Small Wins

“Acknowledge all of your small victories. They will eventually add up to something great.”

Kara Goucher

Following in great family tradition, my twelve-year-old niece is a writer. In this, like many other ways, she reminds me often of myself as that age. She is dabbling in various projects, across various mediums. Experimenting, yes, but also with a real solid sense of it being something she wants to do, in the big, job-sense of doing. 

Recently, she had her first real publication, in a local newspaper. She was, of course, proud and excited. I was proud and excited. It doesn’t matter that it was a short article on a topic she is tangentially interested in through a school activity. It doesn’t matter that she is “only twelve”. It doesn’t matter that everyone else will have forgotten about it in ten years’ time. Because I can guarantee, she won’t have.

I still remember my first “win” when it came to writing. I was eleven, or thereabouts, and I had submitted a story to a national competition. I didn’t win, but I came in the top something-or-other. I got a certificate that had my name on it. The details are fuzzy, but I can remember the feeling. The acknowledgement that someone out there in this big wide world that was not my mother had told me something I wrote was good. Not just good but good-enough-to-go-somewhere, good.

As you get older, the wins seem to become harder to find. Maybe it’s that the playing field becomes too vast, or that at a certain point everything becomes driven by market and profit and what someone, somewhere thinks might sell. “Good” is tangential, in a profit-driven world.

I spent several years querying a handful of novels with literary agents and I found myself ignoring the wins when they came, because they weren’t the one I wanted—they weren’t the agent, and the publishing contract, and the bestsellers list.

Looking back, after sometime to reset and recover from what is quite an arduous process, I see now the wins I had. The requests to read work. The compliments on my work, and my writing. But when it came to it, the same response: this won’t sell. I can’t market this. There isn’t a place for this right now.

None of it was about me, as a writer. Yet it felt like it was, every single time.

I wanted to quit a thousand times. I still often do. Instead, I changed track. And after a decade working in various capacities in the film industry, I switched to screenplays.

I felt like I’d found my voice again, in a way I’d lost it somewhere in the endless grind of writing novel after novel, querying novel after novel, and having nothing to show for it but an inbox full of rejection letters. I finished it in a rush and sent it off to some trusted people to read.

And they liked it. People who owed me no fake platitudes; people who would offer alongside their compliments the necessary and constructive feedback for me to make it even better. But yet: they liked it.

So, I moved to the next step and I sent it out into the wide world. And the wider world… Liked it. The feedback was meatier than I’d ever been afforded from literary professionals. These people didn’t owe me anything but their honest opinions, and their honest opinion was that it was good.

In fact, their honest opinion was that I’d produced, “a remarkable character-soaked psychological thriller that harnesses suspense and shows the writer's masterful command of the genre.” Among other things.

It’s a small win. It is the first step in a long road of trying to maybe, one day get this film made. It might not even be this film; it might be the next one, or the one after that. But it felt like a burst of fresh air had rushed through the house, a reminder of why I’d worked so hard. A reminder of why I’d kept going, when everything logical told me there was no point.

I’m committed to celebrating those small wins as I go forward. To sharing about them even if, to some, they might seem “silly” or “not that big of a deal”. Everyone’s path starts somewhere. And mine is here—or, at least, this fork in the road is. 

And to every person that has celebrated with me, on this or other small wins—I hope you realise that it means far more than I could ever express in words. (Some writer, huh?)