The Luxury Of Hopelessness
For a while now I've been turned down by two of the three major publishing houses in America. I do not want to go on anymore. Every rejection I receive is a piece of finished me, and as much as I love myself, it hurts too much to lose so many people who used to see me.
It's not really something that can be explained or justified. The luxury of hopelessness is the satisfaction that comes from knowing you have no hope left, and looking forward without worrying about anything else in your life besides taking care of yourself for now and maybe one day things will change for the better.
I've been in that situation for a while now, and I couldn't be happier.
I highly recommend it. There's nothing more powerful than the relief that comes from knowing you aren't fighting the world anymore because you don't want to. You're not fighting it because you don't have to.
Not everything is perfect though. I still have bills to pay and they are getting impatient with me but I'm working on finding ways around all of that by selling my writings and just being an ordinary writer who publishes himself instead of going through all these stupid submitting processes guaranteed to break your heart into a million pieces.
I've seen so many people get together and make things happen, and I know that if I can reach someone out there who is about to take their life due to the pain of submission, this article will be worth it.
You have your whole life ahead of you. Don't throw it away on a dream that's not going to come true, unless you truly want to do it. But if you don't want to, don't do it for anyone else but yourself because you're worth more than that. Anything you could have gotten from success would be so small compared to the joy of living your truth now and sharing that with others.
I wish you all good luck in your future endeavours. I hope you find the strength to believe in yourself.
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July 11, 2014
And then I picked up my current pen name and wrote a menagerie of stories. Some good, some horrible; some that were just okay but went on to be massively successful while others were written in a moment of anger and never meant to be finished, though they are still being read today.
After all this time, I got a few books published (one with my original pen name) and started getting paid for my work. But it was never what I expected it to be like at first. I always thought I would be able to live off of writing, but after struggling for years with low income I found out that it was only when I decided to rely on my name and what it could do for me that is when I started earning decent amounts of money.
So here's something you should know:
You don't have to earn a living from writing.
If you want to be a writer, then go ahead and write. It's up to you. But earning a living from your work isn't the best way to make your dreams come true. In fact, trying to do so can make it harder to create.
But it doesn't mean you shouldn't try to make a living off of what you love. I'm sure it can be done—I've seen plenty of people do it; I just think that's not the best way to go about making your dreams come true.
You might have the drive and determination to finish your work no matter how long it takes, but writing is one thing and publishing is another. It takes a lot more than just writing skills to get things published these days, which is why people hire editors or market themselves differently or spend their time taking courses on marketing or learning about the modern ways that encourage readership. There are many successful writers out there, but they are people who work hard at their craft and constantly learn how to make themselves better at what they do while also taking advantage of what they can do with the expansion of technology.
It's a lot more than just sitting down and writing.
For me, I would work on a novel for months, then spend weeks going over every single sentence to make sure it was perfect before I would even let anyone read it. After that, I would send it off to my beta readers only to receive the same advice from everyone—"it's good, but…" followed by suggestions on how I could improve it further. As you can imagine, the time it took to go through each aspect of the book and come out with a finished version of a manuscript that was liked by everyone was quite a lot.
I could spend an entire day just going over one sentence in my manuscript for proofreading before I would send it off to my beta readers again. Yes, things can always be done better, but at the end of the day I wouldn't want to pay someone to make minor changes because that's what I've been doing myself for years.
Just because something takes effort doesn't mean you shouldn't do it yourself. You might have to work harder at what you do, but I've learned that working hard is where I've been most successful as a writer.
I didn't learn to write well until I finally stopped seeing it as something that was supposed to be handed down to me by some god of writing. I used to think my job was to write how the professionals told me and send it off for them to tell me if it was good or bad. And when I wrote badly, they would ask me what went wrong and why now someone else was doing their job for them.
I didn't really care about writing, but I was told that I was a good writer if my story was "good" or "bad". And when I started to write free-style, they would ask me to read through my manuscript while they would go over the parts that seemed awkward or not as professional as the rest of it. That's when something clicked in me—I did have some talent after all, and it was terrifying though very exciting at the same time because I realized that this wasn't something handed down to me by someone else.
But it's easy to give up when you're going through a lot of rejection. I've had people tell me to just write something happy and let them know if it's good or bad. I could have done that if I didn't understand what it meant to be "good" or "bad" as a writer. And then there was the suggestion to just write about anything and everything I wanted.
Same thing with publishing my own work.
Conclusion:
Publishing your work is more than just putting it up somewhere. If you want to be a writer, first and foremost you have to be a person who can accept rejection without taking it as a personal attack on yourself. You also have to learn how to accept that "good" is subjective, and sometimes being told you're doing well isn't always good enough because not everyone has the same opinion on what's good or bad writing. Publishing your own work requires hard work and persistence, but it's important that you don't stop trying after the first rejection letter because there will be many more before someone finally agrees with your vision of what makes for good writing.