A Writer's Advice: Get Comfortable with Your Ambition. It's Not Going Anywhere.

As an unpublished fiction writer, I suffer from the anxiety and nagging agitation of unfulfilled need. The need is for confirmation, which traditionally should take the form of finding a way into print.

However, as a fiction writer, there is a wealth of advice available as to how to achieve this kind of confirmation. Write and be patient. That is what most of the advice boils down to. Write and be patient.

Every few months I find myself engaged once again in an especially poignant episode of despair. When will "it" happen? I always want "it" to happen now, today, this week, at least this year.

But first I need to do some more editing, more writing, more thinking, and yes, more agonizing. That is the reality of my situation and the reality of my ambition.

I don't want to develop a twelve step self-help plan or anything like that. However, certain confessions must be made.

I confess that I have a relationship with my specific ambition (getting published). This ambition is no longer a simple impulse. It is not a character trait. It is a companion.

As Billie Holiday sang about her friend heartache, you can try to dispel the ghosts in your inner life but just because you try doesn't mean they are going anywhere. And, as Holiday ultimately invites heartache to "please, sit down", since it's not leaving, I will ask my ambition to sit down. We'll have a ten year chat, if need be. It's already been ten years since it started standing around tensely, pacing like a tiger in a too small cage, like a Huskie in Texas, out of its element and longing for release...I am going to hold hands with it for a while, pet its head. I am going to write and be patient.

To help me to this, I am considering a radical move.

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As I continue to despair of and agonize with thoughts about getting in print, I do slowly learn patience. Only patience can assuage the agony - until a publication day finally arrives of course.

Patience can do so much for us as writers. Nearly all advice thrown around by successful writers points to patience. Keep writing, they say. Just keep doing the work. It takes patience to keep writing stories and books that only one person will read (that person is you, most of the time).

If you are like me, then all the friends who were encouraging for the first five years of your writing adventure have given you all they can. They read your work, though it was bad, and they helped to solidify for you the idea that you are indeed a writer. Now that you know you know and your friends know that you know, they don't have time to read your work anymore. It's better now, you tell yourself. It's too bad that they spent their allotted reading time on you when you were still such a spring chicken of a writer.

You keep writing, patiently, doggedly, working at it and doing all your own editing - which you must do. No story is a one draft story. Well, almost no story is a one draft story.

You finish the first draft and love what you've done. Then, coming back to it after a period of exercised patience, you see that revisions are (very) necessary.

Then you do the editing and get excited again and throw away your patience. Or, that's what I do.

In an effort to force myself not to lose sight of the positive utility of patience, I am considering a radical move. I am going to put a moratorium on myself. I am not going to show anyone anything for a year. Ok, six months will be enough.

I will write and work as much as ever or more than ever and I will not show any of my fiction to anyone. I won't request any rejection letters from the magazines and journals. I won't be disappointed when friends "forget" to reply to my emails with whole books attached.

I will be patient and work and wait.

When the moratorium ends, I will have two or three third draft (or fourth draft) short stories of 2,000 words each. Only then will I casually email a friend and announce the existence of three new short stories. Only then will I mail these three short stories to Tin House magazine or Zyzvvyza or the Santa Monica Review.

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For those interested, these publications accept online submissions of un-agented writers.

Tin House literary magazine accepts online submissions.

Elimae literary magazine accepts online submissions.

Read about Tin House.