It’s a difficult road, this writing life, with long interstices of hard work and silence. Weeks, months, years go by without sales, reviews, or acknowledgement. It’s tempting during such lulls to give up, to pack it in, to say, The hell with all this, and go do something practical like learn a trade. I’ve been there many times myself. Well-meaning friends and family might even tell you to move on. After all, you have no control over the outcome of any of it, save for the actual work itself: the writing. Everything beyond that: acceptances, publications, reviews and praise — that’s all up to the gods of literature. And we all know they are capricious gods.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret, a secret only those who know me well have heard. And this secret is that I’ve been frustrated lately, not with my writing — I’ve been producing some of the best work of my life — but of the ability of my work to sell to publishers. With a few notable exceptions, I think most writers go through this phase at some point in their careers.
And then something wonderful happened. I can’t say just what, just yet. I can only hint. But let’s just say that not one, but two very good things just happened to me, writing-wise, within the last week, one just last night, and I feel in a way extremely lucky and deeply grateful. Sure, I put in thousands of hours of labor in my writing. These good things did not just strike me from out of the blue. They are the product of years of hard work. But I recognize that just being able to have time to write, to devote endless hours to writing fiction, is in itself a great privilege.
I am always skeptical of those who say, What worked for me will work for you. A sample size of one always leads to self-bias. I’ve heard many authors just say, Follow my example, and you’ll find success too. And I have, in many ways, and the success didn’t come as promised. No two paths are alike. Some have an easy climb, and some must climb mountains. Still, we all have to climb.
This is all just to say that, at least in two recent cases, my hard work has finally paid off in something amazing, and I’m super excited about them. I can’t wait until the day, coming soon, when I can tell you what they are.
So yeah, maybe hard work eventually does pay off, that toiling away day after day, week after week, year after year eventually does lead to something. I’m careful not to generalize. My sample size is one. But maybe there’s some truth in that.
More to come. Stay tuned.
A book? Shocked, I am... Nay. Nonplussed!
Sir. I should smile. Your 20-odd blogs here in The Outer Deep have been either a mirror, or a self-response to where you 'are' as a writer during the period. Reading the titles of each blog... they are mostly a chronological venture, self-analyzing your confidence or competence level during that period of time and using it as fodder to sprinkle wisdom on us nubs. From your blogs, I believe that you have been experiencing a crisis of confidence. In your blogs I saw you struggle with this while advising nubs. I don't know who said it, but "No one learns more than when they are teaching" was spot-on. Gather these blogs and build a book around them.