Jenny Bent's blog and hitting send

Literary agent Jenny Bent's blog is on my list of regular reading. We've never met, although we've exchanged a couple emails, which puts me on a list with about 50,000 other people. She is an agent, after all, and the tide of incoming email is rivaled only by the inboxes of new lottery winners.

Jenny's posts are upbeat. Sometimes they include very practical advice, other times they simply handout some much needed encouragement to writers, but they always provide insight into an agent who isn't spending her public time being snarky. (Although, I'll admit that Query Shark, the snarky/tough-love blog of agent Janet Reid is also a regular read of mine. I read it not only to learn but probably for the same reason people enjoy watching the tonally-challenged sing on the first few episodes of American Idol each season)

The reason I bring up Jenny Bent's blog today, however, is because she is patting those writers on the back who find the courage to send their work out, risking rejection. She calls them brave. I call them functioning.

For decades now, I've found myself sometimes amused, sometimes confused, and sometimes exasperated with those writers who write but do not set their work free. They do not let the work go find its way in the world.

There are countless reasons for this, most of them valid, but I simply can't function that way. There's a line that is weirdly out of place in the movie "Speed" when Dennis Hopper almost slides back into his Apocalypse Now photog character. Amid such classically simple lines like, "Stay on or get off?" or "Yeah, well I'm taller!" comes Hopper's strangely philosophical line that by preventing an explosion, "...you are trying to prevent the bomb from becoming."

Period. As in "to be." For me, to me, the writing hasn't "become" until the risk is taken. Just as a bird would still technically be a bird if it were never kicked from the nest, I believe it is not fully realized until it attempts to fly. Until it does, it is simply unhazarded potential, kept safely under wraps.

So too is it with writing. Your words, your creation, must be risked to be fully realized. Even a prisoner writing on her or his wall, has maximized the chances of the ideas being read and has risked rejection. Yet, millions of would be writers write and risk nothing, and this is fine (supposedly, everyone needs a hobby) except it is inescapable that there are brilliant literary works mouldering in desk drawers, never to be seen.

Set your work free. If you're waiting for it to be perfect, I have some bad news for you. Send it out. Get rejected. It only stings temporarily. The really great work is begging you to do it, to not be overly protective, asking in a Pink-Floydian singsong "Mother, did it have to be so high?"

Hit send. Put a stamp on it. Send it out.

Here is a link to Jenny Bent's blog:
http://jennybent.blogspot.com/