You Are What You Read, Part II: What Are You Reading For?

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Everybody picks the books they read for some reason. They are looking for something out of their reading material that life hasn't given them.  An escape from harsh realities, new insight on a subject that interests them, comfort in times of emotional distress.

My mother, for instance, has had a very stressful job for most of her life.  She is a pediatric nurse, and she has spent the bulk of her career surrounded by very sick children; many of them so sick that they were having life-saving (or threatening) surgeries.  Her job had caused her untold amounts of emotional distress and though she makes a huge difference in the improvement of these children's lives, the ones that don't get better eat away at her.

Serenity now!

So is it any surprise that the books my mother reads are often books with happy endings or messages of hope?  That the books she enjoys the most are the ones that put a cheerful spin on the ways of the world?  I don't think so.  She comes home from a hard day and looks forward to picking up a book where life is good and the people are kind.

My boyfriend, on the other hand, is into nonfiction.  He likes to read about science and the way the universe works, planets and constellations and avian aerodynamics and how salamanders live underwater.  He is a chef, so after high school, he went to culinary school, eschewing the formal education that he would've gotten from going to college.  I know that he often laments not getting the knowledge that would've come out of college, though I don't tell them that the hunger he has for mental stimulation is a lot more intense than most people I knew even when I was going for my PhD.

"Hey Rach, did you know that the word 'giraffe' is derived from an Arabic word that means 'to move swiftly?'"

That said, the materials that fill his reading time are, not surprisingly, things that fill his need for challenge, for learning, for understanding the mechanics of the world around him.
My sister is fifteen years old, and I have watched her development as a reader with much interest.  She has never been as into reading as the rest of the family (my mother went through books like they were candy and my father is a librarian, for Pete's sake), but when she gets into a book, shereally gets into it.  I guess part of that is just the fervor of the very young, the way they latch onto things they love more as things that define who they are than anything else.  But part of it is also that my sister is an extremely sensitive soul with an artistic heart, and loyal almost to a fault.  She loves things intensely, with her whole being, and the books she reads are no different.

OMG. Srsly?

My sister reads books that open up parts of the world to her that she hasn't grown into yet.  Her pre-pubescent years were taken up with the Twilight books, because they opened up the idea of romance to her for the very first time.  She's really into Ellen Hopkins's novels in verse, which speak to both the poet inside her and the teenager curious about the darker, more difficult side of life.  And right now she's reading the final installment of The Hunger Games trilogy -- what better books to read for a fifteen-year-old struggling to assert herself as an independent woman?

The books that we read say a lot about us; about who we are and who we want to be, as well as what we want from our lives.  What books are you into right now, and what do you think they say about you?

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The Pollyanna Game

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Have you ever seen the movie "Pollyanna?" If you're my age (late 20's, I'm afraid) or older, my guess is that you have.  But if you're much younger than me, I'm guessing that you probably haven't.  If you happened to miss out on this movie, the basic gist of it is that this little orphan girl, Pollyanna, goes to live with her mean aunt in a town chock-full of unabashed grumps, and by virtue of her sunny disposition, manages to turn all of their various and sundry frowns upside-down.



It is a very cheerful, feel-good kind of movie.  It's a Disney movie.

The Pollyanna Game, then, following the cheery vibe of the movie, is a game of looking on the bright side of things.  I learned it from my friend Brooke in about the 8th grade, and I remember it from time to time when I'm feeling bummed or cranky.  It goes, "Let us not be sad that *insert crappy thing here;* let us be glad that *insert upside here.*"  Basically, it's an exercise in optimism.

For instance: Let us not be sad that we still haven't found a real job; let us be glad that we have found any job at all.

Or: Let us not be sad that our phone broke; let us be glad that we don't have to get those annoying promotional texts anymore.

In that vein, here's a story:  A couple of weeks ago, a co-worker asked me how the writing was going, and whether I'd heard anything hood from any agents.  I launched into my usual rant about how I felt like I had wasted all the years I spent working on my novel, and how I was finding it hard to get motivated to work on my next project.

Everything sucks! Everybody's a jerk!

 

My lovely co-worker stopped me and he said, "You wrote a book."

"But nobody cares."

"I care.  You care.  Lots of people care.  It's a big thing you did.  You should be proud of yourself."

It kind of stopped me in my tracks, because dammit, he was right.  I wrote a freaking book.  A good one.  And there was a time when that made me feel good about myself, made me feel proud and accomplished and worthy of respect.  And somewhere along the rocky road to publishing, I lost that feeling of pride and accomplishment.  I somehow stopped believing in my abilities, stopped being confident that this is the life for me.

I could do some work, but staring into space seems so much more meaningful.

 

Because it's hard.  It's really, really hard.  Being told no all the time, being constantly broke, feeling like I'm a failure.

But I'm not a failure.  I did exactly what I set out to do when I got out of school.  I wrote a book that meant something to me, that was engaging and well-written, that I can stand behind with pride.  I did everything that I can do to make it great, and I can't stake my feelings of self-worth on what other people think about it.  I have never been the kind of person that needs someone else's approval to feel good about herself, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna start now.



In summary:  Let us not be sad that agents don't want our book; let us be glad that we are so badass that we wrote a mother-fracking book!

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You Are What You Read, Part I: The High School Years

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When I was in high school, I had very strong ideas about what made something good.  This is not, I suppose, an uncommon trait to find in teenagers, but I was particularly militant about my preferences, especially when it came to books, movies, and music.  Put simply, I was an intolerable snob.  There were certain books I thought were below me.  As far as I was concerned, they were stupid, pointless, and without soul.  Had I ever so much as cracked one of these books?  Nope.  I didn't need to.  In fact, I think that I believed to read a book that I felt was too "commercial" would somehow taint me, that it would turn me into a Britney Spears-loving hot pink-wearing lollipop-sucking droolspot -- the kind of girl I loathed more than anything else in the world.  This is the same reason that I refused to wear skirts (un-feminist), listen to anything but college radio (un-indie), or go see any movie that wasn't either in black and white or a foreign language (un-intelligent).

Basically, I was a chubby, bespectacled Jessie Spano.

I want to assure my readers that these days, I am much more relaxed in my judgements.  The only books I hate nowadays are the ones that weren't written by their authors (Snooki, James Patterson, etc).  I am a proud Will Smith fan, and whenever ABBA comes on the radio, I turn it way the hell up.  In other words, I have learned to appreciate the things in life that are there solely for entertainment, the things that exist for no other purpose than to give pleasure to those that consume them.

Who wouldn't love this guy?

When I was in high school, my favorite books were Harry Potter, High Fidelity, and The Handmaid's Tale, all of which I still love to this day.  But they do say a great deal about who I was back then:
Harry Potter was written for children, not for adults.  Perhaps I was just on the cusp of the target audience for this series, but I am sure that J.K. Rowling did not have seventeen-year-olds in mind when she wrote The Philospher's/Sorcerer's Stone.  So what does it say about me that I loved Harry Potter?  I was deep in the painful throes of adolescence, angsty as all hell, fighting with my mother, awkward in my body, longing for love and acceptance from my peers.  Wasn't I looking at the eleven-year-old hero of that book wit longing for simpler times?  For a world where every problem could be solved by magic?  And Harry Potter's mother was dead!  She never bothered him about doing the dishes, or making better grades, or going to see certain bands.  Harry Potter filled my need to hold onto my childhood a little bit longer.



High Fidelity is a book about one of the snobbiest music lovers of all time.  Seriously.  This is a man who owns a record shop, but will only sell a record to somebody if he likes their taste in music and their knowledge of the subject.  And I absolutely idolized him for it.  Seriously.  I actually bought more than one album because it was discussed at length in the book, and if I didn't like the music immediately, I listened to it over and over again until I did.  I thought that music was something to be learned, that taste was to be honed and heightened and then lorded over other people, not to be enjoyed.  And even though the novel's protagonist learns (sort of) by the end to accept that other people have different opinions from his own, when I first read High Fidelity, I used it as a sort of indie-girl music snob's bible.



The Handmaid's Tale I read for the first time in 8th grade.  I borrowed it from the school library during my lunch period and read it in about two days (I have read it about ten times since then, and it has never taken me longer than that first time to get to the end).  This book had everything: sex, women learning to be empowered, and my mother's disapproval (probably because of the sex). As a thirteen-year-old girl, I was just learning about the unfairness of womanhood, how boys' interests and opinions seemed to always be put ahead of my own, how I felt pressured to focus all my energy on attracting male attention.  The hero in The Handmaid's Tale, Offred, lives in a world where women exist for the sole purpose of reproducing for men, and she struggles to keep a grasp of who she is as a person in such a world.  My teenage self could relate, and my teenage self rejoiced when Offred found a way to buck the system.  I loved tales of rebellion then, and I still love them now.



What were your favorite things to read in school?  Why?

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Writing For Yourself

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As many of you have probably heard already, the great children's book writer Maurice Sendak died today.  While not entirely unexpected (he was 83 and had been in poor health for quite a while), his death saddened me a lot.  Outside Over There was one of my favorite books as a kid -- it was creepy and full of adventure and I could identify with the story, as it was about the love-hate relationships of older siblings and their younger counterparts (I am a big sister myself).



When I read about Sendak's death this afternoon, I immediately thought of his recent interview on Fresh Air, which you can find here.  It's a really sad, touching interview, and I remember getting teary-eyed the first time I listened to it, so if you are an emotional listener, just be ready.  In the interview, Sendak talked about being old, about being aware of his closeness to death, of the fact that soon he would die.  And in talking about that, he said something that I found really interesting.  He said that he wrote only for himself now, that he wrote only things that interested him, that he'd always wanted to write, and nothing much else.

"I'm writing a poem right now about a nose.," Sendak said.  "I've always wanted to write a poem about a nose. But it's a ludicrous subject. That's why, when I was younger, I was afraid of [writing] something that didn't make a lot of sense. But now I'm not. I have nothing to worry about. It doesn't matter."

What a gift it must have been, to be able to look at his work that way.  To only write because he felt like writing, to write it and not to care if anybody ever read it or liked it (though they probably would want to do both, I'm sure).  It's a thing that I struggle with every time I start to write something new, and I continue to struggle with it the entire time I'm writing.  Because I can never get rid of that imaginary audience in my head, that cruel, nitpicky class of readers jeering my every word choice.  I've struggled with it since I decided I wanted writing to be my career, because the reader is a necessary part of writing professionally.

The imaginary readers stole my creativity and left a dummy in its place.

It's not the same as it was when I was a kid.  I wrote constantly, without filter, and I think that part of the reason I could do that was because I had not ever considered the fact that if anyone read my stories, they would judge them.  They would judge the merits of the story, the believability of the characters, the words I used and the way I used them.  I didn't fear improper punctuation or cliched phrases, because I didn't care about my readers. So it was easy to sit down and just write what I wanted to write.
As soon as I made the decision to pursue publication, everything about the way I wrote changed.  There was a new pressure there, a new guilt that came with time spent doing other things.  There was a new panic when I thought of a new story, this voice in the back of my head that squeaked, "But will anybody like it???"  Writing became something hard, something stressful, something that had to be done.  And I think now that a lot of the reason for that stress was the imagined reader.

They hate his work.

It's become worse since I finished my novel and sent it into the publishing fray.  Rejection after rejection comes back to me with reason after reason for that dreaded phrase, "No thanks."  So when I try to write something new, I'm automatically thinking, How can I make this sellable?  How can I make them want to take it on?

This is terrible thinking, people.  As artists, we are not supposed to worry about what kind of a reception our work is going to get, especially not before we're even finished with it.  And while it is important, if you're going to be making a (supposed) living off of your work, to create something that can communicate with people, your work will be dead before it hits the water if you get too concerned with what people are going to think about it from the very beginning.

I want to get back to a place where writing is just something I do because I want to do it.  I want to be like the little girl I once was, sitting in the corner with a pencil and a notebook scribbling away, because the story in my head was too good to stay there.  I want to kill off that dissatisfied audience in my head, turn them out of the place and send them to some other person's stories.  I want to write a poem about a nose, dammit, and I don't want to care who likes it.

He's naked cuz he feels like it.

 

 

 

 

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The Magic of Coffee

I don't know if this is the case for most coffee drinkers, but I can remember the exact week when coffee became a centerpiece of my life.  More importantly, it became a centerpiece for my writing life.
I was living in Ireland at the time, going to grad school for writing, and one of my classmates and I decided to take a trip to Venice for part of our spring break.  Venice, if you haven't been, is an incredible city -- everything there is old and winding and colorful and haunted.  Just put your camera up to your eye and, no matter where you are in the city, you have an instant post card photograph.  And when Kate and I went on our trip, it was also deserted.

If this doesn't make you want a hot cappuccino and a good book, I don't know what will.

Sadly for her, my friend came down with one of the worst sinus infections I've had the misfortune to see, and so I spent much of my time in Venice wandering the narrow, twisting sidewalks alone.  Which sounds bad, but really, it was kind of a magical experience.  I had plenty of time philosophize and take photos and brood.  And one of the things I did, being so inspired by the romantic nature of the lonely city, was write.
What I wrote, for the most part, was not particularly good, I'm afraid.  Some core scenes of my novel did come to fruition there, but so did a lot (I mean a lot) of really, really, really bad poetry.  But that caffeine is no joke, and when you're shaking with that first coffee euphoria, you write whatever comes into your head because you haven't learned to filter it yet.
I felt like the greatest writer that ever lived.  It was magical.

I'm a genius!

Once home, I was converted.  Coffee was a way of life for me, and the coffee shops I frequented in Dublin are among the places I miss the most.  I imbibed the juice of the enchanted bean with the fervor of a religious zealot.  And the pages and pages I filled with enthusiastic scrawl while is sat along the canals of Venice, sipping an espresso -- those felt to me like a gift from another plane.  I had met the gods, and they were highly caffeinated. All those people shaking in their pews in small, rural churches, the ones bowing down again and again and again at the Wailing Wall, the whirling dervishes spinning around and around and around in their white skirts -- I felt something like that.

The blogger in her natural habitat . . . a coffee cup.

And yes, it sounds dismissive of those people, or like a severe exaggeration of my caffeinated inspiration, but I assure you, I mean every word.  And yes, it was because I drank way too much of the stuff and it had made me high as a kite, and no, I don't generally get quitethat much out of coffee these days, but maybe you can see why I love it so much to this day, why I rarely go a day without at least a couple cups.
This very minute, if fact, I am sipping coffee from a favorite mug.
But don't take my word for it -- history is full of famous writers, whiling away the hours in tiny cafes.  Everyone from Ernest Hemingway to J.K. Rowling spent their early days bouncing from cafe to cafe, mingling with other writers or scribbling out their seminal works.  Ever walk into a coffee shop and notice that everyone there is on their computer?  Maybe they're onto something.

Good ole Ernie. The coffee may be Irish, but the cafe is Parisian.

Here's the science-y explanation:  The caffeine in coffee binds to the adenosine receptors in your brain, which are responsible for making you feel sleepy.  When the caffeine hits, BAM!  The adenosine can't get to your nerves and you feel more alert.  Caffeine also blocks reabsorption of dopamine in your brain (dopamine is a neurotransmitter that activates the pleasure centers in your brain), which is part of the reason you get that euphoric high when you drink a cup. You can find more information on the science of caffeine here.

Coffee sends your neurons to a rave!

But there's more!  Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, talks in his book about how relaxation help encourage creativity in our brains by turning down the volume on a part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.  This part of the brain is basically responsible for impulse control, which is terrible for the creative mind because it gets you second-guessing yourself and stops your brain from allowing you to follow your thoughts wherever they take you.  While I'll admit that caffeine is not physiologically a relaxing substance (it's actually a stimulant), the coffee shop is a very relaxing place.  Think about it: people gathered around to chat or read, enjoying pastries and sipping warm drinks.  It's all very calm.  The ambient noise of keys clicking and hushed voices, pages turning.  Strangers stop to chat with each other.  Your guard goes down in a place like that.  So what happens?  That damned dorsolateral prefrontal cortex takes a nap while the rest of your brain is just waking up, stretching, and getting down to business.

Eureka! We have found creative stimulation, and it is inside that mug!

One more factor, I think, contributes to the writer-in-a-cafe phenomenon, and that is the starving artist quotient.  All artists, I think, benefit from a change of scenery, and coffee shops allow us to got to a place that is not our home, where we feel comfortable, and where we can stay warm, sheltered, with adequate facilities, for hours and hours at a time without spending a ton of money.  While I would never suggest that a person stay all day in a place and only buy one cup of coffee (it's just rude, people), you can buy yourself a cup every hour or two and stay perfectly within the bounds of polite society, get your work done, mingle with other artists (because, who are we kidding, that's who else is there all day) and not break the bank.
One of the greatest things I got out of my coffee addiction while I was in Dublin was the Fellowship of the Bean.  This was a group composed of three of my classmates and I who would walk down to the local Starbuck's (don't judge--it was right on the bay, and the closest good, local-owned coffee shop was a twenty-minute bus ride away) every Sunday after our hangovers wore off and stay there until they closed the place down.  We're talking, five or six hours sometimes.  It was lovely.  Just four friends writing and talking and reading and pumping black, beautiful coffee goodness into their bodies.  If I could've taken it intravenously, I would have.  Those were some of the most productive days of my life, and spent with people who are some of my best friends to this day, despite the miles between us.

The Fellowship of the Bean.

This is what coffee has given to me.  And for that, I am ever grateful, and ever reverent (say that three times fast--if you're caffeinated).

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Go Ahead. Make My Day.

When I tell people I'm a writer, there are three questions they usually ask, which I will list in order from least annoying to most:
1) What do you write?

I write words, y'all.

This question is generally not very annoying, except for the fact that I have to answer it all the time.  They're being polite, making small talk, and they probably won't push the question much further because, who are we kidding, they're more interested in telling me about themselves.  I tell them I write fiction and that's usually the end of it.  They nod and tell me that's nice and move on.  Where it really gets annoying is when they push the subject, which leads me to the second most annoying question:
2) What's your book about?

So, how do you like my book?

I know that, as a self-employed person who should be constantly trying to promote their work, I should take this question as an opportunity to try and sell the book.  But this doesn't really work for a few reasons.
First, I am not a good businesswoman.  I would venture to say that most writers are not naturally geared toward business; that's what makes them good artists.  It's a big struggle for the artistically inclined to see their work as a product to sell rather than as the result of blood, sweat, and tears.  That's why we have agents and managers and so on (if you can get them) -- to help us hopeless artists with the business-y side of writing.  While I'm trying to train myself to be more of a capitalist when it comes to my work, 90% of the time, I don't see the point.
Because, again, most people are not really interested in helping you further your career or giving your novel to that guy they know at Random House -- they're just trying to make conversation.  And since I am now working on other projects, I'm kind of over telling people all about my first novel.  I think this must be sort of what child actors or one-hit wonders go through every day; talking about that one thing they did a long time ago.  Yes, I am proud of my novel.  No, I don't want to tell you all about it.  And you probably don't want to hear it, either.
Note: If you do want to give my novel to that guy you know at Random House, I will tell you about my novel until you tape my mouth shut.
3) Are you published?

I'd like to tell you about my failure.

Any questions about my published status automatically make me want to hit the asker.  This is mostly a result of my frustration with not being published (except for that one short story years ago), but it's also just a rude question.  It's like asking a childless person why they don't have kids or asking a stranger how much money they make.  It's a sore subject, I'd venture to say, for most writers.
And the ones for whom it is not a sore subject probably are published, in which case, trust me, you won't have to ask them whether they've got a book out there that you can buy.  It'll be the first thing they say to you on the subject.
There's also the fact that this question suggests that the writer's worth is being judged based on whether or not they've been published.  Not only is this unfair, but it makes them feel like a failure when you bring up the subject.  You are reminding them that nobody has valued their work enough yet to print and distribute them, and you are bringing up all their insecurities about their career.
I know this stuff probably makes me look cranky, but I don't care.  I bring it up here because I'm not exactly sure why these questions irk me so much.

I'll be nicer if you'll be less annoying.

Perhaps it's because, to me, writing is very personal.  I don't like making casual small talk about it in the same way I don't talk to strangers about my sex life or my political views or my spiritual beliefs. It just feels too intimate, to close to who I am at the core.
Maybe this is unprofessional; I don't know.  Do stock brokers hate talking Wall Street with people who don't invest?  Do veterinarians want to talk mange with the checkout lady at the supermarket?  Maybe I don't like talking about writing with strangers because most strangers don't know the first thing about writing.  They don't read, they don't write, and they don't really want to.

When you finish reading, we'll talk about it...backwards.

I have no problem talking about writing with my friends (although I'm sure they wish I would stop sometimes).  And I have already talked about my love of talking books with strangers who know about books -- it's one of the highlights of my day when it happens.  Does this make me a snob?  Probably.  And I know I could avoid people asking me these questions by neglecting to mention my being a writer at all.  But wouldn't that be a betrayal of who I am?  A denial of my dreams?  And shouldn't I allow for the possibility that these well-meaning strangers do have something valid to offer on the subject?
Because, as annoying as the questions can be, they do open up a whole world of discussion that might very well make my day a good one.  If I can just bring myself to give people a chance.

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The Years of Busting Ass

A few months back, I was feeling pretty rotten.  I was frustrated with the lack of interest in my novel, worried that I had chosen the wrong path when I decided to focus on being a writer, and starting to wonder if I had what I takes to be successful in the publishing industry.  I spent three years of my life working on something that perhaps no one would ever read, and I was spending a lot of time asking myself what the point of all that hard work had been.

Invest in a duster so at least your book appears to be getting some interest.

Then I heard a story on "To The Best of Our Knowledge" (which is an excellent radio show/podcast from Wisconsin Public Radio), and it put all my frustrations into perspective.  The story was an interview with psychologist Carl Dweck, who had recently published a book called "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success."  You can listen to the story itself here, if you're interested.

Image of the book in question, folks.

The gist of Dweck's argument is that people respond to failure in two different ways:  some people fall apart when they fail and some people learn from their failures.  To the people who fall apart, success and failure are measures of worth: failure means they are not intelligent, not talented, and that they never will be.  They avoid challenges for the fear of being proven to be unworthy (or incapable) of success.   But the people who learn from their failures seem to look at them as obstacles they have overcome, as lessons they have learned.  These people seem to thrive, almost, on failure, to become energized by it.  They understand that abilities, talents, and intelligence are not attributes a person is born with, but attributes that develop over time and with practice.  Talent is less like the bones in your arm, which are more or less always going to be the same (nutrition aside) and more like the muscles, which get bigger and stronger the more they are used.

Better start working on those brain muscles.

In some ways, this argument fits quite nicely with my Dorothy Parker apply-the-ass-to-the-chair philosophy; you will only ever get there if you work hard to get there.  But what happens if you work hard and you don't get there?  It feels sometimes like a hamster on a wheel -- the hamster might think it's going somewhere, but really it's just running in place.  Dweck argues that we need to look at our failures as a chance to learn something about what we're going for.  Why didn't it work?  What did we learn from the process?
We spend too much time focusing on where we want to end up (in my case, well-respected and widely-read novelist) and not enough time thinking about the process of getting there.  Even when we look at people we admire, we don't see the younger version of those people who stumbled along the way to their success.  We don't look at their struggles, their failures, and say, "Look how persistent they were!  Look how hard they worked!"  We say, "That person is a genius."  Or worse, "That person was destined for greatness."

Isn't brilliance fun?

Nobody is destined for greatness.  Some people get very, very lucky, but most people who wind up great bust their asses to get there.  Their work, their contributions to our society, aren't just some magical extension of their natural genius, but the result of years and years of passionate, bone-grinding, sweat-flooded hard work.  And sure, some people are naturally smarter and more talented than others.  But as a writing teacher I once had said, "If you give me a student with natural talent and a student who works hard and ask me which will be a best-seller, I'd bet on the hard worker every time."
The fact that so many people envision their heroes as geniuses who burst, fully developed from the skulls of gods, makes me really value writers who talk about their failures.  I love to hear stories about now-successful writers who struggled in their formative years, not because I'm a glutton for pain (my love of horror films notwithstanding), but because it makes me feel like the success that I want for myself is not so out of reach.  Stephen King famously wrote about his collection of rejection slips, thousands of them, from the time that he was a child until he published "Carrie."  And most writers have heard, at this point, about Kathryn Stockett's 60 rejections for "The Help."  The fact that these writers learned from their rejections, that they kept evolving and persisting even when everybody around them told them to give up is inspiring.

"I may have been born fully formed, but my brain wasn't."

I can look at my novel and say, yes, I hope it does better, but I can also learn from the things that I have done wrong.  I have lots of feedback from all those agents who rejected my work, and if I stop looking at those rejections as just letters that spell N-O, and start looking at them as tools for learning the business, I have already gained something.  And the years I spent tripping over words and trying to find the rhythm required for writing a novel taught me what kinds of things I need to do to motivate myself to write, what kind systematic approach I should take to writing a piece of work that long, and how to approach agents when I'm ready to publish -- those years were prime learning years!
In the end, who knows where my writing will end up?  But I can't know that until the end comes.  I have years and years and years to go, and right now the years ahead are for busting ass and learning how to get back up.  And that's okay by me.