I published my first story when I was twelve and, like many young writers, I was pretty sure I would soon be rich and famous. People kept telling me writing was a challenging career, but I believed it wouldn’t be for me because I was special.
I grew up in a farming town a shockingly long time ago, before it was “in” for girls to have goals other than marriage, and most of my friends were more interested in which one of the Beatles they were going to marry than in creating careers in the arts. It was safe to say I was the best fiction writer of anyone I knew because I didn’t actually know anyone else who wrote fiction.
So, here I am a zillion years later, with a modicum of success and a shipload of experience, and I’m here to tell you the main lesson I have learned over the years since that first publication: The writing life is hard. Not just you-have-to-do-a-lot-of-work-before-you–make-it hard, but you-just-might-be-driven-over-the-brink-of-despair hard. Not just hard, in other words, but dark.
And how is it dark? Here are just a few of the ways:
There are a lot of incredibly good writers out there who aren’t even close to being rich and famous. I mean thousands. Read the stories in a few obscure literary journals. Go online and buy some novels or short story collections you’ve never heard of. You will find among them writing that is radiant, fresh, original, and compelling. And yet, you learn, the author adjuncts at a community college for $23,000 a year while his book sales languish. Dark.
Sometimes poor writers—even genuinely awful writers—become immensely successful. Wealth, fame, and movie deals come not only to the talented few, but too often to the buffoons and charlatans, the writers of awkward, hackneyed, groan-worthy tomes, people who write sentences like: “His fingers made her nipples burn like candle flames until she intoned, Please, Herbert, take me now!”
At some time in your life, you will read the first paragraph of a novel and be so disgusted you throw the book across the room. Later that day, you will find yourself driving home from work listening to that very author being interviewed by Terry Gross about how they get their inspiration. Dark.
There are always going to be a lot of writers doing better than you, and worse yet, sometimes those writers are your friends and you have to pretend you’re happy for them even if you feel like you’re going to dissolve into a puddle of self-pity every time they talk about their latest publication. Dark, dark, dark.
Getting a book published is not often the path to fame and success. The first time you get a book published, you will think, OH. MY. GOD. THIS IS JUST TOO WONDERFUL. Then you will wait, expecting your life to be transformed by the publication of your book into something luminous and lofty. And before you know it, a year has passed and you have eight reviews on Amazon and your book is listed at # 314,281. I forget who said waiting for a book to get published is the calm before the calm, but they nailed it.
There it is. The darkness. The difficulty. The horror. So what can you do? You have many choices. Getting drunk. Giving up. Refusing to get out of bed for days at a time. Throwing such humiliating public tantrums that your friends stop calling and your family makes plans to move out. Or you can do the following:
Get into the adventure. Writing isn’t signing up for a cruise. It’s putting on a backpack and heading off into the wilderness. Stop expecting the universe to grant your wishes and start taking in the view.
Remember you’re in good company. Yep, you can be just as successful as Herman Melville! If he died without a single one of his works in print, so can you. Not that you will—you probably won’t. But keep in mind that some of the authors now considered luminaries were at one time miserable flops.
Develop a sense of humor. Yes, it might have to be a rather grim kind of humor, but if you can laugh about the ups and downs—and especially the downs—of the writing life, you’re fifty steps ahead of the person who can’t.
Write to write. If you’re writing in order to become a bestselling author, you’re writing for the wrong reason. I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with that dream, I just mean it’s not what should be bringing you to the page. Shift your motivation. Write for the fun of it. Write for the excitement. Write to escape the humdrumness of everyday life. Write to teach, learn, grow, entertain, laugh, cry. Write to write.
Sometimes I write worried no one is reading. Other times I Know no one is reading. Writing is a lonely thing. I’ve tried to stop writing and know I can’t give it up, even knowing the long odds of recogntion and fame. But I Am a writer. This I know to be true…
You said perfectly, Doug. The loneliness is real. The odds are long. But once you know you’re a writer, there’ no going back.
Oh, the dark, dark, dark. A writing friend died last year. At his memorial service, the facilitator read a letter of condolence to all those gathered, from a Very Famous Author/Writing Teacher, whom my friend had studied with. I couldn’t believe how outraged I was, that HE got recognized by that Famous Author. I was jealous of my friend, at his FUNERAL, for crying out loud! Dark, dark, dark.
Oh, how I love this! Author jealousy runs so deep. And having gotten intensely jealous at all the attention my sister was getting at her funeral (sibling rivalry at its most awful), I can absolutely relate.