Someone's finally getting real.

That's what I first felt, reading Don Lee's Rumpus essay itemizing the brutal realities of the writing life.

Lee lays it down hard: “Pretty much everything about it  –  the act of writing, the act of publishing, especially the act of promoting –  is miserable. And it only gets worse as the years unfurl.”

Acknowledging upfront that his own writing has made a bit of money as well as given him a solid teaching career with a decent salary and benefits, Lee names the sibling truths:

• Making the work is a perilous journey, haunted,  self-doubting.

• Self-promotion, “pressure to perform and be charming and sell [oneself],” can be agonizing.

So can waiting for reviews, receiving bad reviews, or (worst?) no reviews.

Lee notes that “being a midlist writer is the most tenuous position in publishing...” He may not have considered how it feels to be a small press/literary writer, whose sales and fan base seldom register on any agent's or publisher's radar.

The pitch is your foot in the door, getting someone to be interested in your script/book.

I’m that door. My job is to find projects and submit them to the decision-maker.  

I work for Muse Productions, Inc. You’ve seen our films: American Psycho, The Virgin Suicides, Spring  Breakers. We are pre-production; we find a script, marry it with a director and actors, and find the money. Everything we do is finding the project and selling it to everyone. Pitching is the most important aspect of our job. 

It starts with my pitch of your pitch. I read your proposal and then if I’m interested I read your script. If I like your script, I turn it into two or three paragraphs to sell to my boss.

The unfortunate thing I’ve learned is that a bad pitch can hide a good script.

Your goal with a pitch is not to simply get me to read your work, you want to have already sold your script/book to me (publishers/producers) with the pitch. By reading the script I am simply getting the details and checking that it is as you have described.

With this article I can help you avoid common mistakes.

It wasn’t easy. In fact, it was one of the hardest things I have ever had to face. I was twenty-three when the demons of my childhood stepped out of the shadows and my world came crashing down.

When I was a child, an adult in my life sexually abused me. It went on for a while, and then it was over. I did what any child does when they find themselves shaken with fear. I hid. I somehow pushed the memories back into the deepest corners of my mind and I acted like the monsters were from a bad bedtime story rather than my life. I never found the courage to tell anyone, so I locked away the memories and did my best to forget.

Suddenly, and without warning, I was facing those demons again. For nearly twenty years I had found ways to avoid them. I had all but forgotten what happened, but now they had reappeared from the darkness and were showing their sharp teeth.

Six months into the search for an agent and publisher for my first book, I found myself singing this line from a John Prine song, “…felt about as welcome as a Walmart Superstore.” Indeed. A negative tailspin followed that will be recognizable to most writers: “You can’t write. Who are you kidding?” Sound familiar? I considered stuffing the manuscript into the lower drawer of my desk. Writers die a thousand deaths in this way.

In thirty years of practicing psychotherapy, I have worked with countless authors and artists who were under the spell of self-reproach. These were talented people who struggled with persistent feelings of inadequacy. In nearly as many years as a writer, I have faced my own dark hours suffering from the internal narrative that proclaims, “I am just not good enough.” Even our most successful writers are subject to troubling insecurity and episodes of self-doubt, ultimately undermining their creativity. 

I was leaving the gym the other day, feeling good, occupying that unique moral high ground between having just exercised and not yet eaten a cheeseburger. Theoretically, I could still eat kale for dinner and maintain my elevated moral status over the non-exercisers of the world. This will never happen, of course. Kale is disgusting and cheeseburgers are heaven, but I am not opposed to feeling theoretically happy and morally superior to enormous numbers of people for short periods of time.

As I made my way past the smoothie bar, already thinking about cheeseburgers, my keys slipped from my fingers and dropped to the floor, landing squarely on my foot. Before I could bend over to retrieve them, a woman walking into the gym bent down, picked up my keys, plopped them into my hand, and continued moving past me, so fast that I didn’t even have a chance to see her face. As I turned to proffer a thank you, she entered that medieval torture chamber where unfortunate souls ride stationary bicycles to nowhere while authoritarians in spandex shout at them for not going nowhere fast enough.

The works of Flannery O’Connor can be found in almost any library. Hailed as one of America’s greatest fiction writers, her works – including such notable pieces as A Good Man is Hard to Find, Wise Blood, and Everything that Rises Must Converge– line the shelves in any self-respecting book collection. The work of this southern gothic writer has been captivating people for decades. Even readers who don't particularly enjoy her writing would be surprised to learn this one remarkable fact about Flannery O'Connor: she wrote some of her best works while fighting lupus, a debilitating inflammatory disease. This battle would shape her faith, her writing, and her life– and ultimately end it all.

O’Connor grew up in Savannah, Georgia, quite literally beneath the shadow of the Catholic church. When I visited her childhood home one cool September day– my legs tingling with nerve pain from my own long-term health problems– I saw her cradle in an upstairs bedroom; the steeple from St. John’s Cathedral across the square filled the window above it. I was shown the bathtub where she used to gather her friends and read Grimm’s Fairy Tales to them, which would send them home terrified, producing irate parents coming back later on. I learned how her faith and her worldview shaped her writing, and I realized what a blow it must have been to both of those to be diagnosed with such a terrible disease so young.

"Have I taught you nothing?"

That's what my best friend asked me when I told her that my husband and I had decided to build a house. Her family had recently survived their own construction chaos, and because they lived in a distant zip code, she had shared her travails with me in our almost-daily emails. After I'd been a digital witness to her seemingly endless ordeal, how could I consider stepping into the same excavated pit?