Me writing
There’s an interesting post from Konrath’s site, in which he explains why he never quit writing. Basically, years ago, he was making about 25k a year from writing and felt it wasn’t enough, and now he’s making a ton of money from writing, but felt that if you can’t hack the writing challenges, you might be better off just quitting. And he’s right. But his post also hints at something else: The people who basically are driven to write, and therefore need to make it part of their professional life, if not their entire professional life.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the same sentiment because let’s be honest, my writing career has never taken off the way it was supposed to. When I was a kid, teachers used to tell me that I was a brilliant writer, that they could see a future for me as an intense writer. I loved telling stories, whether in person or on paper. Writing came naturally to me. It felt inevitable as a future career for myself.
Early in my writing career, I latched onto an agent who was going to sell my first novels. She was a well-known, highly placed agent. Everything was looking great. And then she had a brain injury and left the business. And then came back to it years later, but honestly couldn’t remember who I was. Yeah, sounds like a bad soap opera plot. I then secured a second agent who tried for about six months to sell my stuff (or just thought about it and never did anything about it) and then fizzled. Since then, finding another agent has been almost as easy as climbing Mount Fuji by starting in Texas.
And then the ebook revolution took place, and the whole industry fell apart. There are still publishers out there, but connecting with them has become almost impossible, and agents don’t seem to be interested in anyone any more, and everyone that has ever wanted to be a writer, even if it was just for fun, is now a published author selling their own stuff through Amazon and others. Now, the model has changed from good writers getting attention to the best marketers getting the most attention, even if the writing is awful (i.e., Fifty Shades of Gray, although people tell me that once you get past the really bad beginning writing, it actually becomes a much better writing enterprise).
Which brings me back to my original question in the subject line of this post. Why I never quit writing. You see, I really can’t stop. I love to write, and the only way I’ve ever been able to understand and then explain the world is through writing. For me, the act of writing is an exercise in learning more about the universe and why we’re here. Through continuous experiments in writing, I find myself learning more about myself and more about the world around me. Each new novel is an exploration into the process of writing for me, and each new novel is something completely different than what I wrote before. It’s more of a Murakami type of writing, although it’s my own journey, not one scripted out by someone else.
But the business of writing has been the thorn in my side since day one. I’ve never made it successfully, which often leaves me wondering if I should even be able to consider myself a professional writer when my books are read by so few people. Sure, I can take any title I like, but what good is a false accolade in the long run?
But getting back to the question, what I have discovered is that writing is basically all I have. I don’t have a family. I don’t even have a girlfriend. I don’t have a job that I go to where I think “those people would suffer if it wasn’t for me coming in each and every day.” The people where I work wouldn’t notice at all if I wasn’t there tomorrow. They might notice the desk not being occupied, but that’s about it. I don’t do anything of enough significance that it matters to anyone, nor will it ever.
I don’t have a lot of friends, so I don’t have a large group of people who rely on me as their social hub person. I have very few friends, to be honest.
I don’t even have a pet that relies on me for its meals. Not even a goldfish swimming around, thinking, “where’s that strange human who puts food into my bowl?”
For me, writing is all that I have. I construct fantasy worlds, and sometimes I create scenarios where people do horrific things that force them to do all sorts of things they wouldn’t have normally done. I write about people who question their reason for being, their relationships, their place in the grand scheme of things, while I meanwhile ask none of the questions of myself because I have no ties to the material world that my characters inhabit.
So, for me, if I didn’t have my writing, I’d have nothing. Which brings me to the conclusion that if I ever finally realize that my writing is a joke, that my purpose actually has no purpose, I’d probably end everything right then and there.
That’s why I never quit writing. It’s all I have.