Today, I’m going to be writing what will be my 12th novel (and yet another epic fantasy) since I first stopped treating my writing like a test of my worth.
As I’ve talked about before, my decision to self-publish was the beginning of my resolve not to put my future in somebody else’s hands. I was tired of gatekeepers getting to decide how I was going to feel about myself that day, that week, even that month. “I’m useless,” I used to tell myself every time I saw a rejection, which would push me into yet another mental health spiral which wasn’t helped by the fact that the rest of my life was all over the place, too. I know people say that’s normal, that it takes hundreds of rejections to get anywhere, but being BIPOC in this industry also means not knowing if those rules apply to you or not. Heck, being BIPOC in any industry comes with that uncertainty: is it systemic racism or is it yourself? Can you do anything about it or are you supposed to just take punch after punch until you die? Self-improvement in the hopes of overcoming racism could be a doomed dance…you end up shedding parts of yourself and forming a caricature to please imagined strangers. I don’t know if you can find truth or salvation there, though I can certainly understand the necessity. Despite the world’s demands, I want to give myself the room to be a human being expressing my heritage and my experiences and my feelings and myself.
Writing is such a double-edged sword. I can snip and touch it up to please the default’s perception of what’s good or not, but this comes with the risk of taking my soul with it. Is it an accident, then, that my most powerful writing came after I chose to let the stories lead themselves? I’d like to think not. Stories need to be nurtured, not whipped into shape. It doesn’t matter what genre it is. Epic fantasy, thrillers, what have you. It needs space to grow in the presence of people who care about it, who see its potential and want to guide it to success. Even now, I barely use beta-readers. I have a handful of trusted people who help me shape the stories into how I envisioned them, and no more. I don’t want a thousand opinions colouring what I’m trying to do when they all have different ideas of what’s good or not.
I know this goes against usual conventions. How do you know your writing is good if no one tells you it’s good? But I happen to think that’s the wrong question to ask. To me, good writing is powerful writing. It is persuasive, unforgettable. It makes at least one person feel about it so strongly they can’t stop thinking about it. Why can’t that person be me? I put the writing away. If I can come back to it weeks, even months later, and feel the tug of story to a point that I want to do nothing else but finish it right away, it’s good enough. In many ways, I am the only audience my stories need. That’s not ego–the egotistic writer needs outside validation in order to proceed and falls apart when they don’t get it. When you shed all of that and learn to love every story for what it is, for yourself, the sense of freedom is inexplicable.
Everything else–public response, sales, whatever–that’s a business thing. And if these things are important, then yes, you need a sense of market (even if–and arguably especially if–you’re self-publishing. Because putting that thing out there is going to be on your dime, and you have to know where to start). But that’s not the same as asking for permission if your work is good enough to be published. I haven’t asked for permission in nine years, and I’m not about to start now.
(And you, my first epic fantasy novel: yes, you’re good enough. You always will be.).
