Writing to keep Afloat

What would you say is the biggest obstacle for your writing. Is it confidence, skill, commitment, or just finding the time to write?

For me, I find that I am never happy enough with my work to call it finished. I worry that if I send something off to agents that is not perfect, I’m wasting my chance. And if that imperfect piece of fiction reaches publishers, I worry they will reject it. And if, by some miracle, a bad piece of my work reaches bookshelves, I worry that I will look back on that first book –after a long career, of course– and regret starting with that book.

Some authors find themselves pigeonholed into a certain genre or attitude, even something as specific as a certain trope, because that is what they started with and it sold. It becomes a battle to write something else and to get the people around you, who are depending on your work for income, to support you in writing something else.

It’s the nature of the industry, but all of these possibilities can seem overwhelming to a budding writer. How can you avoid these pitfalls? How can you choose something to write now when it could affect so much in the future?

Really, the only answer to these questions is to forget about everything. Forget about what could happen and write what speaks to your heart. Forget the person who says you should abandon editing your first novel because it couldn’t possibly be good. If you love your first novel, the worst that could happen in editing it is that you improve your editing skills.

Forget what could happen in publishing. That should remain a vague dream for the future until it happens. Right now is for writing furiously and with as much passion as you can muster.

I’m saying this because I think that the main disease that writers have presently is the ability to think and think and think about writing and never write. That is the hole I often fall into when I become obsessive about the what-ifs of the industry. There are a hundred writers’ memoirs, a thousand craft books, and a million YouTube videos to distract you from the actual task.

When I want to go down a learning rabbit-hole instead of using my time on the words, I remind myself that the greatest writers did not have all of this distracting content. Jane Austen did not spend her time watching ‘Hello Future Me’. William Faulkner did not learn from books like On Writing by Stephen King. And Charles Dickens was not a master because he read The Elements of Style. These authors only did two things to become immortal literary behemoths:

1. They read a lot
2. They wrote a lot

In the end, that is all you really need to do. Put all the other chatter to bed and be obsessed. It’s time. Do it now.