Circling the Drain of Self-doubt

Today we're going to have a little chat about perseverance.

Who am I? Well, probably no one you've ever heard of. 

Yet. 

But I am an expert on my best friends, fear and self-doubt. So I thought this might be a good topic for me to tackle, and tell you the story all about how my writing career got flipped turned upside down.

Picture it: 2010.....an emotionally charged new mom with little sleep, and a traveling husband, decided to write a book. Friends and family encouraged her, said her words were great, and she should try and get it published. Naive mom decided, yes, this sounds like a great idea. If friends and family love it, the rest of the world surely would as well.

Well, let's just say reality hit me hard. Rejections ate my soul. And many times I wanted to give up. But there's something special about the writing community, and once they grab hold of you, they don't let go. They don't let you give up. They become your friends who pull you off ledges, reel you in from the sea of self-loathing, and make you keep going. Because while friends and family may be supportive and encouraging, writing friends understand what you're going through on a level no one else ever will.

How does one obtain said writerly friends? Lots of ways. Join local chapters of associations, writers guilds, enter online contests, find writing forums. Some of my best friends have come from Twitter and writing contests online. And if it weren't for them, I wouldn't be here today writing this blog post. Let's face it, friends are cheaper than therapy and a hospital stay from alcohol poisoning. 

But sometimes, fear and self-doubt still turn up like bad pennies or exes. And no matter how many times my friends talk me down from the walls, my writing life looks like this:

It's hard when you pour your heart and soul into words on a page, characters who live in your head finally make it to paper and the world just doesn't love them as much as you do. Trying to find a home for your book babies is a harsh business. And it plays with our head and hearts.

It's hard to stay motivated when you're facing a pile of rejections. How many times can you hear, well just write another book. Often times success doesn't happen with your first book. Or even second or third. I've heard stories of people who wrote ten or fifteen books before ever landing an agent or publishing contract.

These stories never made me feel as encouraged as people probably meant them to be. Instead it turned me into:

Did you know there's an actual scientific name for the hysteria I possess?

Suddenly, I was never going to ever get published. Everything I ever wrote sucked, and I would just sell insurance for the rest of my life. Because I was going on book number five and still unpublished and unagented. 

Granted, the more books I wrote, the better my writing had become and more requests came my way. Over the years I've learned more about my craft, honed my skills, made tons of amazing friends and even mentored others just starting out. And suddenly, things didn't seem so bad. 

Then one day one of my best writerly friends encouraged me to try writing a short story for her publisher who had a call for an anthology. She suggested I take a break from writing my usual stuff and just try writing something completely different. So I set out to write a short for a sexy anthology about uniformed heroes. I thought, why not. 

While I sat waiting to hear back on the anthology, she encouraged me to write a novella for one of this publisher's other special lines called Naughty Fairytales. My mainstay had always been science fiction and fantasy so I thought, well yeah I could totally write a sexy fairytale. So I did. And wrote one in a few days and subbed that.

And low and behold, that email came from the publisher and they wanted my short story for their anthology. Then they wanted my naughty fairytale too. And I totally sat at my computer looking something like this:

Suddenly I'm scrambling to set myself up a pen name and a whole new persona for my new writerly life writing sexy fun-time stories. I'm still trying to find an agent for my more mainstream novels. But now a whole new world has opened up for me on the side writing more romantic and fun sexy stories to pass the time. So sometimes you have to shake things up. Try something new. Success isn't always what you think it may be.

There will be many hills and valleys. Many highs and lows. But the key to it all is perseverance. 

For some, reaching their dreams may happen over night. Sometimes it's all about being in the right place at the right time. Sometimes it's knowing people. Sometimes it's just dumb luck. Often times it's hard work and just never giving up.

So if you're at that point where you want to throw in the towel....maybe throw in the towel on one thing, but pick up another towel and snap that one around for a little while. Sometimes you just have to go in a different direction to achieve a goal. Will I give up on my other persona? Never. I'm just detouring and enjoying this new ride for a little while.

And now, February 13, 2015 my very first book is getting published with Evernight Publishing. My naughty fairytale, UNBEARABLE will see the light of day. 

And on February 27th my short story will be out in the Uniformed Hero anthology!

So, if you're feeling down and out about life in the writing lane, don't give up. Remember:

A Career In Books?

An editor in New York recently said to me, "This is one of the last true apprenticeship fields." Although she meant it as just an interesting aside, the more I thought about it, the more I realized this is both a problem and an unfortunate truth in writing and publishing.

If you're like me, as many in our field are, you spent your childhood with your nose in a book. Late nights under the covers with a flashlight, sitting on the sidewalk while others did sports, and hours at the local library are the bright, shiny, happy spots in your memory.

Books, books, books. Must read all the books.

Sadly for me, as I got older, reading became less an obsession and more of a hobby. My English class in high school was uninspiring, and few of my peers read like I did. I was from a small town and a child of poverty, so although I had dabbled in writing here and there, there was no concept of being a writer for a living. I was privileged enough to go to college, but there was no way I would waste that opportunity on an English major. I didn't know taking a literature class was an option, let alone having a career in books. (This belief prevails. Check out this Slate article: Major Exodus: How do post-recession English departments attract students to a field losing popularity?) Thus I got my B.S. and reading was further pushed into the "something I only do for fun," area of my life.

What am I doing with my life?

Ironically, it was my career in biology that reunited me with my love of books. As a field biologist I got to witness many of the amazing creatures nature has to offer. That being said, I was also twiddling my thumbs, a lot. You do quite a bit of "observing" in the field, which means waiting and watching for something to happen. That's when the ideas for a novel started crowding my brain. I spent my nights tapping away at the computer, and it rekindled the love and obsession I had as a child. One year later, ta-da! My first complete novel.

Ta da! I will be a famous novelist!

I was going to make a living as a writer! This was what I should have being doing all along! Of course as anyone in the publishing world will tell you, it wasn't ready. But I didn't know that. It took 100+ rejections, a MFA in Creative Writing, self-publishing my next novel, and a 2-year unpaid internship at a literary agency for me to understand, six years later, what "ready" meant.

What makes you think your book is special?

All of that experience was my apprenticeship, and it opened my eyes to the world of publishing as a potential career. If you love books, despite what people tell you, teaching English or starving writer are not the only career options. The book industry world needs managing editors, literary agents, book-marketing gurus, book buyers, bookstores, designers, proofreaders, copy editors, ghost writers, book reviewers, writing conference leaders, distributors, publishers, the list goes on.

I only wish someone had pointed this out to the little girl with her nose in a book. I would have started earlier, done the unpaid internship in college, taken the courses in writing/literature, begun my career path sooner, so that the struggle would have been at the age it should have been. The MFA programs are equally as guilty, many of them focus on writing as art, scorning the "commercial" world, which is where most people in the book business make a living.

You write commercial fiction?

Many others who work in the book industry have a similar story to mine. They fell into it later in life, and realized they were in love, but it took some time to get to a moderately successful career and there were many financial sacrifices along the way. And still others don't make it that far. The path to publishing is littered with ex-editors who couldn't survive on such low salaries, ex-literary agents who didn't have financial support in those first few penniless years, ex-interns who had to get a paying job and more.

Why can't being an author and working within the book industry be a viable career path for everyone? Why can't more universities offer programs like Columbia's Publishing Course? Why are we expected to toil away at un-paid/low-wage apprenticeships just to get our foot in the door? Why is it that there is not a career path for novelists the way there are for so many other jobs? Why is there so little money in such an important field? And why is most of it concentrated in NYC, one of the most expensive cities to live in the world?

I don't have to put up with this, do I?

It was luck and privilege that I was able to follow my dream career at an older age, which included a partner willing and able to support me and an educated mother who taught me to love to read. People say that publishing/writing is a career for trust-fund kids and retirees. This is not true, but it is definitely an uphill battle if you don't have those advantages. One of the biggest reasons for this is a lack of information/opportunity available to those with less means. There are not many options for the not-so-privileged, the need-to-work-for-a-living, and the few paths to work in books that are viable for us are buried under negative stereotypes of post-English-major lifestyles.

Hey there. I work with books!

Books are considered a luxury commodity, even though reading and writing have proven again and again to be a crucial aspect of human nature. See the Guardian's Reading Fiction "Improves" Empathy Study Finds, or the New York Times's Writing Your Way to Happiness or NPR's How Orwell's 'Animal Farm' Led a Radical Muslim to Moderation.

Yes, you can work with books.
(And maybe the next doctor will be a POC. Maybe.)

The world needs more (and diverse) people working in books, but how will that happen with the current lack of support in the education system and society in general?

Managing Expectations

 

NaNoWriMo taught me a great deal this year.

I shared this fascinating experience with a group of wonderful writers, many of whom contribute to this awesome blog. We would post daily our accomplishments, struggles, frustrations, and/or tears. NaNoWriMo is not a task to be undertaken lightly. In fact, I’d sat on the sidelines for several years, watching other braver souls set forth on the perilous journey of writing 50,000 words in one month. I’d pants around with them in spirit, adding a few words here a sentence or two there to my work in progress, but I did it comfortably from my uncommitted couch. This year, I jumped in with both feet, all the while kicking and screaming, and discovered a great deal about myself and the writing process in general.

The biggest gem of insight this insane challenge gleaned was that as writers, and human beings in general, we are ridiculously hard on ourselves. In order to reach 50,000 words in 30 days, one had to commit to setting down on the page 1,667 words daily. That, by the way, is my extent at math skills, which is why I stick with writing.

At the end of each day we would post our word counts. Some would wallow in defeat and self-torture, others would prance with victory. On days I didn’t make the word count, I felt like I had failed. Days I made the minimum or exceeded it I was ecstatic but felt guilty posting my success because I knew there were others in the group beating themselves up for not meeting the daily requirements. I knew how frustrating that felt.  NaNoWriMo was supposed to be a brilliant kick start to creativity, instead it turned into a mad dash to crunch the numbers, and each day I fell behind left me with a bitter taste of inadequacy and failure. Why? Because the expectation with NaNoWriMo is that you commit to achieving the goal. In order to win, in order to get that shiny NaNoWriMo badge you can proudly display as your profile picture, you had to make the cut.

But here’s the thing. Make the cut for what? We were battling with ourselves and our uniquely creative process (for more insight, check out Anna Davis's post Want More Creative Energy? Pace Yourself). NaNoWriMo forces us to create in a surreal, unnatural environment and then measure ourselves against that ideal.

 

NaNoWriMo is not bad, in and of itself, the problem is how we approach it. Setting goals is a wonderful pursuit, but expecting things to turn out a specific way only sets us up for disappointment and disillusionment if things turn sour. Instead of patting ourselves on the back for 500 words in one day, for many participants (myself included) negative self-talk undermined the process of creating and turned writing into something unpleasant, or at very least a chore, and a tough one at that.

We write because we love to, because our passion compels us to create worlds, people them with a host of quirky characters, and live out our fanciful days in a realm of make believe so captivating that we lose ourselves in our own delightful creations. When we get caught up in the semantics of process and output rather than the experience of joyfully, blissfully adding fresh, compelling, sexy words to the page, in my humble opinion, it defeats the purpose: why we got into this crazy gig to begin with.

As writers, there are a plethora of misguided expectations we may place on ourselves. We might have an unrealistic idea of how long it actually takes to write a novel, screen play, instructional manual, or memoir (months, years, even decades). We might not realize how many drafts it takes to turn a lumpy piece of creative clay into a smooth and polished masterpiece (think double digits here). What about the end result of your blood, sweat, and tears? Do you want to be published? Are you hinging your happiness and sense of accomplishment on whether or not you get picked up by an agent or publishing house? What happens if you don’t sign that contract? Do you throw in the towel, hang up your laptop, and call it a career? Or do you acknowledge that there are other streams, other opportunities to get your work out there? Are you open to new experiences, wild and crazy unconventional options?

If we are constantly hung up on the end result, whether we get there, and the way we envision ourselves arriving (standing on a podium with fireworks and streamer cannons, thank you very much) we’ve lost touch with the passion that drives us to create.

By all means, set goals, have objectives, but don’t hinge your happiness on whether they end up looking like the vision you created in your mind. Instead, go with the flow, take the lessons you learn in the process and attempt something new in the future, try a new tack. No effort is wasted.

Being a writer isn’t easy. There are plenty of challenges both external and internal that we continually battle against, but the journey is definitely worth it if we keep in mind our reasons for starting in the first place. Writing invigorates us. It makes us excited to wake up in the morning, our fingers itch to put those words on the page, to flesh out that story, to sculpt and hone that brilliant idea.

If writing’s your passion live it, breathe it, but let go of the handlebars, loosen the grip, lose the expectations and let the words percolate one letter at a time.

You’re a writer. Have fun with it. xo

In gratitude,

Marissa