I keep telling people that I wrote six novels before A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend. I’m not sure that’s true. I think I wrote four full novels and, two years I participated in NaNoWriMo, two half-novels that didn’t have enough energy behind them to be really worth finishing. In any case, my computer crashed, I didn’t back up well, and most of what I’ve written has been consigned to the little “trash” folder in the sky. But anyway.

People are a little bit surprised, sometimes, that I was willing to write four-and-two-halves bad novels and keep on going. What did it mean? Dedication, perseverance, optimism?

Not optimism. The people who know me will confirm that I can panic over absolutely anything, that I usually have to be pulled back from the worst-case-scenario running through my head. I stopped believing I would ever be published years before I wrote Love Story.

But I didn’t stop writing.

I mistrust doing anything with my hopes pinned on what’s going to happen in the future, or what other people are going to think of me. I trust what I can see in front of me right now: it’s an idea that’s worth digging up. It’s a story that’s worth telling. It’s sitting in front of the computer and making myself work the problem instead of watching the Daily Show or playing Bejeweled.

I may not always believe in myself. But I believe in the work in front of me.

I find that I naturally cycle through head-work and hand-work. In college, when I was coming down from the rush of finals and term papers, I’d pick up a craft project or a musical instrument. Not that these things don’t require intelligence and concentration; they just don’t require the same kind of brain work as writing six pages on The Importance of Being Ernest.

So I handed in revisions on Wednesday, and promptly went into a round of nesting.

When I’m writing, I have a habit of letting things… accumulate. I did not do a precise inventory of my computer desk last week, but I can say I had two plates, a bowl, some glasses, a couple bottles of Coke and other snack-related trash, three partial manuscript printouts, hairbrush, hair conditioner, four or five books — there is probably more than that. When I’m ready to get down to work, the writing is more important. And when I’m not ready to get down to work, I’d rather play Pokemon or watch TV than clear off the huge piles on my desk.

But they’re clear now, and I’m all ambitious about putting shelves in my closet and hanging up some art. At some point, though, I really should figure out how to get into the habit of cleaning at times when I haven’t just finished some major project.

A friend and I were talking yesterday about what it means to follow one’s dreams – about how hard it is to define yourself as a creative person and carve out space for your creativity when you have a day job as well. In some ways it’s actually worse if you have a somewhat creative job, like technical writing or copy writing; it can take creative energy out of you and leave none at all for the novel you’re trying to write.

I have been writing novels for roughly seven years now, and there were times I was very close to throwing in the towel. The one thing that kept me on an even keel through a lot of rejection was that I tried to define, very carefully, what I wanted from writing, and what I could reasonably expect. Some people want to write, some people want to have written, some people want to be writers – you have to learn to disentangle those things before you can chase after the ones you truly want and make peace with not having it all.

If you expect publication and money and fame, you may get those things. The odds are against you, but it’s a possibility. I think it’s more of a problem to expect certain emotional things from writing, especially validation. Validation is an illusion. You can sell a million copies, win the Pulitzer and the Nobel, and it won’t be the validation that you need. There’s never any voice on high telling you you’ve done a good job. If you do get an agent and a book deal, that will feel like the voice on high at first – but, at best, it will only last until the first bad reviews. It has been a hard struggle for me not to ask for validation from writing, and I’m still terrible at it, but I think it is so important.

So what can you reasonably expect?

I started my first novel because I wanted to read it. My circumstances might be a little unusual; I was enamored with some Japanese novels and graphic novels that were nothing like what I could find in English. They were melodramatic and romantic and self-indulgent; they were not afraid to get bombastic to the point of silliness. They had a kind of adolescent intensity that I desperately wanted to emulate. When I wrote my first novel, I wanted nothing more from it than the novel itself.

Later I would write to work through my feelings. A writer needs to make distinctions between things that you should put in your novel and things that you should tell your therapist, but that was valuable to me too. I would write for the intellectual challenge of putting a story together. More than anything, still, I was writing the kinds of novels that I wanted to read myself.

But there was one more thing I wanted. I wanted to learn how to write novels. I decided, midway through writing my first one, that I was willing to treat this as an apprenticeship and accept that I’d have to put in some time before I got to be any good.

Seven years. That seems just about right for an apprenticeship.