At The Millions, Bryan VanDyke reflects on his experience writing several unpublished novels, and how these manuscripts helped motivate him to write the draft of his first published work in less than a week:
My grad school mentor, the brooding and kind-hearted author David Plante, would sometimes refer to unsuccessful books as “one more for the river.” As a student in his twenties with a chartless ocean of writing challenges ahead, this metaphor made me uneasy because I so desperately wanted to arrive somewhere with my work. But more than a decade later, after trying and failing repeatedly to sell a work despite mustering all the inner creativity that I had, I began to see how important David’s metaphor was. There is a freeing quality to the sense that you have only a brief relationship with writing that you care for and craft as best as you can. In the end it’s all just ballast.
