Focus… or lack thereof

There’s a saying you hear a lot when you are single and depressed about the lack of good men around. Some sympathetic, well-meaning, and incredibly grating person will come by, pat you on the shoulder and say, “It will happen when you stop looking for it.”

What the heck is that supposed to mean? If I sit alone in my little room all day, Prince Charming will come riding up on a white steed and sweep me off my feet? Bull. It will NOT happen when I stop looking for it.

No one ever says that about the publishing industry. In fact, the prevailing wind around here blows, “You miss every shot you don’t take,” (read: keep looking sweetie, or you’ll never find it.)

But it occurred to me this morning that that’s exactly what happened to me. For a year, I did NOTHING all day but chase after that contract. I didn’t have a full-time job, or an apartment, or anything that distracted me from an all-consuming obsession with “the industry.” I went to conferences and entered contests and and queried agents and participated in thirteen separate internet writing loops, not to mention running a contest and serving as a board member. I had NO LIFE. My friends were all writers.

Amazingly enough, I didn’t write much during this time. And every single shudder of the publishing roller coaster hit me like a shock wave. Naturally, It was all I had going on.

On January 17th, I packed up and moved to Washington, D.C. Two days earlier, in the midst of packing, during a whirlwind tour of restaurants designed to get me ahead of schedule in my food critic job, I came up with the idea for (Secret) Society Girl. It was right there, in between the bruscetta and the cioppino. I told my boyfriend that it was a really fabulous, amazing idea and I was going to sell it. He shook his head, told me I had four outstanding full manuscript requests, a cross-country move, and a job search to deal with.

Fine. (In his defense, I’d been telling him the same thing every time I got an idea for the last three years.)

I moved across the country, I looked for a job, and I finished those full requests and got them out the door. I had another manuscript that I should have been working on, but this was the story I wanted to write next. I didn’t have steady internet, so I disconnected from the vast majority of my writing lists.

I started (S)SG in a tea shop right after my job interview for my current job. I wrote the first chapter while waiting to hear if I got it. I wrote the third chapter during my first week, and edited the partial on my lunch breaks. One of my new cowrokers copyedited my pitch. I was packing for my move into my new apartment when I got the first agent offer, and in a UHaul when I got the second. The auction took place in the midst of me training for my new job.

Was I writing any less? No, in fact, I was writing more. And I was still submitting. But what had changed was that I had, in effect, stopped looking for it. I’d broadened my focus — no longer “Sell a book, and you’ll be a complete person” but “Be a complete person, regardless of your publishing status.” (This was a very difficult step, by the way, since I was incredibly unsatisfied with all aspects of my professional life, not just my fiction-writing one, and was depressed enough to almost believe that I was already too late.)

I think, when we become too focused, too obsessed, with this one goal, then the desperation begins to show. We’re like the woman who goes to a bar every night, hoping against hope that Mr. Right will be there. When she lets go, joins a class or a gym, or a political activism group, has some fun, forgets about how badly she WANTS to meet a nice guy, then he shows up. She’s still available, she hasn’t stopped putting herself out there or taking those shots, but it’s no longer her all-consuming, single, focused desire. She’s going out becuase she ENJOYS (what she’s writing) going out, not because it’s the hot new (market) nightclub where her friends found (contracts) guys. She won’t accept the sleazy, easy (sketch agent/house) guy just because it’s better to have someone than no one. She knows she’s better than that.

She has her focus where it belongs.