Writing careers are for crazy people. My new theory is that when the Reagan administration closed down all the state mental hospitals, it was in response to a dramatic upswing in fiction publishing. The people who should be in mental hospitals would find themselves a nice comfy spot somewhere on the shelves of bookstores across America and all would be well. Yes, there are several (thousand) holes in this theory and what else did you expect from a nutbag?

The other day, I remarked to one of my friends (who is sane enough to choose a career outside the fiction world) that I was “learning it all all over again” when she asked how my writing was going. She looked puzzled, and then there was a loud bang from the toy room and the subject (like so many of our conversations, being two mothers of small children) went into momspace (you know all those sentences your mother couldn’t ever finish from being spitting mad, or all those times she called you by all your siblings’ and two uncles’ names before she hit on yours? They go into momspace, just like all those extra brain-cells during pregnancy). Forgotten by us until later that night (much later), and I thought about why she’d looked so puzzled. Then I realized that from the outside, once you’re published, you’re “there.” It’s a perception that’s very logical–the assumption is that a person in a field trains, tests, and achieves competence in a field. For writers, people naturally assume that publication is the standard by which competence is measured.

To some extent, this is true–you have to demonstrate competence in technical aspects of writing and coherent storytelling to get past an editor at a publishing house, but there is no set point in writing when you can say you’ve “arrived.” Not if you want to keep doing it.

And it can be damn hard to separate the author from the writer, when that well-meaning friend (or not-so-well-meaning voice of self-doubt), “but you’ve already published a novel–don’t you already know how to do it?”

You have to re-learn it every time if you want to be a better writer. Every story is unique. There are shortcuts, and you can develop a writing process that allows you to consistently chart recognizable landmarks during your adventures in storytelling, but it’s a new thing every single time, and it can be scary to stand at that precipice and feel the deja vu yet still be confused about just where the hell you are and which end is up.