“Aspiring writer” is always a lot more fun than “published writer.” You get to dream about how readers will respond to your work without this pesky thing called “reality” getting in the way, pretend you’re some undiscovered genius who just needs the right opportunity for your work to catch on fire like a fucking phoenix who rolled around in gasoline.
And sometimes that’s the truth for others. Which is always awesome; it is always amazing to watch someone who truly deserves it to get the credit, for once. Even though after clapping you now have to go back to trying to make your own sparks catch flame, except it’s raining, everything is wet, and even your matches are soaked.
I’ve seen writers turn to anger. “The public is stupid and they just can’t appreciate what I have to offer!” they’ll say, before they turn back to beating the proverbial dead horse of evil publishers and it’s all about the marketing budget and so on and so forth.
Me? I beat myself up. I’ve gotten very good at breaking apart my own work, knowing exactly what readers don’t and do respond to, and trying better the next time around. If nothing else, I know my craft like the back of my own hand. I know exactly what I’m trying to accomplish with word choices, sentence length, pacing…I know why I choose to show some scenes and not others, why characters do the things they do or talk about the things they talk about.
I know my craft so well I can tell myself to write to a schedule and I’ll be able to stick to it. I know what’s going to be a long slog, and how exactly I’ll tackle it; I know which character is supposed to have an existential crisis and at what point, and how I need to build up towards that. And you know, these are good things, I tell myself. Anyway, doesn’t it all come down to it in the end, the battle between me and the blank screen as I attempt to paint a picture through it? At least I’m productive.
I’m very good at motivating fellow writers, I think, because I have to do it for myself every step of the way. Every one-star, two-star, even three-star rating feel like a blow to my head. I’d go back to engineering, except I was pretty bad at that, too. So I really have no choice but to try to eke out some living from this, even if right now I am losing more money on ads than making them back. My artist and editors are all unpaid. If not for the love of the craft, we would have given up a long time ago.
My English teacher once told me that despair is a pretty hard subject to tackle.
All the rage and frustration goes into my writing. Pain, for an artist, is gold. Or so I tell myself. I love how I can transform all of these things to suit the genre. There is a scene in Sapphire’s Flight where Kefier is fighting a losing battle and readers responded to it very well. I’ve fought losing battles my whole life, and maybe I still am. I have become an expert on despair, on losing, on failure, on getting my teeth kicked in by life from every corner. Maybe that’s the kind of writer I’m going to be. Not the kind who gets respect and admiration but the sort who spills her guts out despite everything. I wear my heart on my sleeve and then smear it on every page.
There are worse things to be.
