All Writers are Optimists

I am a glass is half-full kind of guy. I always have been, though for a while I found it difficult to maintain this optimistic outlook. This was at a time when what I was writing wasn’t being published. I really wanted to publish what I wrote. Nearly every day I thought about how much I wanted my work to be published and how it wasn’t. On most days, my publishing glass did not appear half-empty – it looked completely empty. I was not happy with my empty glass, but I believed I was being practical. After all, I wanted that glass to be full. How was I going to fill it unless I remembered it wasn’t full? That emptiness was the hole in my happiness, and all my energy was devoted to filling it. And yet the more I stared and stared at what I didn’t have, the more it seemed I had nothing.

What a strange way for a writer to think. Every story is begun with an empty page. It is the perfect vessel for any story, poem, essay, or novel. Yet I when I look at the blank page, I do not see my story glass as completely empty or even half-empty. That’s because, though my eyes are resting on the page, my attention is focused where the story actually exists, in my imagination, that unseen realm where all stories begin. The only way for the story to move from my imagination to the page is give it my full attention. Only then will I be able to extend that story to the page in the form of my first sentence. And then extend it further with my second sentence. And then my third sentence . . .

What a miracle. Where there was nothing, there is now something. Except there is always something. Publishing is merely another extension of the story we have told, the next sentence, so to speak, in the story of how I shared something I loved with other people. That was the great secret to publishing success: giving what I’ve written my full attention, whether I’d just begun it or had finished it. The truth is, I am not even a glass half-full kind of guy. I’m a glass is always full kind of guy. That glass, like the story I’m still writing, just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.