Satisfaction -- Garbo

In the past forty years, occasionally I've delivered writing work that wasn't all it could have been, and yet I still had good feelings about what I'd written.  

Sometimes the work was for a newspaper or magazine and the deadline for the piece was abruptly moved up. They needed 2967 words to fill the space between two advertisements, one for sofas and one for coffee tables. They couldn't get the issue to press till that void in the middle of the page was full of words.  Despite short notice I sent  in 2967 words (mentioning an upholstered sofa and an attractive coffee table in there somewhere) and all was well with my employer. I even got a check afterward. If a clipping of the article came along with the payment, I stuck into the plastic portfolio folder  without a re-read. I knew the article wouldn't be bad during the second reading weeks after I wrote it, but it probably wouldn't seem all that good either. But it had been the right length and on time, which were the important things. 

Sometimes, as a freelancer, I had plenty of notice but other factors turned what could have been an opportunity to express myself into a challenge to overcome. One time, I remember, I'd had bronchitis for three weeks and then the baby got colic and kept us up four nights running. And I was supposed to be penning a happy, happy thing; what I submitted didn't, at least, reflect at all the fact that while typing away, I'd been wondering if  I mightn't just expire and  be found hours later with my face on the keyboard, my nose pressing hundreds of lower-case n's into the word processor. 

There have been times when I was proud if I wrote anything at all. Like most writers, I had a day job. Or rather, I had day jobs. Sometimes night jobs. A few of these offered down time in which I could scribble in a notebook. Sometimes there was a lengthy bus commute and I'd make notes on the back of envelopes or whatever I could find, often using a golf pencil I'd put into my coat pocket at the public library.  I'd get up early some mornings and type into the computer before the day started, or chug iced green tea at 11 pm and try to get in a chapter before I crashed into bed at midnight. The quality of my work suffered in these periods, but I was glad I'd done something, anything, with words that day. 

Once in a while,  often just when my morale had begun to dip, a bit of praise or appreciation got me feeling good again. I was happy when a short story was selected for an anthology with really good writers in it. One time I got a good book review in a big newspaper. A year or two after that, after a reading, a couple came up and  told me they'd driven an hour and a half each way to  hear me do a literary thing in a university library. The vent was held in a space which got pretty full once about forty folding chairs were set up in it. 

I've also been able to keep writing after some disappointments. There was the time my house burned down with the only copy of my nearly-finished manuscript inside. (I was able to recover the novel, but that's a story for another time.) And my career hit a real sour note after a submission when an editor called me on the phone to tell me that "No one wants to read stories about the lives of middle-aged women." At the time, I was about thirty-two or thirty-three. I wouldn't say that being rocked back on my heels by difficulties made it pleasanter or easier to write, but it sometimes motivated me to work in "I'll show them" mode.

These challenges and feel-good moments haven't really been the reasons I've continued to write. I've  kept going, actually, because I've found a way to be happy doing it. 

The Tarot cards the Seven of Pentacles and the next one in the deck, the Eight, show someone doing a chore type of job and then an artisan at work. The first person is looking at what they've done so far and evaluating their progress. The second person has gotten back to work and has honed in on a better outcome. If I think about these ideas in terms of my writing, then I'd say my adaptation to happiness comes from evaluating what I've written and then putting in the effort to make the writing project better. 

To make the fire brighten inside my creative furnace, I give myself the satisfaction which comes from  applying myself. When choosing the words and putting them together, I go to the highest level of my capability. This wasn't always so.

 When I was younger, I wrote in a looser, sloppier, highly-expressive way. I had my reasons. Won't bore you with those here. But now I am choosier with my subjects, with my word choices, with the structure of each sentence. 

I've matured enough to make my own happiness. But another was to say "matured" is "gotten old." I'm isixty-two years old, and my next birthday's closer than the last one to the present moment. What I create now will serve as my legacy. When I'm gone, this work is what I'll have left behind for the world to read. 

Thus, when I've completed the fourth draft of something I wished I could be done with before I even starting a third draft, I  evaluate the final product and it feels great when I see that I've done my best. Those moments are truly satisfying. 

Oddly, I find it even more satisfying sometimes when I happen to come across pages I've forgotten about, having mentally filed them under Ideas Which Didn't Work Out As Well As I'd Hoped, only to find the words are better, sometimes even much better, than how remembered them.

 This happened to me during the last week. In particular I was looking at a story which I began writing for the wrong reasons, and perhaps at the wrong time in my life. I started out typing merrily, believing this would be something i could sell easily. At that time, I was feeling  pressure to produce more cash flow. Writing fiction wasn't the best way to make that happen, and I  set the story aside and took on a part-time job. I told myself it wasn't very good anyway.

But looking through the manuscript again a few days ago, I saw that a particular description of a small stone house was really quite nice. The plot was well thought out, and the characters were detailed and appealing. I realized i'd been throwing shade on my own project because, long ago, I hadn't thought anybody with checkbook privileges would give me a decent payment for my tale. Now I see the work as it is: needs some tightening up here, some filling out there, but pretty good as it is. 

To balance it all out, funnily enough, a day later I found a separate, stray page from the same long tale. That page was a mess.  I saw many margin scribblings. Clearly, there were a number of edits I'd overlooked when I'd finally put the story out into the world. The markup only went down half this messy page, and a glance through the remaining paragraphs showed me places where more improvements should have been made at the time. 

Tomorrow morning, it'll be time to sit down with this befuddled page and fix it. That's okay. I suspect I will find both the process and the end result fulfilling.  Satisfactory, even.

Garbo

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