Thriving in the Darkest Hour

I read an awesome blog post by Robin LaFevers the other day on Writer Unboxed. It's about how a writer can not only survive but thrive in that "almost there" phase before they get an agent and a pub deal. It spoke so deeply to me, because I've been in that "almost there" phase, or the "Dark Night of the Soul" as Robin put it, for well over a year now. I was a semi-finalist in one online writing contest, and won my age category in another popular online pitch contest, but the agents that requested ended up passing. I got very complimentary feedback from an agent that loved my writing but had something too similar, and requests to submit my future work from a couple others. In essence, it's been an extremely frustrating period of near misses. A period of good, but not good enough.


Reading Robin's post was like a beacon in my dark night, and inspired me to keep at it with gusto. Not that I was thinking of quitting, but it enabled me to smell the roses again. In her post she talks about using this phase in your pre-career to really amp up the excellence in your craft. So, being the list freak that I am, I decided to list out what I felt were the main elements of a story, with the sub-elements that make a novel delicious. My goal with this is to take an honest look at how I stack up in these various areas, both overall and for each book I've written, since each book is of course a unique creature. Here's the list of elements I came up with:

• Character
  • Depth, details, uniqueness
  • Motivations
  • Emotions
  • Relationships
  • Dialogue
  • POV
  • Character voice
  • Arc
  • Antagonists
  •  
• Plot
  • Concept – new or archetypal?
  • Scenes
  • Pacing
  • Tension
  • Hooks and Cliffhangers
  • Turning points – inner and outer
  • Twists/surprises
     
• Voice/Style/Skill
  • Writer’s voice/style
  • Skill with words, mastery of craft
  • Structure
  • “Feel” of the story
  • Ability to immerse reader
  • Subtext
     
• Worldbuilding
  • Description – range from lush to minimal
  • Visual and full-sensory experience of reader
  • Details – whether real or fantasy world
  • Setting as character 

So, writer friends: have you experienced a dark time in your writing career? What do you think of the list above - what did I miss? How do you self-evaluate?


I'll let you know how my self-evaluation process goes. I've been reading writing craft books and I have some other exercises to experiment with. Whatever you're up to, I hope the summer is unfolding beautifully!