I have just submitted three short stories to yet another competition. This one required an entry fee for each story, so I limited myself.

We hear the phrases all the time: Set realistic goals, don’t get ahead of yourself, write what you know.  On a bigger scale we sometimes hear: Live The Dream.

For a writer, or those who would like to be one (or, quite frankly, anyone who wants to do anything out of the ordinary), a better creed is: Live The Delusion.

The Delusion I’m referring to comes in many sizes, but it comes in only one shape. The Delusion tells you that you’re going to succeed. Not only that, but also that success is just around the corner. And it’s going to be SPECTACULAR.

The biggest version of the Delusion is the one you need to get started. If you take the commonly accepted view that overnight success takes 15 years, well… who really wants that? Not when you didn’t start writing in earnest till you were old and wrinkly. Fifteen years is a long time. 

Thinking about it that way demotivates you, it allows you to tinker and pause and do other things, “Cause hey, I’ve got 15 years.” Thinking the big break is close makes you work furiously. It makes you focus. Like running for a train that you don’t want to miss. And you should manifest like crazy. Imagine a publisher getting your manuscript and reading late into the night because s/he just can’t put it down.

I’ve got this feeling that there’s no time to waste and that’s what’s driving me on. I sent my manuscript to a publisher called Journey to Words after I heard the lady who had set it up interviewed on ABC Radio while I was beavering away for sixteen hours a day in my coffee shop and writing at night. She’d set it up for mature-age (over 50) writers to get a break: people over fifty. That was me. She said mine was magical writing, but she needed me to send it to a developmental editor and recommended a lady in Melbourne.

I scrounged together $1600 for the before-and-after reads. I did everything to the manuscript that the editor suggested, including buying and reading the books she recommended by other writers and the books published by Journeys to Words. On the second edit, she recommended I do some writing courses before attempting to submit.

I started doing courses with The Australian Writers’ Centre and I started to learn why I needed to do them.

In Creative Writing Stage 1, I learned something about passive voice. Passive voice? What’s that? I began scanning my manuscript—the whole thing was passive voice. It was like I had perfected a new style of writing: the 100% passive-voice, reader-distancing memoir. Ugh. Maybe I should write in 3rd-person. Distance my personal involvement.

Back to the drawing board. Reset the Delusion. I can afford another year to be rich and famous, as the coffee shop slowly leaks money. I thought to myself: ‘I still have a great plot and great characters. I’ll just rewrite this’. Re-write, Re-write, Re-write. I didn’t have a social life anyway.

I made the move back to teaching in Dunedoo. Lots of weekends in front of the computer. Some nights and holidays in front of my new laptop. The new draft was finished. No passive voice. Except where I liked it for style purposes.

Back to AWC—man, I love that place! Where are those agents and editors and Hollywood types? This time I do Creative Writing 2 talking about action, using strong nouns and good verbs, and avoiding too many adjectives and adverbs—those tricky little -ly words that make you think you’re describing something precisely but mostly weaken your writing. (See what I did there.)

Quick, scan the manuscript. Dammit. I count at least a hundred adverbs in every chapter. Deep breath. All you need is one more rewrite. One more year. Nothing’s happening during Covid, anyway. Success is so close, I can taste it. Thank you, Delusion, for being so powerful.

I’m still reading like crazy everything I can get my hands on about writing, as long as it’s free. I read this article in Writer’s Digest about point of view.

Point of View? What’s that? It talks about head hopping and how that puts distance between the reader and the characters. Let me see…

Yep, head hopping everywhere. I mean I was trying to let the reader see what everyone is thinking. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?

An honest note—even after reading the article, I wasn’t convinced this was a bad thing. Then I happened to read Dr. No, the Ian Fleming book, the first James Bond book I’d ever read. It’s a great story, a fun book, but he’s constantly jumping between Bond’s head and the other characters in the scene. It feels more like you’re being told a story than living it. It feels more like you’re watching from a distance instead of experiencing the setting through Bond’s eyes. Gosh, I’d have hated to be the screenwriter for the Bond movies!

So… another year of mad rewriting follows. The delusion is sagging … but, hey, Covid’s still dragging on. I bite the bullet and enroll in Novel-writing Essentials with AWC. I learn that there’s this standard structure that every novel follows … every novel except mine. There’s plotting and planning which should be done beforehand. I do it and try to jam my manuscript into the format. LOL. I do a complete re-write.

Then in 2022, I get Covid badly (sorry for the weakening effect of the adverb there). It demolishes me. In the meantime, I’ve met the man who would become my husband and we’ve decided to make a fresh start in a new location. I buy the house and he agrees to support me. Gratitude. Gratitude and stoke the Delusion. I take a year off from teaching and move to Queensland in 2023. Too tired and wrecked to do too much re-writing, so the Delusion has to take a backseat. I intend to go back to do some casual teaching, but most afternoons I need a long, long nap. I travel while I can and collapse after each trip.

I enroll in Write Your Novel in 2024. It’s a big financial outlay—enough for another overseas trip— and takes a year to complete. It’s yet another re-write, very intensive. I’m still sick with Long Covidy symptoms, even though it supposedly doesn’t exist. Towards the end of the year, I try to re-establish contact with the Journeys to Words publisher. It feels as if she is ghosting me. What a bitch! I attempt to stalk her on Facebook and discover that she’s passed away in 2022. These things happen when you’re older, I guess. I feel remorseful. And bereft. The Delusion sags.

However, the AWC provides an opportunity for students to pitch to a real publisher. Online, as a group, because there’s safety in numbers, we get to pitch to Jo Mackay from HarperCollins. Exhausted but thankfully still Delusional, I give the worst pitch ever. Jo only asks me to send her my manuscript out of pity because they aren’t accepting literary novels (which is what mine is). Naturally, it was rejected, but only after six months. I kept that Delusion simmering throughout. Onya me!

Now, I said the Delusion comes in one shape, but all different sizes. 

The same Delusion is required to start each book. Ideas are easy. Staring at a blinking cursor and a blank page one, knowing you have 450 more to write, is hard. But if you live in the Delusion that it’s all going to come together, you don’t freeze up. You plan your plot arc and character arcs meticulously so you don’t get stuck editing and re-editing chapters because it’s not perfect. You move forward because success is RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER. And to get to that corner, you have to go forward, not stay where you are.

You need another sized Delusion to fix your crappy first draft. But as long as you live in the Delusion—this’ll be easy to fix—then you won’t freak out and get stuck. 

The final form of the Delusion is the biggest and the smallest. This one is needed to hit ‘send’ on the email that your manuscript is attached to. This should be the most joyous part, but it’s HARD. That’s where the short story thing comes in. Not only do you get to practise writing, but you get to practise hitting the send button. [Note: ‘Practise’—the verb—is spelled with an ‘s’ in Australia, wriggly-red-line bot!]

Hitting ‘send’ requires you to let go of control. Let others see your efforts and worse yet, judge you for them. You need the Delusion to tell you, they’re going to love this. I’ll probably be rich and famous by the end of the year; all I have to do is press this little button and…

Then you hit send and instantly feel sick but also relieved, and honestly a little lost.  Thankfully the Delusion soon chimes in. The next book, it says, is going to be even better. One day, there’ll be success and I’ll be able to live the Dream instead of the Delusion.