The Suck

I've been off mucking with my fiction instead of paying attention to you lovely people. This I attribute first to the length of time it takes the earth to rotate--which is too short--and then to my mammalian brain's need to shut down for eight hours out of every rotation, and finally to my complete lack of access to chemicals which will either shorten the need for the second reason or significantly change my perception of the first.

Despite these celestial and neurochemical handicaps, I have in fact managed to eke out more chapters--thrilling, yes, I know--and am mostly succeeding in keeping the terror of The Suck at bay.

The Suck. I use that term a lot, but I don't think I've ever defined it.

The Suck
Function: noun

Date: 21st century

1 : a state of being that is qualitatively sub-par, wretched, completely unworthy of any acclaim, and generally boring, despicable, and awful.
2 : the personification of that state, usually amorphous. Wears a hat that does not inspire confidence.

Every writer fears The Suck, whether they admit it or not. It's what makes us rewrite the same sentence a dozen times, then throw up our hands and douse ourselves with gin. It's what yanks us out of bed in the dark and wee hours to scribble down a line of dialogue, only to discard it in despair at breakfast and have another Bloody Mary. When you've published your first story, The Suck is at your ear, whispering, It's a fluke, it'll never happen again. As you package up your queries and your sample chapters, The Suck sits in the corner, shaking its head. The Suck is omnipresent and smells of old rubber erasers and failure.

The joy is in overcoming The Suck, pressing onwards in spite of it, getting to the end of the chapter or the story. Sometimes you can defeat it outright, with an honest You know, this is pretty good. But it comes back, lurking in old drafts. There's always more of it to stamp out.

If that sounds terribly neurotic, well, it is a bit, but a writer free of neurosis simply isn't trying very hard. I use it as motivation. I usually know when my arrangements of words aren't as good as they could be, because that's where The Suck hovers. If I'm on my game I can rearrange things so that they're better, passable, or at least entertaining. But how would I know to revisit those rickety corners of the tale, if not for The Suck? It really provides a service. The key is to not let it take over and overwhelm the entire project. Nobody wants The Suck to take up residence on a manuscript, sitting atop it and smoking its cigarettes while it mocks you with the sheer volume of work you'll have to do to banish it.

That's why I've found that it's best to deal with The Suck as soon as I can, whether it's creeping around a word, a sentence, or a paragraph. Wait too long, and it'll get ya.

And nobody wants that.