When you write for any length of time, you’ll come across some very common thoughts. Patterns, if you will. How hard this all is. How mentally taxing. How frustrating. Everything is frustrating. Editing is frustrating. Marketing is frustrating. Seeing other authors get attention, when you don’t–no matter how much you logically try to tell yourself their success has nothing to do with your failure–is frustrating. And then of course there’s that sweet insanity of writing in the first place…trying to produce magic from a blank screen, like you’re some wizard whose powers have yet to surface, a Goddamned muggle hoping this time the sparks will fly from the wand you picked up from the local hobby store. Who are you kidding?
I think the best way for a writer to protect one’s self is to never look past the story you are writing. Don’t even compare it to other stories you’ve done. All the crap has to recede to the background, become invisible. At that moment in time, only the story matters. Only that world. Only those characters. If you do it right, it’s like slipping into the water and swimming towards the ocean. And then it becomes almost comforting, just having to worry about staying afloat in that particular sea. Who cares if that is the market trend over there and you can only write this? So it’ll never sell. It doesn’t matter. It’s the story you want to tell. The desire for control is all too real with most people, and writers especially. You can read as many How To Write guides as much as you want, you can pretend that commercial or critical success is within your grasp if you can only figure out the secrets of the universe, but the truth is even within our own manuscripts, we aren’t gods.
So what else do you have? Just the story. Overthinking this whole process is like overthinking life–at the end of the day, today, you can only breathe.
