Being a Writer Is Like Being Told To Climb a Cliff With A Spoon

When I say writer, I, of course, mean creative writer, the kind who works with fiction and has tea-parties with make-believe personalities.

The cliff is typically the point where you no longer have to make the decision between burger-flipper and writer. Yes, you may earn slightly less as a writer in the long run, but at least you have less pimples.

Life used to be a lot easier, I think. You only had the one cliff to climb. Queries and traditional publishing was the only way to go. To even venture into the realm of self-publishing was akin to dousing your hair in shrimp paste before going to a party: it was the easiest way to turn into a pariah within the industry. Couple that with an attitude that you’re “just as good” as the traditionally-published writers and you will quickly find yourself famous for all the wrong reasons.

Nowadays, just being labelled a self-published book isn’t an automatic reason for people to recoil from your work. Well, maybe if your covers looked like these. Many people saw this as one less hurdle they have to climb in their quest to becoming a world-famous author and rushed to get their manuscripts published. This created a new cliff for new authors to surpass: becoming noticed at all. Lately, the choice seems to be:

• Go the traditional route, hope your manuscript gets picked from the slush pile, and then, when you finally get a publishing deal years of rejection letters and sobfests later on, hope to God you can maintain favourable sales or else you’ll find yourself back where you started…
• Go indie or the self-publishing route, which seems easy enough at first, until you realize you have to bathe in virgin blood and sacrifice a variety of animals to all sorts of deities so that you have a slim chance of making enough sales and not eating dog food when you retire…

I‘m exaggerating. At least, I hope I’m exaggerating. But it really is hard. And I’m going to tell you something that I think a lot of self-published writers, and maybe even some traditionally-published ones who lucked out but have no clue what they’re doing, don’t realize: it’s hard from the beginning.

It takes years to master this craft. Years to even be able to spit out work that doesn’t make a reader want to tear their eyeballs out. Years of actually sitting down, writing, and finishing manuscripts (note the “s”) before you can safely say that you kind of know what you’re doing. Kind of. Yet I still see people expecting accolades with their first manuscript, or people who self-publish and then believe the hype that all you have to do is bombard your potential readership with marketing propaganda in the hopes that they’ll randomly click on the “Buy” button for your book (probably to get you to shut up, hah!)

I also see people who, having attempted all of these, eventually give up. I hope I don’t become one of them.

I‘ve been preaching about the love of the craft for as long as I can remember. People would even quote me on it, back in the wake of fickle Internet fame. I don’t think I ever really understood what I was saying. I’ve always known this was going to be hard, but I was young, and I think a part of me thought I could maybe become an exception.

It’s humbling to understand the road you’ve chosen–the day you realize that mountain, those cliffs, also exist for you, and that you’re going to keep going because it’s all you know. Writing is not as painful for me as it once was, and I’ve long ceased trying to find fame or acknowledgement for it. I just need to do this about as much as I need to breathe.

Now, where’s my damn spoon?

“Well, the secret to writing is writing. It’s only a secret to people who don’t want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.”

-Ursula K. Le Guin

Read or don’t read The Agartes Epilogues. Like, whatever.