Here is some news for you.
Porno Kitsch has done a pretty fly interview with me in which they asked some fairly tough questions (and in which I get to face the infamous “is this a D&D game gone wrong story” question). Check out Parts One and Two here.
Ari “Mammaries” Marmell and I are going head-to-head for the next week over at Babel Clash. Come watch the magic and mystery.
Please keep an eye on Amanda Rutter’s blog, since she’s been helping to organize a donation/charity auction for relief effort to Japan which many of us fine authors will be contributing to.
So, then…to business.
Hi. It’s a post about writing today. One that you might find useful, though. It occurs to me that we discuss the technical aspects of writing and getting published frequently, but we don’t always think about the mental and emotional aspects. This, I feel, is slightly dishonest of me, since those aspects are the ones I was least prepared for when I became published and I’d not want to wish the same mental torture I put myself through on anyone…well, maybe some people. All those people should stop reading here.
I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but it can be remarkably easy to get burned out on social media. Part of this reason, of course, is that becoming overwhelmed is simply inevitable when everyone is talking about similar things all the time. I think for those of us in the writing profession, though, there’s another aspect to it, one that can swiftly morph from burn out to resentment and outright loathing.
Envy.
It gets easier, but it never gets easy.
I’ve probably brought up this quote, that Joe Abercrombie once said to me, more than any other piece of advice I’ve ever been given. And there’s good reason for this: it’s astonishingly true. Getting published is difficult, sure, but being published can be a whole different animal. If you’ve ever attended a writing workshop or panel, you’ll probably have heard that the internet changed everything about being a writer. Having become a writer by the time the internet was ensconced firmly in most peoples’ lives, I couldn’t really say as to how much has changed, but I can tell you this.
It’s very easy to get personally involved with someone halfway across the world when you can talk to them in real-time. It’s easier for authors and readers, I think, because the art form is inherently personal: something written is something offered personally by the author and the reader connects with the author on a personal level. That’s what makes it work. That’s also what lends the relationship a degree of personal investment and all the emotions that come from it.
My editor Lou Anders once suggested that there are people out there that can admire an author and, at the same time, resent him for occupying space they feel they’re entitled to (I’m horribly paraphrasing this, he said it much more eloquently). This isn’t a broad, sweeping accusation, but I suspect there might be a ring of truth to it.
Largely because I’ve often felt it.
As I said, it’s remarkably easy to look at another author’s stellar reviews or awards or work or twitter followers or comments on their blog post or just the fact that someone said just the right word to them that you wish someone would say to you. It can be pretty intimidating to see it and fear tends to begin the spiral. The reactions go from “how am I going to compete with that” to “what makes him so special” to “I deserve it more.”
This can quickly lead to the resentment I mentioned earlier, where you find yourself irritated to hear of their success or to read their tweets or just to see them eat lunch because how dare they eat a burrito when you’re languishing under their oppressive heel!
Probably the worst about it? It’s totally natural. You’re not a freak for having felt that twinge of envy, that pang of resentment, that stroke of intimidation that has made you quiver in your computer chair. And you’re not a tramp for wanting attention, wanting people to look at you, wanting people to notice your writing.
But these are products of the art, things that will come to you when you write the best book you possibly can and hone it as much as you can. Everything you want will come from all that you should want: to tell your story.
The envy, the resentment, the intimidation are largely useless things because they all spawn from a largely useless emotion: fear. It’s one I revile and one I frequently find myself wallowing in. And it all starts with that fear that you’re not good enough to break into this competition and compete with the big dogs, woof woof.
And yet, it’s there, at the top of the spiral, where we tend to go wrong.
Writing isn’t really a competition.
There are awards, online polls, the occasional blog that asks you to cut open a goat and see who will be the true champion writer of whatever. These are fine for people who are interested in them, but they don’t change the fact that there is no such thing as a reader who will only read one book. No one has ever looked at Tome of the Undergates and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and said: “Well, shit, whichever one I don’t read now I’m going to ignore for the rest of my life, because that’s hardcore, baby.” And if there are people who’ve done that, they probably weren’t going to read your stuff, anyway.
And there will be people for whom your stuff just doesn’t work. That’s fine, too. It’s something you get to deal with. It sucks, of course, but “sucks” is not a really earth-shattering verb.
Because “sucks” does not take away from the art. “Sucks” does not change the fact that it’s the story you wanted to write. “Sucks” does not mean you’ll swear off writing forever. “Sucks” means that it sucks that this person didn’t dig your stuff. Maybe they’ll like whatever you do next. Maybe they won’t. But the people who will are the people you should keep in touch with.
I’m kind of writing this for myself, primarily, just to reassure myself that it’s not all that I make it out to be. I succumb to these emotions frequently. I’m getting better at it, of course. If you can take something away from this, so much the better.
And we end the same place we began: social media. Don’t look at it with fear and revulsion. Don’t look at other authors as challenges to be topped. Don’t look at people as commodities that either contribute or decrease your success. And don’t view success as being in limited quantity.
These are numbers.
If you were good with numbers, you’d probably be doing something that paid better.
