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| Photo credit: Twylo on Flickr |
Continuing from last week’s 10
Writing Truths post, here are the final five of my ten writing truths:
The last five writing truths:
6. Not everyone will understand your passion. This especially applies to those of us who aren’t published or have self-published. Family and friends won’t always understand why you spend your waking hours locked up with a computer, typing away at something that gives you little income in return. Strangers will smile and nod and pat you on the back when they realize that by writer you don’t mean published in a bookstore. There will be looks. There will be judging. There will be comments about getting a real job or spending your time on something fruitful.
6. Not everyone will understand your passion. This especially applies to those of us who aren’t published or have self-published. Family and friends won’t always understand why you spend your waking hours locked up with a computer, typing away at something that gives you little income in return. Strangers will smile and nod and pat you on the back when they realize that by writer you don’t mean published in a bookstore. There will be looks. There will be judging. There will be comments about getting a real job or spending your time on something fruitful.
They
won’t always understand and that’s ok. That’s when you reach out to your
writing community. Because we writers? We get it. We understand. And we know
exactly what you’re going through.
7. Writing requires
sacrifice. Maybe it’s sleep or a social life or television or video games
or a plethora of a hundred other things you could be doing, but writing takes time.
Time that you could be doing something else. Maybe it’s time in the morning
that you could be resting instead of waking up early to get some words down
before the day begins. Maybe it’s time in the afternoon when your favorite
television show is on, but you’re holed up working on your WIP instead.
Whatever it is, writing takes time away from other things
you could be doing. But if you’re a writer, it’s worth it—because writing? That's just what you do.
8. You will need to
be patient. If this list were in order of importance (it’s not), this would
be way up there. Writers play the waiting game all the time—waiting for a
manuscript to cool down before we start editing, waiting for a critique partner
or beta reader to get back to us, waiting for an answer to that query letter,
waiting for a response from an editor, waiting for your book to finally get
published, waiting waiting waiting.
It’s tempting to skip a step. It’s tempting to edit before
you’ve developed enough distance from your manuscript or forgetting beta
readers or bypassing editors or submitting (even publishing) manuscripts after
just a couple of drafts.
It’s tempting, I know. But you
need to be patient. This isn’t a race—not with yourself or with anyone
else. These things take time and in the case of the writer, time
is on your side.
9. You will need to
be brave. Writing is a scary profession. There’s the fear of
rejection—first privately, by agents or beta readers and critique partners—then
publicly, by readers and reviewers. There’s the fear of disappointing your
readers or not being able to live up to your expectations of a writer. There’s
pressure and deadlines and terrifying fears every step of the way. You’re not
going to be able to avoid the fear forever and that’s ok—we’re all afraid
sometimes.
But you’ll need to be brave. You’ll need to step past the
doubts and the nightmarish scenarios forming in your head and keep working and
writing and editing and rewriting because you’re a writer and it’s time for you
to be strong.
10. To be a
successful writer, you must love to write. Period. Writing is not a
profession for the faint of heart. It’s competitive, exhausting and at first,
requires a lot of work with little return. Some authors spend years on a
manuscript and you need to be prepared for that possibility. When years go by
and manuscripts pile up in your drawers, you must continue writing. When you’ve
written half a dozen drafts for your WIP and it still needs a complete
overhaul, guess what? You need to keep writing.
That kind of perseverance can’t come just from sheer stubbornness.
You must love what you’re doing every step of the way or you’ll burn out.
To be a successful writer, you must love to write.
So there you have it—my list of ten writing truths. Did I miss any?
What do you think?
