Source: None via Trish on Pinterest
As I send off my synopsis and five pages to Arthur Levine (of Arthur Levine Books at Scholastic) tonight, I’m reminded about just how codependent I am. I need this editor to like my pages or I think I will just die.
Honestly, I conform to peer pressure in publishing as a kids book writer like I’m an amateur, as if I’m a baby duck learning to stay afloat. It’s the only thing I really conform to in my professional work. I’m completely differentiated in so many other ways: I don’t care at all if my editorial clients like or hate my work or like or hate me, I’ve run out of patience with authors who revise so fast they don’t really revise at all, and as an author of blog posts all over the web these days (at some prestigious blogs, mind you), I can go toe-to-toe with any commenting readers: they are mad, insane, bat shit crazy, venomous, you name it, I’ve seen it.
Truthfully, this codependent slice of my psyche bothers me.
Perhaps it’s because it really IS me. This manuscript I’m working on represents the purest sense of self that I own. I can shield myself behind a mask as an editor or critique partner or agent and I can hide underneath a thick skin of marketing terminology when I write for the top marketing blogs, but when I write a book for kids, I take all those masks off, peel back my protective scabs, and am just skin, open to any hits that are still to come. I am preparing to be wounded.
It hurts too. Those wounds. It is really hard to hear that you’ve once again started your book in the wrong place, your voice tells more than it shows, and your world-building skills are lacking in that generic, can’t-tell-much-of-a-difference-between-this-world-and-any-other way.
But there are four stages of learning: from amateur to professional:
- Unconscious Incompetence
- Conscious Incompetence
- Conscious Competence
- Unconscious Competence
At least I am consciously incompetent, which is better than the first step. And I always feel this way when I am learning something new that I’ve never done before. Don’t you?
It’s really hard to feel like you’ve got any talent, natural or otherwise, when the only thing you can see is what you’re doing wrong.
But I’m not going to give up. This is just the beginning.
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