One of my favorite movies, and a film I prefer over the written version is, The Shawshank Redemption*. If you’ve not seen it, you should. One of the recurring motifs in the film is hope. The movie is set in prison and there are few men who are more desperate than those locked up unjustly.

*Spoilers below

Andy is a former banker locked up unjustly for a murder he did not commit. Red is a hardened criminal incarcerated for a murder he did commit. At one point, after Andy gets out of the hole, he says to his fellow inmates that hope is what kept him going. His friend Red warns him, “Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane. It’s got no use on the inside. You better get used to that idea.” Red, now just as much a victim of his own crime as the person he killed, is looking at prison from the perspective of a victim. He is stuck inside and there is nothing he can do to get out. His fate is entirely in the hands of others. It is sometimes hard not to feel this way in our lives, is it not?

As writers, we all hope that our work will be appreciated by others. We hope that we’ll write a best seller and become rich and famous. Most of us know that it’s a pipe dream, and ultimately most of us write not to get rich, but because we love it and we have something to say. But in the back of our minds is this hope that our work will take off. Many writers, myself included, spend a lot of time courting agents and editors in the hope of licensing our work to a major publisher. Some of us don’t like our day jobs. Some of us are poor and need money. Others crave fame or fortune. Whatever the motivation, we spend countless hours researching industry professionals and writing letters to them. We read books and attend conferences that promise to make us better at querying. Then, we send these letters off and hope.

A very bad habit, and one that I got in to a few years back, was daily hoping for a reply. Checking your email every thirty minutes can become a very destructive thing. Like Red said, “Hope can drive a man insane.” And it can! I’m here to tell you, it can!

Recently I was forced to stop writing. My job became very intense with a lot of travel. Not only did I stop writing, I stopped querying. How can you query when you’ve written nothing new, right? And besides, I hated waiting for those query letters to come back as rejections. I was like Red, waiting for the prison board to parole me for good behavior, and trying to do whatever I could to grease those skids. I was sick of querying and, quite frankly, sick of writing. Little did I realize what I was giving up.

Lately, after a bit of a break, I’ve begun writing again. I had forgotten how much I enjoy it. But with the writing came the specter of querying again. After all, there’s little point in writing if I have no hope that anyone will ever see it. But this time, the thought came differently. I realized I actually missed the excitement of sending queries. Even though most of them do result in rejections, each one does have the possibility of something greater. And quite honestly, how often in our lives do we really get to experience the hope of something greater? (Christians, of course, have a different kind of hope that I’m not talking about here. ) Upon graduation from high school and college perhaps? When we marry? How often do ‘promotions’ really lead to something better? Outside of that, what is there? People buy lottery tickets by the $millions in the hope that something will happen. We want hope. We crave hope.

Later in the movie, after Andy has escaped from prison, Red is finally released on parole and follows a series of cryptic clues until he finds a note left by his friend Andy telling Red how to find him. In the note Andy tells Red, “Hope is a good thing. Maybe the best thing. And no good thing ever dies.” Red now understands why Andy was able to have hope even in the darkest of their times in prison. Andy, despite being innocent of his crimes, did not take Red’s view that he was simply a victim at the whim of others. All throughout their incarceration, Andy was working on an escape plan. And even though the chance of escaping was always slim, it was always there. Andy was generating his own hope. Red’s hope had no foundation and so really wasn’t hope, but just a dream. A baseless, whispered wish. I have often confused hoping and dreaming. Hoping and wishing. They’re not the same thing at all.

As authors, as people, we can either dream, or we can hope. Like Andy told Red in the prison yard after some very tough time in solitary confinement: “Get busy living, or get busy dying.” Andy’s outlook remained hopeful because he was creating his own hope. As authors, and indeed anyone in life, we can do the same thing. In the story it took Andy over twenty years to tunnel out of his cell. And while escaping was the goal, the plan itself is what provided the daily dose of hope that kept him going. So, I’ll write my books and then write my queries. Because it isn’t the answer I get from someone I have no control over that is important, it is the excitement of knowing that with each blow of my tiny rock hammer, I might just break through that wall.