking that I do while driving is utterly unlike any of the thinking that I do in the rest of my life. I think maybe it’s because driving is utterly unlike anything else I do. It’s basically sitting down for eight hours and staring straight ahead. But you can’t fully zone out because you need to maintain the minimal concentration needed to avoid hitting something. It’s a bit like the thinking that I do when walking, I guess, but I never walk for a whole day.

Anyway, I thought about my life and all kinds of other things (like the edits that I want to make to This Beautiful Fever). But mostly my life. Good times.

I wrote Monday’s post last Thursday, so I’ve gone a week without thinking about this blog. Err…so…I am spending the summer in Berkeley. And I decided to drive there. I’m surprised no one has questioned this decision: it was obviously extremely cost-ineffective. Flying would’ve been substantially cheaper. And you don’t really need a car to live in Berkeley.

The truth is, I just really like to drive. And I like driving across the country the best. This is my fourth time going between SF and DC. I’ve now done (/slash am doing) it by all four major routes: I-10/I-20, I-40, I-90, and (now) I-80. I guess there’s also I-70, but whatever.

When I drive across country, I don’t really _do_ anything. Sometimes I stop and visit a friend, but I actually don’t have very many friends who live between the coasts. And when I’m on the highway, I get way too zoned-in to want to stop and drive.

I do my best thinking while driving. I can never go on a trip of longer than 500 miles without having some kind of epiphanic moment. However, my last two cross-country trips were marred by these horrible headaches that I developed halfway through, which turned the rest of the trip into an endurance test. This time, I’ve been wearing my contacts and a pair of sunglasses (one of my recent epiphanic moments was realizing that sunglasses actually have a purpose outside merely looking cool), and the headache has remained at bay.

Some solid thinking has been done and is being done. Also, some useful thinking. I just got back some notes on This Beautiful Fever from my agents (really, really good notes) and I’ve been slowly plotting out the changes I’m going to make. I think the major thing writing-related insight I’ve had this year is that at some point you need to rigorously interrogate your own text and ask all the questions that you avoided while writing it: What does this character want? Why does this event happen? How did this custom arise? Why don’t they use this technology to solve that problem?

It’s difficult and annoying work, but the result opens up startling new possibilities.

Err, well…at least I hope it does.

Writing about the conceptual breakthroughs I’ve had as a writer seems a bit pointless, since they’re not really the sort of insights that another person can take and use. I think this is the problem with writing advice. For the person who gives it, it’s always very true and deeply felt. But for the hearer, it’s just words. The advice is a verbal tag that’s given to a set of behaviors and thinking patterns that can be summoned by the tag, but not described by it.

Most of my conceptual breakthroughs have been really simple. In 2011, I realized that I needed to start doing a lot more rewriting if I was going to eliminate some of the bagginess and silliness in my stories. Then, last year, I realized that voice was one of the most important elements of a story, and that if the voice was missing, the story wasn’t ever going to be particularly readable.

And lately, I’ve realized that I need to interrogate my stories a bit more deeply and start trying to think harder about the choices I am making and about how everything fits together. Usually, I am content to work out everything on an intuitive level. But there does come a time at which intuition can no longer be allowed to run amok.

With my latest story, I’ve started jotting down questions that I have about the story: “Why is the character doing this?”, “What are the characters talking about in this scene?”, etc. And then I just think about the answers to these questions. When I wake up and shower and walk around outside, I think about the answers to these questions. Eventually, an answer comes to me, and then I think about that answer. It’s a very halting, grinding process, since each answer brings up more questions. And whenever one part of the story gets built, then all the weight shifts and falls upon another part. The temptation, for me, is to always proceed and build up the strongest and most well-realized part of the story and, thus, to deflect attention away from the weaker parts.

But with this story, I am forcing myself to work on the weaker parts before I address the stronger parts. I think that if  I can figure out what is happening in the weaker parts—in the backstory, in the setting, in the motivations—then the stronger parts will be richer and more confident.

Of course, it’s just a supposition at this point, since the story is far from being completed. It’s entirely possible that I will abandon it entirely. It’s astonishing how far I’ve gotten on so many stories before eventually abandoning them.

It’s possible that this knucklehead was the first one to come up with the saying, but I don’t believe it. More likely he was just the first and famousest person to write it down.

In a recent email to a friend of mine, I used some variation of the old proverb, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” And I was kind of surprised to find that my friend thought this was an aaaamazing saying! She emailed back to tell me how much she loved it! And then she posted about it on her Facebook wall!

I was like, “Hmm…I mean, it is a pretty great saying, I suppose…wait…what…does she think that I came up with that myself?”

It was only after talking to her later that evening that she was like, “My god, Rahul. You are so clever. That thing that you made up will percolate through the ages.”

Of course this is kind of a humorous story, but I think it illustrates something important. I’ve said and written a lot of witty things, but no words that I have ever produced in my whole life has caused the same kind of instantaneous reaction in another person that this hoary old proverb caused in my friend. She was driven to not only reply to me, but also to go on Facebook and share it with other people.

That’s the power of great writing. I mean, there’s definitely a social aspect to success. If I didn’t have any friends, then nothing I could say would ever achieve any traction. If I didn’t have the confidence to deploy my writing at the right time and place, then no one would ever see anything I wrote. But none of that matters if the content–the writing itself–doesn’t have that power to shock people and affect them in a way that ordinary words don’t.

I think that’s something I often lose sight of in ordinary life, just because I spend so much time: a) criticizing the flaws in great art; and b) being praised for the goodness of my good art. And those are fine things. It’s worthwhile to learn from Dickens’ flaws. And the enjoyment that people get from my stories is real, honest enjoyment. But still, there is something in Dickens that compels me to talk about him all the time. And that thing is, for most people, missing from my own writing.

I’m totally sure that if I actually had created a phrase that was good as “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” then that shit would right now be going viral and getting retweeted and shared all across the internet. Brilliant stuff has its own power. We just don’t recognize that because we are constantly saturated with brilliant stuff.

Although, sometimes brilliant stuff has so much power that it inspires people to create knock-offs that possess some fraction of the potency of the original. And these knock-offs use their borrowed energy to achieve a weak popularity. And then they flood the internet, and  although the knock-offs never quite achieve the success of the original, they still manage to get enough hits and views and sales and mentions that we all lose our faith in brilliant stuff and start thinking and saying that any old crap can become successful.

Winter and spring were very victorious times for me. I sold all kinds of stories and got into all kinds of MFA programs. Triumph is a very short-lived emotion. It feels very good for a day or a week and then it fades as if it never existed. But the point is that feels very good.

Summer was a bit more quiescent, but the lack of triumph was masked by all the angst and agony associated with writing my novel and then abandoning my novel and then writing the other novel and then moving and preparing for the program to start.

But now I feel ready for some more triumph. During odd moments, I find myself casting about for things to apply to or places to submit to. I haven’t fallen back into the trap of checking Duotrope obsessively, but I am uncomfortably aware all the stories that are out at markets for longer than usual. I just feel like I’m in a state of expectancy. I feel like it’s time.

Not for a big triumph, you know. I’m not expecting a novel deal or something. But selling a story? Yes, I do kind of expect that.

This is clearly not an optimal state of affairs, because I’m pretty sure the universe has no idea that I’m due for a triumph. Nor do I want to do anything differently in order to pursue such a triumph. I feel as if my life is fairly well-organized as it is. I’m writing and revising and submitting. Nor is it ever wise to feel like you’re owed some validation by strangers.

Still, the expectancy exists. It is difficult to dispel, and I am not really trying to do so. It’s a fairly pleasant emotion. There’s nothing anxious or obsessive about it, because there’s no element of uncertainty in it. I feel like the triumph is definitely coming…so I can afford to wait for a bit.

Of course, if the triumph is slow to get here, then I’m sure the emotion will mutate into something that I have to deal with. But…that’s a problem for another day (or maybe never?)

You can read it here.