The One Thing that Separates Published from Unpublished

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We have legs to walk. Hands to touch. Necks to look back.

Publishing is difficult for many reasons. There are at least a million writers in America with dreams of writing the great American novel. There are fewer publishers than a decade ago. The same websites that made newspapers obsolete ushered in the decline of the written word. Today, you have Tiktok, the NFL, politics, YouTube makeup tutorials, and AI-generated Taylor Swift articles to distract yourself.

In my work as an author and teacher, I love to hear my colleagues talk about revision. They talk about the clarity that comes after a draft is written and, weeks later, they return with a fresh brain to work out the sticking points.

But when I ask unpublished writers how they feel about revision, 7 out of ten times, they complain about how terrible revision feels. To them it feels like punishment or like stepping in something because your neighbor forgot to curb their dog.

It’s clear to me that this difference explains a lot about the difference between published writers and aspiring writers. I’ve written some first drafts that I was positive were publishable. But they didn’t get published.

Maybe mick Jagger really did scribble the lyrics to Brown Sugar on the back of a napkin and head straight to studio. But I’m no Mick and neither are you. The rest of us must work to earn our keep.

So how do we address this problem. How do we get hopeful writers to treat revision like the gift it is?

I believe it all comes down to how we frame our challenges.

When I was growing up, Dad worked six days a week selling used cars and later new cars. Fords. Good American cars. He’d come home around 8 pm with a palette of Chinese food cartons for dinner. After we ate, he’d collapse on the sofa, his elegant black socks still on his feet. Sometimes, he fell asleep on our massive couch next to the orange brick fireplace. Sometimes he read the paper. It all looked like a post-modern Norman Rockwell painting, a scene from the American Dream that once seemed possible, even likely for most people. (RIP American Dream 1955-2008). Still, I felt bad for Dad sometimes. He worked all the time.

Yet, one thing he never did: complain. He made great money selling those cars and provided a nice house and cars for the whole family. But occasionally he’d find even more things to do. Like the time he filed for an LLC and started his own garbage disposal company. He got a contract from the federal government, but before you have visions of Dad standing in front of a fleet of dump trucks, let me assure you it wasn’t that glamourous.

The one clear memory I have of that scheme is going with Dad to a Levee near the Lower Ninth Ward and picking up scraps of litter. Later, after he was gone, and I began to really look back on his life, I realized that he was never a one-job person. I learned that before I was born, he owned a restaurant and later sold reams of carpet he bought wholesale. To the very end, he’d do anyone’s taxes for less than the national chains.

I understand now that my father really liked to provide, but more than that he just liked to keep busy, to use his brain.

When I was writing my first stories, years would pass before I sought out help from a writing instructor. He would tell me to fix this or that. I felt like a fool because either I’d wonder why I hadn’t thought of the fix he suggested, or I’d have no idea what he was talking about.

But I was on a mission to finally get a story published so I stuck with it.

When I was writing my first novel, We Cast a Shadow, I wrote a draft that I was proud of. I shared with peers and mentors who told me what worked and what didn’t. But I would read sections in public and get a great response. Why should I revise? Why should change even a comma?

This is where the story ends for most writers. Sure of the strength of the work, they send the manuscript off once, thrice, a dozen times. Crickets.

It dawns on the writer that publication was never meant to be. Game over.

But that’s the absolutely wrong takeaway. I believe we’ve been deprived of some truly incredible work due to this mindset.

The writer should have taken weeks, months, or even longer to re-read the manuscript and debate the appropriateness and wrongness of the comments they received. Only then could the writer make the revisions that fit their artistic vision.

Time is a challenge, of course. Everyone is busy. But busy doing what? I worked through college and law school. When I came home, I’d play John Madden football for hours. One day, I realized I could spend those hours making my own future. That was when I started reading craft books. Later, that ex-Madden time became the time I used to go to grad school for creative writing.

I returned to my We Cast manuscript. Suddenly, that first chapter that worked so well when I performed it looked like one of my kindergarten

drawings. Charming, but only to those who loved me. And too, my attractive performance style made up for some of the shortcomings of the text. Most importantly, I realized that I didn’t like the tone of the story and where that led readers.

This was when I popped the hood on the manuscript and began to figure out which parts were broken and which simply needed to be cleaned.

Years later, after I got final version of the manuscript back from my editor, I realized how far the book and me had gone. I understood how revision allowed me kill my darlings, pick up the pace, and polish the language to a brilliant sparkle.

I realized that revision was never work. It’s play. I enjoy it far more than I ever enjoyed playing video games or reading posts about Ms. Swift.

Thanks for reading the 50th edition of my newsletter!

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Lastly, for my birthday on September 20, I’m giving away 20% off to all new yearly subscribers. That’s right. 20%! Here’s the link. Please share if you like.

https://mauricecarlosruffin.substack.com/theamericandaughters20