Roads to Joy

So yesterday I finished printing all of the programmes for our exciting concert presentation on Saturday. It was a labour of love throughout the day, which mostly involved wrestling with the wireless connection to the printer, orientating the paper so that the marginless printing worked as expected, and regular ink replenishment, until 167 copies of the programme reached the folding and boxing stage. All ready now.

I was looking for an image to illustrate how challenges can bring joy, and this little job, as plodding and as persevering as it was, seems to fulfill that brief. I’m that glad to have the things printed safely and in hand. But along the way, to keep the computer happy while it prompted the printer, I was busy with a bigger challenge: beginning the extensive re-write of my fourth novel, with its new working title From Silenced Voices.

When I got stuck into that task, working hard to locate and express motivations for my characters, motivations that are ringing true and that follow on consistently in time and place, I felt a definite sense of peace and delight. I think of the new process as a kind of ‘challenging joy.’ The re-write did not come, or should I say, my acceptance of the re-write challenge, did not come easily. At several points during the mentoring process that I’d been granted, I felt like, so like, throwing in the towel. I can’t do this, or I don’t want to do this, or any number of defeatist approaches raised their spectres and jangled my spirits.

But setbacks are useful if they make a writer sit up, listen and learn, I’m sure. Another aspiring writer recently revealed her decade-long odyssey to find representation and publication of her debut novel, in the ‘New Life after 60’ series that’s become a staple column at The Guardian. One of the aphorisms that kept her going was ‘Rejection is what makes you a writer.’ Maybe it’s the perseverance in the face of rejections that makes you a writer, but certainly the opposite is true, that without perseverance, dedication to the task, and somehow finding joy in the process, a person who writes cannot quite claim to be a ‘writer.’ A dilettante, yes, but a writer has to work hard, I think.

Intriguingly, however, setting the hundreds of rejections aside, the happy debut for the delighted ‘over 60’ author only came about after she took her novel off to a professional editing service to hone her craft. That’s about where I’m getting to, or will hope to be, when I’ve finished the re-write and again will have tried my very best to get it right.

Then I shall subject the re-written manuscript to yet another challenge, another professional read, and hope I’m closer to the novel I’ve been aiming for. Along the way, though it is hard, and I do have to insist to myself that I shall get through this, there is a certain joy, an intrinsic sense that perseverance is its own reward. Just getting through.

A bit like an evening of folding programmes, after a prolonged quest for accuracy, which settles my mind and brings a certain ‘ahh’ or maybe a ‘whew!’ For want of a better name, I’ll call these sorts of exercises my ‘challenging joys’ and get on with it.