Tenacity Tales

Mood Tools Week 13: Build a Tenacious Mindset

As a writer in the murky middle of her career¹, I’m something of a collector of tenacity tales that allow a brief peek at the sweat and tears spilled behind the curtains that published writers sometimes draw across their workspaces.

Here are three of my favorites:

• As a beginning fiction writer, I found comfort in the creakiness of Ernest Hemingway’s original first paragraph of The Sun Also Rises:

  This is a novel about a lady. Her name is Lady Ashley and when the story begins she is living in Paris and it is Spring. That should be a good setting for a romantic but highly moral story. As every one knows Paris is a very romantic place. Spring in Paris is a very happy and romantic time. Autumn in Paris, although very beautiful, might give a note of sadness or melancholy that we shall try to keep out of this story.²

• In the sad, but necessary, moment after I closed the drawer on the novel I’d hope would be my debut³, I found comfort—and laughed my ass off—reading Kira Jane Buxton’s essay in Writer’s Digest about how her own rejection emboldened her to break ground on the hilarious Hollow Kingdom, a novel about the human apocalypse narrated by S. T. a foul-mouthed domesticated crow. Hollow Kingdom gave me dozens of belly laughs, but Buxton’s essay—“How to Protect Your Artistic Integrity: Let Go of Expectations”— was the hug I needed to move on.

• And when I most needed permission that it was OK to protect the flame of my writing dream from the punishing winds of long odds, there was Min Jin Lee—author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko—choking up during the 2018 Muse and the Marketplace keynote as she talked about the longing she felt during her long and winding road to publication. Lee’s address is the most uplifting and empowering speech I’ve ever heard about what it means to be a writer—faith, sweat, tears, and all. If you can’t watch it in its entirety now, do yourself the considerable favor of saving this post and watching it when you do have time:⁴

That said, as inspiring as these three tenacity tales are, I don’t love that publishing success seems to be a prerequisite for their telling. The train wreck of Hemingway’s original first paragraph comforts me because I know he revised it into the stunning opening paragraph of the published version of The Sun Also Rises.⁵ The only reason Buxton could make me laugh about my own writing failures was because she parlayed her own into one of the most hysterical books I’ve ever read. And I could only be moved as Lee wept at the memory of the longing she felt scrambling toward her writing dream because she’d become successful enough to be invited to give a keynote—the day before the talk, she’d been awarded a Guggenheim.

But as much as I loved Pachinko,⁶ I’m much less interested in the triumph at the end of her story—published books, awards, nominations, a gorgeously-shot limited series from Apple TV—than I am in the tenacity of the middle of her story.

Because we’re all in the middle of the stories of our writing lives, aren’t we? From the novice writer longing for the courage to write their very first words to published writers longing for a bigger audience or a movie deal or just the simple freedom to break free from their book club branding to write the comedy horror novel that makes them giggle, longing seems to be the universal writing condition.

Longing.

Longing.

Longing.

As much as the world celebrates outward markers of success, the triumph of writers shouldn’t be measured by the number of their book deals but by the strength of their tenacity. And tenacious writers are those who keep writing even when—maybe especially when—their longing feels like a road to nowhere.

Enter Rocky.

I recently re-watched the original Rocky movie and was was struck by two things:⁷

1. how glacial the pace of this 1976 Oscar winner felt compared to the whiplash pace of modern movies,⁸ and

2. how ballsy it was that Hollywood let Rocky lose the fight.

Because as big a winner as Rocky is in our collective psyche, he did technically lose the fight—while the viewer is focused on Rocky’s pulpy face and Rocky himself is focused on finding ADRIAN, the announcer in the background calls the split decision for Apollo Creed, who enjoys a brief moment of celebration before the camera finds its way back to Rocky.

Because there’s no question that Rocky’s the movie’s true champion, right? The night before the fight—after Rocky’s experienced his dark night of the soul in the empty spectrum—he sits on the edge of his bed and tells Adrian what success means to him:

“It really don't matter if I lose this fight,” Rocky says. “It really don't matter if this guy opens my head, either. 'Cause all I wanna do is go the distance. Nobody's ever gone the distance with Creed, and if I can go that distance, you see, and that bell rings and I'm still standin', I'm gonna know for the first time in my life, see, that I weren't just another bum from the neighborhood.”

Apollo Creed may have won the fight in the ring, but by going the distance, Rocky won the fight with himself.

Tenacity, then, is going the distance (even when that means you’re blind at the start of the fifteenth round as you mumble, “Cut me, Mick”).⁹

Look, I understand that it’s far easier to talk about the importance of tenacity than it is to actually feel tenacious. And I get how impossible it is to act tenacious when you don’t really feel it. In some ways this whole Mood Tools series about supporting your writing mindset is really just a handbook for tenacity. Because writerly tenacity isn’t some one-and-done grand gesture—it’s the sum total of a thousand tiny tenacities:

You’re being tenacious when you tame the dragons of your inner critics or trade your all-or-nothing thinking for all-or-something thinking.

You’re being tenacious when you set goals and track your progress.

You’re tenacious when you feel all your feelings—longing included.

You’re tenacious when you lean on your community for support and the magical thinking of mantras and talismans to get you to the page and help you stay there.

You’re tenacious when you can laugh at your writerly foibles and be patient when the work isn’t progressing as quickly as you’d like.

And you’re tenacious when you can be grateful for the writing practice you do have and when you regularly celebrate your writing wins, no matter how small. In fact, celebrating our smallest wins may be the single best thing we can do to build our tenacity muscles. Like Rocky defining success as going the distance against Creed, we can define what success means to us personally, and we don’t have to wait until after we’ve enjoyed traditional publishing success to tell our tenacity tales. Because tenacity is its own success story, isn’t it?

To be honest, I struggled to get this particular newsletter into fighting shape—I had so much to say that at one point Substack warned me my post was nearing terminal length.¹⁰ So I did what overwriters do best—I cut about two thirds of my post.

So since I clearly meant what I said in this essay’s opening sentence about being a collector of tenacity tales, I’m launching Tenacity Tales as HIBOU’s first rolling series.

On something of a sporadic basis—monthly maybe?—I’ll share new tenacity tales, both those I spot in the wild and (hopefully) your tales:

• Tell me about that first page you finally nailed or how you breathed life into that lifeless character.

• Or tell me about how you coaxed yourself back to the page after a disappointment or the silly limericks you write just for you.

• Or tell me about the time you threw out a late draft and started again.

• Or tell me about the time you could only keep writing my leaving yourself voice notes while walking your dog before you woke your kids up for school.

While I welcome the big Hollywood endings, too—who doesn’t love a feel-good publication story?—don’t be shy about telling me about tenacity happening in medias res.

If you have a tenacity tale you’d like to share, comment below or send me your pitch at hibou@substack.com.

In the meantime, I leave you with the tenacious spirit of The Italian Stallion:

1. Some people might say it hasn’t truly begun, but some people are jerks.

2. Some writer’s I know are completely demoralized by reading Hemingway at his worst—if even the master of clear prose wasn’t immune to rambling, what hope was there for us plebs? While I can understand that take, my take’s a little more optimistic. If a writer so revered for clarity edited this lifeless prose dump into the masterful opening paragraph we all know and love, then no first draft is so bad that editing can’t save it, not even mine! This was a powerful lesson to learn as a beginner, and I will be forever grateful to Lisa Borders for handing out the two first pages in the first fiction class I took as a writer.

3. Closed not locked, mind you. Hope springs eternal, etc. etc.

4. Be sure to have tissues handy.

5. “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly's star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn's distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met any one of his class who remembered him. They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion.”

6. No shade intended to Free Food For Millionaires, which is on my teetering TBR pile!

7. Spoilers ahead, but the movie has been out for 47 years, so if you haven’t seen it, that’s on you.

8. The big fight at the end lasts a mere 8 minutes of the movie’s full 159-minute run time. Maybe I’m just weary from the interminable action scenes in The Lord of the Rings and most Marvel movies, but I can’t imagine that Rocky and Creed’s showdown would be so fleeting if Rocky were remade today.

9. Metaphorically, of course. “Cut me, Mick” just has more of a ring to it than “let’s rip this manuscript apart for one more revision!”

10. Apparently, some email servers limit the length of emails, the jerks.