Congrats on Finishing Your Quarantine Novel
By Bill Ferris | March 6, 2021 |
Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.
Happy Quarantiniversary! Time flies, does it not? Now we’re one year into the pandemic, and many of you reading this have already been vaccinated. It’s time to celebrate not just the prospect of life returning to normal, but also your forthcoming literary success. When all this nonsense started, writers everywhere said, “This sucks, but at least I’ll have more time to write.” A whole year has gone by, and based on how much extra writing time you had, you must be putting the finishing touches on your novel, right? Right?!
Let me remind you of my advice from a year ago:
They say Shakespeare wrote King Lear during the plague. This is not inspirational; this is the baseline. Shakespeare didn’t have wifi. With the tools you have at your disposal, and with the abject terror you have as motivation, you should expect nothing less of yourself than to create an artistic masterpiece that high school English students will write formulaic essays about for the next several hundred years.
And now that you’ve put in all that hard work for the last twelve months, you get to reap the rewards. It must feel good, after a year of wondering whether you will live or die, to know that you at least have an artistic triumph to show for it. I mean, how bad would you feel if you hadn’t finished your book? It’s a good thing you’ve used all of this extra time at home wisely! Had you not done that, why, that would be enough of a failure to cause a full-blown existential crisis! Ha ha!
photo by Matthew Dillon
Now that you’ve written your magnum opus, here are just a few of the wonderful things you can look forward to in the weeks and months ahead, all made possible by the fact that you finished your book:
Book your book tour to promote your book. Think of all the places you can go! With a book to promote, you’ll have an excuse (and the funding!) to visit all the places you’ve been dreaming about during those dull months spent inside the same four walls.
Spend your newfound riches. Once you sign your famous-author contract, you can use your proceeds to buy a new house, since you’ve come to loathe the apartment you’ve been stuck in all this time. Perhaps a new car, now that you can afford gas money again after losing your job during the economic downturn.
Speak at conventions. Go interact with flesh-and-blood human beings, all of whom think you’re interesting and attractive.
Don’t those all sound terrific? I naturally saved the best for last:
Just relax. The last year has been hard on all of us, and in the United States, half a million people had it even worse. There’s no shame in taking some time off from writing to catch your breath and reflect on how lucky we are to be alive. If you do decide to give yourself a break, I unfortunately have no way of knowing whether you earned it by finishing your book, or if you’ve been too overwhelmed by encroaching disaster to write a single word. I think very highly of my readers, however, so if I see you taking time off to find some peace of mind, regardless of how much you’ve written, I’ll just go ahead and think of you as a success.
Share your amazing writing accomplishments (or lack thereof) in the comments!
[coffee]
After college, Bill Ferris (he/him) left Nebraska for Florida to become a rich and famous rock star. Failing that, he picked up the pen to become a rich and famous novelist. He now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and looks forward to a life of poverty and ridicule.
Not only that, but I typed the whole entire manuscript on my grandfather’s inherited typewriter (similar to the one in the photo), which is older than I am (and I’m old) with a fraying ribbon that just barely made it to The End. Now I have to find some postage stamps and hire a snail (perhaps wearing Bernie mittens) to take the ms to the publisher, who is waiting anxiously to receive it, having already set up the launch, the publicity, and dozens of post-pandemic bookstore events.
Love this.!
My debut novel came out last August, my second novel comes out this August. I wonder how many authors like myself have had the foresight and brilliant timing to squeeze TWO book launches into ONE pandemic? The in-person book festivals and speaking engagement and travel have been awesome, plus all of those readers browsing bookstores across the country, spotting my novel and saying, “This looks great! I am SO buying a couple of copies, and then I’ll tell my friends about it at a cocktail party!”
*sigh*
I have come to believe that ‘finished first draft’ may be the greatest of oxymorons, and I have produced one such oxymoron during this pandemic.
Thank you for your posts. They not only provoke humor, they re-emphasize the importance of humility.
I used COVID-time to find a read and critique group (Zoom of course) where we meet weekly without fail and am very close to finishing the memoir I started in March, 2020. (I don’t count the two chapters I wrote years before that, which I kept polishing like a vintage car.) This, despite a full-time job that did not diminish in workload through the entire past year.
There were many other things I neglected and projects I still haven’t gotten to: scanning in the 1,000s of photos currently stacked in shoe boxes or becoming fluent in French via Duolingo. But none of that would have mattered if I hadn’t accomplished the writing goal I set for myself. By the end of this month I believe I will be able to type THE END in my manuscript.
It proved to me that it wasn’t finding time that made this writing goal happen; I never did have more time during COVID than any other year. It was acting as if I expected to have more time and finding the motivation and focus to make writing a priority.
The “CoVid” novel (that I started about 30 years ago – and put down while I wrote 7 other books, dozens of songs, and struggled through the ups and downs of life and work) was finally finished during “quarantine” and published in December 2020. Those coveted reviews are slow in coming and I have no idea if the book is selling (or any of my books) because I can’t understand the Amazon algorhythms that rate and rank a title. I took the Leap of Faith and retired in January (since I was only marking time on the job when half of my duties disappeared!), mainly because I’m old and tired and have no idea how much time I have left in this world anyway. So, I published some of my songs, am trying to learn piano all over again, and making notes for a brand new book. Do I have the energy to write one more book? Especially one than spans from 18th Century France to the present? Ask me in a year. Right now I have to go play June’s Journey and watch the Hallmark channel; mindless activity seems more important these days, because I have no idea what I am doing from minute to minute.
Happy Spring everyone.
Bill, since you asked, a comprehensive list of my quarantine writing accomplishments is shown below:
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Yeah, I’m pretty much nailing this.
I long for the day teens write mediocre essays about my books for centuries after the fact.
Yours have become some of my favorite posts!