Before I tried my hand at fiction writing, I worked as a newspaper reporter. I was in the field for about a dozen years and never made more than $40,000 in a year. For the vast majority of my career, in fact, I made $20,000 - $25,000. I looked upward to journalists at the highest levels of the "game" at newspapers like the Detroit Free Press, Chicago Tribune and Washington Post. They made double or triple what I did.
After striving to reach their level for years, it became demoralizing and seemingly unattainable. So, I moved on. Now, I haven't exactly set the world on fire in terms of salary since then, but I am making more. Better yet, I don't have to live with the feeling that I'm somehow lacking, or that I'm not good enough to make it to the Big Leagues (to use a bad sports analogy).
The reason I say all of this is that I am fighting many of those same feelings of rejection and failure as a fiction writer.
To date, I've only published a short story and a pair of novellas. So, if you said I shouldn't even be thinking in terms of success and failure right now, you'd have a point. After all, there are very few one-hit wonders in indie publishing - Darcie Chan's Mill River Recluse comes to mind.
Okay, I know, I get it. I'd have a lot more to whine about if I had published a dozen novels and still only saw trickling sales. Still, at the moment, I feel a lot like I did years ago. Truthfully, I'm having a really hard time finding the motivation to write.
It takes a big investment of time and energy to put a story together. I can deal with that, and I still enjoy the process of writing. It's the investment in hope that, perhaps, this will be the one that sets me on my way, I'm lamenting over.
Because I know, going in, the odds are steep. I know, despite my best efforts, my next "little darling" will likely languish somewhere around a million in Amazon's Kindle store after a few months of being on its virtual shelves.
There's a line from my favorite movie, The Shawshank Redemption, which seems apt here:
Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.Anyway, I would really love to hear how you, my writing colleagues, deal with this issue from day to day. How do you push past it and keep churning the words out?
