Writing Ups and Downs

Writing is a profession of ups and downs. 

This morning, I started out up.  I created a map of the small fictional town in Colorado which figures prominently in a historical series I am writing.  It felt good to complete the sketch because I am on the third book in the series, and I was worried I might inadvertently start moving the buildings around, or some such thing.  No one wants to be the writer who places a particular shop on the east end of town in one story but moves it to the west side in the next story.  I paged through my manuscripts until I was sure I had all of the key locations properly pinned down. 

After that, I sat down and wrote over 500 words in a pretty short time span.  I thought I was on a roll that would last all day, and started making a mental list of everything I thought I might accomplish.

Then I started working on a query letter.  And the gods brought me back down to earth in a hurry.  Writing a query letter may be the most dreaded task you can ask a writer to do.  Writing a synopsis might top it, but both are painful, so there is simply no winner in that particular contest.  Working on the query letter brought my gleefully productive day to a screeching halt. 

It reminded me of a funny-but-not-really image a writing friend shared. 

 
I would like to say “thank you” to the person who created this image, because it does a nicely pithy job of summing up my feelings and those of many other writers.  I could give you a long list of household chores I would rather do than write a query letter or a synopsis, but they are both necessary tools when trying to sell a story.  So we eat a lot of chocolate (well, I do anyway) and write them.

I considered reusing an older version of my query letter, but truthfully, it needs to be revamped.  And since I owe pages to a couple of agents I spoke to at a conference recently, the revamping needs to occur now.  It has made for a long afternoon, and I don’t feel nearly as productive as I did this morning.

Definitely a downer. 

Writing a good query letter takes time, and I started this one a few days ago.  But I’m close to having one that is ready to use.  A faint hint of cautious optimism is swirling around me, nudging me back toward an upswing.  So I’ll continue tweaking until I think the letter is ready to send. 

But I won’t really know if it was ready until I see the results of sending it out into the submitting ether.  Writing is a profession of ups and downs.  Submitting and never getting a reply can bring a writer down.  Receiving a request – or better yet an offer – which started with a query letter is one of the ups all writers strive for.

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