The ‘Cult’ of Imposing Writing Rules on Others, IWSG

One thing insecure writers so often do is get on a mad search for absolute writing rules and then proceed to impose those rules on other insecure writers— whether asked for feedback or not.

This is a post in the Insecure Writers’ Support Group blog hop. Learn more at: https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html

Some people support the rule about ‘no clichés’ by condemning every actual fantasy element in a fantasy novel as ‘cliché.’ No dragons, no elves, no vampires, no magic rings… no readers, because fantasy novel readers like books with fantasy elements in them, even though they have seen these things before. 

Some people like to complain about ‘head-hopping,’ or shifting the point-of-view during the scene. It IS an amateur move to shift point-of-view accidentally or in a confusing way. But author Stephen King wrote a scene where the reader starts off in the head of a bad guy on a shooting spree, shifts to a frightened observer who is the next to get shot dead, and then moves back to the point-of-view of the shooter. Does this make Stephen King an amateur hack-writer who will never be published? No, it makes him a skilled writer who is too experienced to bow to a lot of absolute amateur-writer rules.

Our need for rules dates back to our very early days of being able to read or write. When teacher admonished us that the word ‘cats’ must not be spelled ‘ka777z,’ it was wise of us to obey that rule if we wanted others to be able to read our childish little attempts at writing sentences. 

But we kept on learning more and more, and I hope we will all keep on learning more about writing until we die. There are very few absolute rules other than the ‘traffic signals’ of correct spelling, grammar and punctuation that make other people able to make sense of our work. Imagine if Jeff Lindsay had gone to a bunch of rule-oriented writers and explained his idea for the Dexter novels. A serial killer who’s a blood spatter analyst and the ‘hero’ of the series? You can’t do that! Lead characters need to be— at least more moral than someone that gets a thrill out of making other people dead. But Lindsay did pretty well with the Dexter thing after all.

The point I have to make is we have to develop our writing confidence enough to ignore the people who want to impose various rules on our work. If we are writing ‘OK-enough’ fiction and not groupthinking it to death through critique groups, we can ignore alleged writing rules. And if our writing skills have a long way to go, no amount of slavish rule-obeying will save us. (Hint— if you fear your writing is ‘not good enough,’ read more books. Write more novels and short stories. Your skills will improve.)

“Why is my writing broken?”

A lot of writers out there are desperately searching for a critique group, or beta readers, or even a ‘content editor’ to hire, to get some feedback on their work. Many go so far as to post their writing or writing ideas on an internet group and then get frantic when random strangers on the internet are too critical, which means ‘my writing sucks,’ or not critical enough, which means ‘my writing sucks so much that people feel sorry for me.’

This is a post in the Insecure Writer’s Support Group blog hop. To connect with other Insecure Writers, follow this link: https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html

What we are looking for in these cases is validation, and our search for validation is usually based on ideas like this: My writing is broken. My writing is broken because I am broken, and so therefore I can never fix my own work myself. Other people— any other people, even strangers on the internet— are not broken so that any thing they say about my work is valid and any criticism they make must trigger yet another rewrite. Because I’m broken and they are not.

Why oh why do so many of us think like that? Well, think back to the days when you were first learning to read/write and were writing down words and phrases for the first time. When you showed your first written sentences to a grownup, that grownup often couldn’t make out what you meant to say. Perhaps because the word ‘cat’ is spelled with fewer sevens than you used. Or some of your letters looked more like other letters than the ones intended. Only a grownup could show you which things needed to be fixed at that baby stage of your learning. 

But now, you are not a little kid any more. You probably can spell many words correctly, or you know how to use a dictionary and spell-check to fix mistakes. You can either write legibly or you use a computer to write so no one needs to know how vile your handwriting is. But inside you is still that tiny learning kid that expects his work to be wrong, and broken, and in need of grown-up fixing. 

Here is the reality— your writing is not ‘broken’ and you are not ‘broken.’ You know things and have skills you didn’t formerly have. And you can learn new stuff any time. If you think your characters are weak, you can read a good book on writing better characters. If you make a lot of typing errors, you can get a typing program and practice every day. 

Other people are not better than you at everything. Just because some near-stranger in your critique group says you can’t write a book about a serial killer who solves crimes because he likes to murder other serial killers doesn’t mean you can’t write that. Just because someone says ‘Amanda’ is a stupid name for a character doesn’t mean you have to change it to Agnes. Believe in your own writing ideas more than you believe in that of others. Because they can’t see inside your head and write your story for you, any more than you can see into another writer’s head.

Also, when you learn for yourself to correct flaws in your work, you learn to see the difference between a real flaw and just something that some random person didn’t like. Spelling ‘cat’ as ‘ka777’ is a real flaw (except perhaps in avant-garde poetry,) making your starship captain a talking cat is more a matter of taste. 

I think sometimes that the main difference between the ‘real’ writers and the eternal beginners is not in skill or talent, but merely in the fact that ‘real’ writers believe in themselves and their work— enough, at least, to keep going and to submit or publish their works. I have read big whoppers of mistakes in early works of big-name writers— a writer who created a metal-poor world in which the hay was still kept in hay bales, implying the existence of hay balers which require lots of metal to make. Or the very young writer who implied that a 30-year-old character was old and decrepit. These mistakes made it into print, and these writers made a living in writing anyway. 

So don’t fear mistakes so much you feel ‘broken!’ Your ‘broken’ writing may attract readers that love your work and want more.

Finding Your Genres #IWSG

It’s not enough to aspire to be a real writer— you have to be a writer OF something. That’s where genres come in.

A genre is a book-selling category. If you go into a real-world bookstore, there may be a section of science fiction and fantasy, a section of mysteries, a section of romance. In a big bookstore there may even be a bit of literary fiction around somewhere. 

Genres are the way most of us find stuff to read. We learn that certain genres reliably give us a good reading experience and other genres do not. We pick up Westerns or mysteries or thrillers or military SF or gothic romance or whatever other kind of book we have learned delivers the kind of story we want.

When you are becoming a writer, part of the job is developing a self-identity as a writer. And writers are known by the genres they work in— there are romance writers and horror writers and Western writers and science fiction writers. 

Of course there are writers who write in multiple genres, or who write a book in one genre but then write in a different genre— as in the case of Louis L’Amour, whose first published book was poetry and wrote many many Western novels, which are still in print today. 

But your writer-identity ought to have one or more genres connected to it. It’s not a limiting thing— you are still free to write and publish what you like— but it helps you think of which playing-field you will likely be working in. But how do you figure out what genre(s) to pick?

What Genres do you Read?

When you are reading for your own pleasure, what genres are you most likely to pick? Don’t be ashamed of what you like— even if your English prof told you that intelligent people only read literary fiction, that doesn’t mean you should feel bad for reading things you actually enjoy. Learning to be a good writer— of ANY genre— means a lot of reading since if you are a Regency romance writer you need to learn what current writers are doing IN THAT GENRE. It’s easier to do that reading if you don’t hate the genre!

What Genres do you get ideas in?

Some well-known writers enjoy READING in certain genres, but they don’t really THINK in that genre. They may read every science fiction novel that comes out, but their brains don’t come up with valid science-fiction story ideas. Or they may love historical fiction but not be able to do the massive amount of research involved. (I might want to set a story in the Roman empire but I don’t speak Latin well, and don’t have access to a library that would have the books I’d need for research or the money to buy a library’s worth of books about Roman history, so any mystery novel ideas I have where the Emperor Claudius solves crimes will have to remain unwritten.)

What Genres currently sell well?

This is where many aspiring writers go astray. They think the genre they love doesn’t sell or is too competitive so they randomly pick a genre that’s currently ‘hot.’ But if you think Amish romance or Dystopian YA is utter dreck, you will likely not be able to write in that genre in a way that fans of that genre will appreciate. 

But there is room for writing in popular genres in the world of writing. The top Gothic romance authors, when the genre tanked, called their books Romantic Suspense and kept on writing. Fantasy writers might try writing some ‘paranormal romance’ if that category is selling. Science fiction writers might try a ‘dystopian YA’ novel, especially of some of their science fiction novels have been described under that term. 

Even when you are a mere unpublished— not even indie published— writer, picking your genre(s,) reading in your genre(s,) and thinking of yourself as a future writer in those genre(s) is a good step towards becoming a writer for real. And that’s always a good thing.

What genres do you read? Get ideas in? Write? Publish? Are there other genres you might like to try someday? Share about it in a comment!

Yours in genre-identity,

Nissa Annakindt

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This was a post in the Insecure Writer’s Support Group blog hop: https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html

Need to know more about book marketing? Read ‘How to Market a Book’ by Joanna Penn. (Not my book, not a paid ad. Just a recommendation.)

Blogging is Essential to your Author Platform! #IWSG

Let’s take a break from being insecure about ourselves as writers, and start being insecure about our Author Platform! Just for a change of pace. (This is a post in the Insecure Writer’s Support Group blog hop: Sign up here: https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html) 

What is your author platform, anyway? A ‘platform’ is like the soapboxes cranks and crackpots used to stand on in big city parks while they lectured on their topic to the entertainment of the crowd. The soapbox helped the crackpot be seen over the heads of his (hoped-for) crowd of listeners.

An author platform today consists of the things that make the author visible. Let’s take the example of television personality and author Bill O’Reilly. When he had his own show on the Fox News Network, he was allowed to plug his current book at the end of his evening broadcast. He also had a web site for which he sold memberships in exchange for exclusive content— a web site he was also allowed to plug on his television show. And so his books sold well— because they were well publicized, and because they were good enough that readers were willing to buy the next O’Reilly book. And when O’Reilly lost his Fox TV show, he had his web site to fall back on, so I would imagine any books he writes continue to sell well.

The sad fact is, though, that none of US is going to be invited to host a TV show on a nationwide channel so we can have a good platform for our books. We have to build our author platform ourselves, plank by plank. And a blog is a key to having a good author platform.

Why? I have heard people say that they ‘blog’ on Twitter or a Facebook author page. Those social media may be part of an author platform— until Twitter or Facebook suspend or shadowban you— but they can’t fully replace a blog, for these reasons.

1. Authors are expected to have websites, and blogs qualify. You can use ‘pages’ on your author blog to have all the things that an expensive web designer would put into a static author website for you. And you can do it yourself, and for free on Blogger or WordPress . com. 

2. Tweets are fleeting, but blog posts are forever. A tweet or a Facebook page post has a ‘shelf life’ of a few hours or a few minutes. A blog post may be drawing in new readers for years. That’s making the most of your writing time!

3. Blogs can turn into books. Particularly in the non-fiction realm, a good blog can lead to a book contract. People have actually been asked to turn their popular blogs into books! Traditionally-published books! And even if no one asks you to do that, you can take a bunch of posts on a topic, ‘fix’ and redraft them into good shape and add new material, and publish or self-publish them as a book. (You could also just throw a batch of random old blog posts together as a book, but it might receive worse reviews because of being ‘episodic’ in nature.)

4. Removed blogs can be put back up. Now, I don’t know anyone who has had his blog taken down by Blogger or WordPress, while I know quite a few people who have had their Facebook or Twitter accounts censored, suspended or removed. But anyone who does as I do and composes blog posts on software such as Scrivener or Evernote can respond to losing a blog by putting the posts back up somewhere else. Does anyone bother to do that with their tweets or FB posts? If they did, would putting the tweets back up somewhere even be worth doing? 

You may feel that your own personal blog is a failure in adding anything to your author platform. But likely your blog is doing better than you think. I recently discovered I had a couple of readers that follow this blog by email! I never thought my blog was attracting readers as loyal as that. Also, your blog can become better over time. You can read blogging advice, as from Barb Drozdowich’s Blogging for Authors or from blogs such as Problogger, and make your blog better over time.

Wishing you happy blogging,

Nissa Annakindt

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Want tips to improve an author blog? Join my FB group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/310331253293318/

My new book: Getting More Blog Traffic: Steps Towards a Happier Blogging Life  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086H4FQ4M

The Finishing Game: Simplify

I was the girl who never finished anything. That was my rep as a child when it came to finishing my math homework or cleaning my room; that was how I thought of myself when I first started trying to be a writer.

This is a blog post in the IWSG blog hop: https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html

it is also the first part of a series on learning to be a finisher of writing projects.

Then I read about Heinlein’s business rules for writers. The Second Rule is that you must finish what you write. And I didn’t think of myself as a person who could do such things.

But wait a minute. There WERE writing things that I regularly finished without a problem. I have written loads of short poems, and I finish most of them. I used to regularly submit poems to poetry ‘zines and got published.

I also can finish blog posts. I have no doubts about my ability to finish this one, even though I’m writing it on Evernote instead of on Scrivener because BOTH of my old wore-out and/or demon-possessed computers don’t want to let me use Scrivener right now.

And based on this accomplishment in the finishing department, I recently completed a short non-fiction book on blogging called ‘Getting More Blog Traffic: Steps Towards a Happier Blogging Life.’ I thought of it, not as a big scary book-writing project, but as a bunch of little blog posts. Only instead of publishing them one-by-one on a blog, I compiled them and published them as a KDP ebook.

When I think of a book writing project, fiction or non-fiction, it gets big, scary and never-ending in my head. And that’s what kills the project. What helped in the blogging-book project is that I simplified. Instead of focussing on everything I could possibly say on the topic of blogging, I narrowed the topic to things that help improve blog traffic— the number of readers one gets for one’s blog.

I narrowed my focus for the audience as well— mainly author bloggers and other topical bloggers who blog out of love for the topic rather than as a blogging-get-rich-quick scheme.

By narrowing the focus that made the project into something I could do and finish. It wasn’t any more difficult than writing several blog posts on different aspects of the same topic.

The same narrowing can make a fiction idea more doable. My current fiction WIP is science fiction set on a lost starship. Now, I have been making up stories in my head about these characters for years, and I have pages and lists of backstory, dozens of characters, enough for a 20-book sci-fi epic that I could never finish because I could never hold all that detail in my head.

So, instead of writing yet another novel-beginning destined to have no end, I’m paring things down to short-story level. Instead of having to introduce and develop the three major characters and the dozens of minor ones, I’m paring it down to a story focussed on one of the three and a single challenge he must face and overcome. (Current plan is to do one short story for each of the three characters.)

The paring-down process seems to help. Instead of doing something that might involve months of outlining and planning before actual writing even starts, I’m setting my sights on something short enough to start today and work on until the finish.

Both doing actual writing (not planning to write or talking about writing) and finishing what you write can be such a challenge. But not writing and not finishing don’t exactly help you develop your writing skills. I can’t write a 100000 word book right now in my writing life. But I can and do write shorter things. And shorter things can add up to something epic.

Springtime greetings,

Nissa Annakindt

Questions: Have you ever had problems finishing writing projects? Have you tried things that have helped? Have you tried things that just made everything worse? Share your thoughts in a comment!

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Recommended Reading: Heinlein’s Rules: Five Simple Business Rules for Writing by Dean Wesley Smith (author of over 100 books.)

Please Help!

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IWSG: An Aspie Writer’s Take on Social Distancing

Since I have Asperger Syndrome (an autism spectrum disorder,) I have been doing social distancing all my life. I just didn’t know that was what it was called. I just thought of it as being lonely and not having friends and going days and weeks without meaningful social interactions.

This is a post in the Insecure Writer’s Support Group blog hop: https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html

While other people are getting frantic when they have to stay home because of that certain virus, my life is mostly situation normal. I haven’t had a job for years and get along on SSI disability (NOT fun,) I live in a rural area and don’t waste my small amount of money by hanging about in barrooms, and after a lifetime of having social interactions with mean and hostile people, I tend not to even try to socially interact any more.

In fact, the main change in my life is in the direction of MORE social interaction. My friends, with a very few exceptions, are not real-world friends but online friends. And my social media accounts are livelier than normal with many people staying home and sharing memes and rumors about the virus all day.

Being socially isolated can help you concentrate on doing your writing work— if you actually do your writing instead of letting your social media become a time sink. I have recently completed a short non-fiction ebook. Unlike my usual open-ended projects that get bogged down and fail, I planned this project to be a small, time limited one. I gave myself 12 writing days to produce a work that would be 12000 to 24000 words long, which I have read is a good length for a non-fiction ebook.

In reality it took me 17 days, the book turned out to be on the long side of the projected length (which is good), and I had to do 3 more days to transform my Scrivener text into something Kindle Create could work with and to design a cover on Canva.

And now the hard part comes. I don’t really know how to do the social interaction part of doing a book launch, and with my SSI income I can’t hire services to promote my book for me. I don’t know how well the book will do.

But I have already started my next two writing projects. One is another non-fiction, this time about a low-carbohydrate/ketogenic way of eating. The other is science fiction, about a starship which is somewhat lost and encounters a planet where the population is keen on dealing in stolen starship parts. I am not sure, right now, if it’s better to try to work on both at once or to do them one at a time to keep focus. What will happen? Well, you can come back to this blog to find out.

Lenten and Insecure-Writer Greetings,

From Nissa Annakindt & her cats and other critters.

A Click-To-Tweet Experiment

This one’s about my new book, ‘Getting More Blog Traffic: Steps Towards a Happier Blogging Life. Click on the blue bird to tweet about it. (If you want to participate in this experiment.)

 

IWSG: Family traditions or family trauma?

Family traditions or family trauma? Which create more fodder for the writer? Happy, traditional-celebrating families are all the same, but every family suffers its traumas in a unique way. Your family’s happy family vacation in Yosemite won’t lead to any writing other than a grade school essay, but if your dad went to prison, your mom was an alcoholic, your childhood cat had kittens on the toilet seat cover, and a famous serial killer stole your beloved pink bicycle, rejoice! Your past is full of things to write about!

[This is a post in the Insecure Writer’s Support Group blog hop: https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/ .The question for the event is: ‘Other than the obvious holiday traditions, have you ever included any personal or family traditions/customs in your stories?’ And I’m not ignoring the question this time.]

Good writing aims at creating emotion in the reader, and traumatic events tend to produce more intense and lasting emotions than happy little memories. That time you were stalked by the campus rapist? Pure gold for the writing-you that you are today. Your happy fifth-birthday party? Not so much.

Writing is one way to help yourself through a trauma, major or minor. When family member X shamed me at a family gathering, I went home and wrote furiously on something. Not a something directly inspired by the being-shamed event, not even close. But I wrote and it was intense and it helped. Very shortly after that event there was a death in the family and I had to interact with family member X as if nothing had happened though I’m sure it was expected that I would assume that I had been in the wrong and be very ashamed of myself. (Still not ashamed.)

I was blessed by having an intact family that stayed intact until my father’s death from natural causes, and we were generally happy. But in every family some minor trauma flows, and some trauma that no one could prevent. Grandparents and great-aunts died, there were tornadoes in the campground we planned to stay in on our trip through the country, and there were a lot of little things that went wrong that seemed much bigger and more intense when I was a child.

Even when I’m not writing something that strikes similar emotional chords to my family trauma-events, it is a part of my past and therefore of who I am, and thus is a part of my writing life.

My Facebook author page: (Please visit & ‘like!’) https://www.facebook.com/nissalovescats

IWSG: Pictures & Conversations

How do your writing ideas— fiction or non-fiction ideas— come into your head? I know I often ignore that aspect of my writing life. But as I look back on my process, I find that my ideas come in the form of pictures and conversations.

This is a post in the monthly blog event of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group— visit their blog here:

PICTURES

Mental pictures are particularly important to my fiction life. I see a race of people who can change their skin color by changing their shirts, or a starship with a large forest in the center of it, or an animate showerhead and toilet. In my current fictional WIP, the guiding picture is a group of naked Jewish people in a Nazi gas chamber, and a portal to another world opens and a group of Catholic monks from that world hustle the people out of the chamber and into the other world. And then, there is a dragon….

I’m not really a visual thinker, so these mental pictures have vague spots— I couldn’t draw a picture of them, even if I was a skilled artist. There are only a few parts of the picture that are clear and visual at the moment I get the idea. Though concentration on the image and the related story make more things come clear. These pictures  are helpful when the writing chore of describing things comes along.

CONVERSATIONS

Conversations and speeches have a constant place in my head, and I use them both for my fiction writing and my non-fiction blog posts. Fictional conversations, or dialog, are a way to draw people into a story. They can’t replace other elements like description, which keeps the reader oriented in the story. A story with conversations but no description, set in a magic forest or a high-tech spaceship, may lead the reader to forget the setting and wander out of the story, bored.

Conversations can’t be written down just as they first occur in your head. My head-conversations often have vague, unnamed participants and a Byzantine backstory which intrudes into the conversation. Part of the reason for a writer’s reading life is to get a sense as to how to include conversations without neglecting the rest of the story, or distracting from it.

My non-fiction ideas come not so much as dialog but as set speeches, as if I were giving a lecture on the topic. When I have a blogging idea, I rehearse in my head the things I might say about it. As a child my version of this— before I was actively writing non-fiction— was to compose letters in my head to ‘Dear Abby.’ (I didn’t know at the time that ‘Dear Abby’ was a euthanasia advocate who promoted ‘living wills’ for that reason, or that her twin sister was ‘Ann Landers.’)

The main point to remember is that however your ideas come into your head, they have to be worked out a bit before you set them down on paper. You may neglect to mention important things about a character in your head-images because YOU already know those things. But sometimes the reader really needs to know your character is a cockroach.

HELP! My blog is not doing so well lately, and I’d like to ask a favor— either share a post from this blog to your Twitter, MeWe or Facebook, or share one from some OTHER blog. I don’t really care which blogger you help out in this way, just help one of us. Thanks.

If you REALLY like me, you could always follow me on Twitter. I follow back unless you are Nancy Pelosi, or naked in your profile picture. https://twitter.com/nissalovescats

IWSG: Following Heinlein’s Rules

Writers and would-be writers, since we work alone, crave rules that will promise success. Lots of people make up rules for writers— English teachers who have never published anything, or even written anything, wannabe writers who like to boss other wannabes around, people trying to sell writing classes or writer services or recruit writers to be victimized by a vanity press….

This is my monthly post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group: https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/

The best rules for writers come from known writers who have actually written stuff, and made a living from writing. Robert Heinlein was such a writer— his science fiction is still read today— and he invented 5 simple rules for writers.

I have a book by Dean Wesley Smith about Heinlein’s rules. Smith is also a professional writer. He got that way by following Heinlein’s rules, he says. Smith has written over 100 novels and an unknown number of short stories, in his early career he was entirely traditionally published and has now gone indie, and I have actually heard of him and have some books he wrote on my shelf.

Heinlein’s rules worked, therefore, for Dean Wesley Smith, at least. Will they work for you? Probably better than writing advice from people who have never made a living at writing, who perhaps have never finished a novel or even a short story.

Here are the rules— Heinlein called them business habits:

1. You must write.

2. You must finish what you start.

3. You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.

4. You must put it on the market.

5. You must keep it on the market until sold.

Things are a little different today, as Dean Wesley Smith points out in his book. Putting a written work on the market can now mean indie publishing it. Keeping it on the market until sold can mean keeping an indie published work up, even if it doesn’t sell very well, instead of pulling all your work down because it’s ‘not good enough.’

As the ultimate Insecure Writer, I’m shy about submitting my work for publication, perhaps because of my Asperger Syndrome. Perhaps it’s just I am afraid of being judged by people who just don’t get me. But in keeping with Heinlein’s rules, I put up some of my work on Wattpad, and plan to do more there— a non-fiction work, and a new book of my poetry, both of which may become, in a longer version, at least Smashword ebooks and perhaps proper books (if I can figure out how to format for Lulu and how to afford a decent book cover.)

My Wattpad profile: https://www.wattpad.com/user/NissaAnnakindt

Feel free to share your own Wattpad profile in a comment.

#IWSG — Too Late, Too Late

Becoming a successful-enough writer is a process that usually takes many years, and as the years go by many of us take a moment to wonder— is it too late for me? Am I too old to become a ‘real writer,’ or have I been trying for too many years? Wouldn’t it be better to give up on my writing dreams right now?

This is a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group’s monthly blog hop. Learn more at: https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/

The answer to that is that the one thing that guarantees your failure at writing is giving up on it. If you quit writing, your writing can’t get better or take off or anything. In fact, if you give up on writing the moment becoming a writer crosses your mind, you will have saved yourself a lot of time and effort. But then you will never know what would have resulted if you had started trying.

The amount of time you get in this life to do anything is limited. The day you leave the first grade and start the second grade in school, it is forever too late to distinguish yourself as a first grader. That part of your life is over, and whatever things you have not yet achieved as a first grader can’t be done as a first grader. You have to do them at second grade (or even later.)

Writing dreams can begin for us in grade school. When we first read Little Women, being a writer like Jo seems to have much more of a future to it than being a good piano player like doomed Beth. We think about writing, we make our juvenile first writing attempts, perhaps at the orders of a school teacher, and it seems like we have an infinite future in which to make our dreams come true.

But then we get old enough to become a ‘real writer,’ and other people of our age are self-publishing and selling, getting agents, selling books to traditional publishers or getting conned by a vanity press, and we may feel left behind. What’s wrong with my brilliant writing career? Why hasn’t it happened for me yet?

Of course, no one’s writing career is perfect, and I bet there are days in which successful writers like George R. R. Martin, James Patterson, Stephen King, Declan Finn, Karina Fabian, and Mercedes Lackey feel like their writing career is ‘not good enough’ and that they are failures. (Boy, would I love to be a failure like that!)

There are some writers who begin writing at a later age and yet succeed. Others have written and ‘failed’ for years and then their writing ‘takes off—‘ they get published or self-published and their books sell well.

What we need to do is have an idea of what success looks like for us. Is it finishing a novel? Or finishing one that doesn’t suck (much?) Or making a best-seller list? We can’t all be Stephen King and have multiple movies made of our books and short stories. But the vast majority of us can manage to write stories that someone or other out there will enjoy reading. We just have to keep trying, keep improving our skills, and keep writing. Because there is no prize for giving up writing early because you ‘know’ you are doomed to failure. Maybe you will write until age 101 and only then write a single short story that gets published. Maybe only a few people will read it. But you will have kept on trying, and your success at age 101 will inspire many. Though, admittedly, you likely will have passed on before you discover how inspirational your persistence has been.

 

Do you ever worry it is ‘too late’ for your writing? My advice is, stop worrying and write something! It’s only too late when you are dead. If you are still alive, keep on writing.