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blog by RICK WALTON listed in categories: Writer's Life

I want to be an author,

My hand up to my face;

A thought upon my forehead,

An air of studied grace!

I want to be an author,

With genius on my brow;

I want to be an author,

And I want to be it now!

— Ella Hutchison Ellwanger

You can be an author. You can be almost anything, if you’re willing to work at it and pay the price. But that’s the catch. The price.

Sometimes we think we can shortcut the process. Some people do. But you can’t count on it.

I received hundreds of rejection notices before I sold a manuscript. But one of the reasons I was getting so many rejection notices is because I was lazy. I wanted things to be too easy. I wish at the beginning that I had just accepted that this was going to be hard work and plowed ahead.

Right at the beginning I should have done my research.

I wish I had read a lot more of the kinds of books I wanted to write.

I wish I’d studied books on writing, and taken more classes on writing. It’s usually much better to learn from someone else’s mistakes than your own.

I wish I’d networked earlier on with other writers so I could get more feedback.

I wish I’d done more market research to find out what kinds of publishing opportunities there are, and aren’t.

And I wish, while working harder, that I had been more patient. The number one reason people don’t get published, from what I’ve seen, is that they lose patience with the amount of work and time it takes.

Now this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There are a lot of roads in life worth following. I, for example, would love to be a concert pianist. And I believe I could be, if I wanted to begin practicing eight hours a day. But I don’t. It would cost too much in other areas of my life. So I content myself with what music skills I have now because they do add to my life.

Part of me would love to be a social worker, or a travel agent, or a librarian. But to do so would, at this point in my life, require an investment of time that I don’t feel I should make, and I don’t want to be these things more than I want to be a writer.

You can get published if you work at it. Or you can work more slowly at it and accept the probability of it taking longer to get published. Or you can accept that other things in your life are more important right now and that writing is just a delightful hobby with many non-tangible benefits.

For me, I’ve finally learned that writing is worth the work.

Posted in February, 2008