Writing

 

If you’ve spent anytime on Twitter or reading agent’s blogs, you’ll know that submissions have skyrocketed this year. Further, editors report the same phenomenon: an abundance of manuscripts. Some have mused that it has something to do with the economy and although it makes sense, I hesitate to concur.

I do know that for writers who have a submission and are looking for agents, it’s tightened the race significantly. I see agents as the filters of the publishing world, the first line of defense as it were. But even though to an un-agented writer, finding an agent to represent feels like finding the holy grail, there is still many steps to ‘published’. And those steps, they are a crowded.

 

I don’t know about you but from time to time this leads me to question my career choice. If you think about it, the odds are so stacked against me and stacking higher with every passing day, you gotta ask: Who am I kidding?

I can write a passable story and I am more than willing, in fact want, to learn the craft and the business of writing but what’s the point? I can work for years on a manuscript, and have, only to see it sit on a cyber shelf collecting cyber dust.

Do I push the boulder up the hill until it stays? (or rolls down the other side of the hill into ‘published’ land) This is something, I’m sure, every serious writer contemplates from time to time.

 

Today as I was browsing some of my favorite sites, clicking links like opening doors in an old deserted mansion, I found a post by Kate Eliott from 2007. In this post she gives advice for first time novelists, one of which is, “If you can quit, do.”

 

This got me thinking. Could I quit? Could I just stop writing? Which led to: Why do I write?

When I first decided to write a novel, it felt a little like giving in; the novel wanted to be written and I finally said okay. From then I’ve not stopped. Let’s face it, wrangling words is hard work and it doesn’t stop once you’ve got them lined up into sentences and the sentences organized into paragraphs that in turn tell a bewitching story. There is this thing called publicity and networking that is both time consuming and, at times, frustrating.

 

For me, ultimately the answer is simple. I write because I’m driven to it; because it offers something I can’t find elsewhere. There is no satisfaction like finding the perfect word, or painting with words the image inside your head, of bring characters to life.

 

So I keep pushing that boulder up the hill, learning tricks of the trade along the way, and hope once I get it there, the rock will be polish and commerical enough that the ‘gods’ of publishing will let it roll down into the other side.