Today I read a blog post by my good friend and fellow writer, Jason Myers. You’ll find it here. Jason writes about giving up this crazy dream we call writing. It hit a chord with me so instead of leaving all of this in a comment, I decided to give my slightly darker thoughts in a blog of my own.
The writing industry is brutal. It doesn’t just take talent, or luck, or a good story, or technique. It takes all of them. A lot of all of them.
There comes a time when you start to wonder why. Why spend hours away from your family every day; why write story after story that no one, except a few peers who love it, reads?
If you’ve written for any length of time, you know you don’t write for a muse, you write for publication. This is a job. You’ve learned technique, studied up on your grammar and punctuation, invested much time in author/agent/editor blogs. You read your genre, know what’s out there. You write when you don’t feel like it, you write because you’re dedicated. You’ve received rejection after rejection and managed to hold onto the concept: ‘it only takes one.’ And when the last query/partial/full is answered with a ‘thank you but this isn’t for me.’ you think, okay on to the next novel. And the next, and the next, and the next.
At some point you start to wonder, if this is a job, what kind of idiot pays to work? Writing costs money. You’ve bought books on writing, books to read, sent out queries and partials, built a social network so when you do publish… and time is money. And when that time squeezes you and you realize you haven’t spent as much time with your kids or husband or family as you should, you begin to wonder if you should just put writing on the back burner, write on the weekends or when time allows instead of making it a priority. Or maybe… just maybe, it’s time to give up the dream.
Kids are growing up, bills need to be paid and there is no guarantee that you will ever be published. And when/ if you are? It’s scary to look at this industry without the rose-colored glasses. Have your read the statistics of how many authors don’t sell out of their advance? How many are dropped by their publisher after the initial contract runs its course? Would you take a second job that not only doesn’t pay, it costs you? Would you do the work for only the hope that someday, you may hit that magic combination that swings open the doors to the inner office?
Do you play the lottery?
So why do we keep on? Passion? Maybe. Foolishness? Maybe that too. Why do you write?
Shawna Thomas: Just another day in the life... 