Despair in the Writing Life

I had a friend email me tonight utterly forlorn about a publishing deal gone south. It made me think about despair in the writing life. It's a companion who keeps coming back to you no matter how far you've gotten. Things go wrong. What you have visualized does not come to pass. That opportunity you thought you had turns to dust in your hands.This is most difficult for beginning writers. If you have not yet held your own book in your hands, despair over the here-and-how can seem like an eternity. You walk into the bookstore and your book is not there, no matter how much you want it to be there. It seems as if no matter what you do, you will never see your book on the shelves.But it's important to know that despair is there for published writers, too. The setback that threatens a whole career. The sense of being so close to something major, which then recedes, like some amazing deep-sea creature glimpsed by a diver through the murk, except the murk takes hold and it disappears from sight. Granted, a writer with a few published books has perspective. That writer knows, if they think about it, that the despair one feels today can turn to triumph in a month or a year or a decade.Because a writer's career does usually last decades. And the ephemeral quality of the current moment is exactly that. There is always the next story, the next book, the next narrative. What slips through the hands now comes back willingly later.Sometimes, it is more satisfying when it comes to you later. Sometimes, despair is the vanguard of great success. But the most important thing is to somehow be able to zoom back, to do the reverse of Google Earth, and to put the situation in its maximum perspective. And then to continue on--to write, to create, to continue doing what you love.Note: As Jonathan Strahan points out to me, this applies to most artistic/creative endeavors. Well, life generally, too.