I’ve been feeling down lately. It’s counterintuitive because I have a lot of good going on. I’m healthy, and my family is healthy. I make a good living, getting paid for my technical and creative know-how.
More specifically, I get paid for my words and escaped the cents-per-word grind. It’s insanity. I feel very lucky.
And yet, this vainglorious, persistent voice in my head invalidates that experience as it relates to being a writer. It doesn’t matter what magazines or websites my work has been in if it’s ghostwriting because that’s “not me.”
It doesn’t matter how many readers read my articles, case studies, and blogs or how many leads they generate, as they are “business” things. They aren’t the stories that I want to tell, the stories that I am passionate about telling.
The pieces I care about — the novels, short stories, and comics I’ve written have been widely rejected. At this point, we’re talking about hundreds of rejections. And while I know this is a part of the process, it often hurts. Sometimes it feels like a rejection of my very being. It invalidates, unfairly, any work that I’ve succeeded with. Logically, I know this is untrue.
In my mind, though, the rejection of yet another story brings into question whether my writing is worth a damn. Whether I’m terrible. A slippery slope doom spiral eating away at my esteem until nothing seems good.
It wrecks everything around me and makes me feel like the most entitled, spoiled, awful person. But I am lucky. I am thankful. I worked hard, and by many people’s barometers of success, I have “made it.”
So, being honest with myself about wanting more and having artsy, highfalutin ambitions to be a traditionally published fiction writer sometimes brings me a pang of highfalutin existential guilt.
And before you people in my business circles say, “but why don’t you just self publish?”
I have my reasons. If you want to know why, ask.
So, I’ve been attacking the problem head-on. First and foremost, I ensure that I’m still writing a lot because, at the end of the day, my writing is one of the few things I can control.
I’ve also been trying to build my writing community even more. I’ve had less of it and been floundering since the great Twitter exodus, and many of the people I’d come to rely on for communication have dissipated into the online aether. So I’ve been taking more online courses.
Last week, I attended an in-person, full-day seminar for writers. And it was good. I felt inspired afterward. A lot of it was basic information to dispel naïve thoughts about how the publishing industry works. It’s stuff we all need to hear but don’t usually know until we actually start.
The new writer writes a book and says to themselves, “Egad! I’ve written a book. My genius words will be heard by all. I will be a New York Times Bestselling Author by next Tuesday. All I need to do is write [AN AGENT] and obviously they will also fall in love with my genius. They should feel lucky that I’ve decided to let them in on my tome. Not since Bill Shakespeare have there been words of such weight. They will have to construct a new kind of paper in order to hold them.”
This bubble quickly bursts when you realize what the querying process actually is, the slow speed that the industry moves at, and the number of people who are also trying to do what you are. Even though you are in rarified air relative to the public, for having completed a book (something you should celebrate), you still need to come down to the reality of how things work.
You cannot control the market, who you are, or other people.
Your pages better be good, your work needs to be sellable, and you need to be prepared for the fact that “completing your book” is really just the beginning.
I hope you actually like reading and writing. I hope you don’t mind countless drafts after the first one is done. I hope you have even more books in you. Because the grind of making the real book and making you a commercially viable ongoing writer is a whole different kind of thing that goes far beyond you writing the first draft of your first book.
But, friend, trust that you are a writer. And if you feel that you must continue to write. So you must.
The seminar was full of these bubble-bursting moments as I heard writers, young and old, gasp at the thought of having to bang out even more drafts of the manuscripts that they had toiled over to produce. Gasping at the notion of having to write another book before their precious baby is even picked up or out in the world. The notion that the agent has to sell it even after they’ve decided to represent a writer and it might not happen.
These were not shocking insights to me. On the one hand, I thought, well, I must actually like writing because here I am several books later, several hundred rejection notices later, and still doing it. It made me feel good. Proud. Maybe I do have the requisite grit, or obstinance (these things are relative), to just keep going.
The seminar was important for other reasons too. I’d gone in a real moment of doubt. It’s been years. My bubble had already been burst. I was searching for something to validate my continuing. And even though I received no guarantee of any kind, I felt comforted by hearing it from professionals.
I didn’t pitch anything to the agents on the panel while I was there, as I didn’t think my particular work was what they were looking for (do your research, folks). However, there was a panel in which our first pages were submitted, read aloud, and critiqued by the agents. They were very kind and less brutal, I suspect, than when slicing through their own inboxes, but the feedback for my writing was encouraging.
Very encouraging.
And boy did I need that. Again, it sounds strange. Because I know my business writing sells. And I know my business writing sells products in turn. But I needed and wanted validation for my fiction writing. I needed it pretty badly.
And I got it.
And it felt pretty darn good. It felt like progress.
Because for my business stuff, I can see how long people are reading it and I can see if it’s “doing” what it’s supposed to be doing. I’ve actually been very successful building a business platform. My numbers rise. The numbers are good. Always the numbers, numbers, numbers. I see a need, make content that fits into a strategy for a specific need, measure, iterate, optimize, until I get the right outcome.
This is harder to gauge for my fiction writing. Technically it should be the same process. But the need is so much more esoteric. So hearing good things about it aloud in a public forum (one where I could very easily have been torn down should it have gone the other way) was nice.
There are things that I need to figure out. Unique to me. I don’t know how to build a writer’s platform and get more people to read my stuff while maintaining a separation of “business marketer and content creator” me. They’re very distinct skill sets with storytelling overlapping the two, though used in incredibly different ways. I wouldn’t introduce the kind of prose I write to my marketing, and I wouldn’t love to see fiction written in my business guy voice. So I’m learning to develop the two paths simultaneously. I still need business guy. He pays the bills. Fiction guy gets scraps. But he’s actually me.
If I had the option to sever the ties with business guy, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Because I know what I want. That’s the kind of insanity that made me leave a c-level position in a huge company. It’s why the kind of insanity that makes you continue on even though I should know better. It’s the kind of thing that makes me wrap up so much of myself in silly stories. It’s the kind of insanity that makes a rejection of those stories feel like a rejection of me.
And it’s the kind of insanity that makes me keep doing it over and over, no matter what.
So special thanks to those at the seminar and participating in it. It made a big difference. I needed it.