Every Creative Person Feels This Way

I'll get this out of the way at the outset: no, I don't think writers are better or more special than anyone else. Everybody's special, because we're all unique individuals. Some say that everyone has his or her doppelganger, and if that's true, I really want to meet her, because she'd be my new best friend! For one thing, we'd never have an argument. She'd "get me". But doppelgangers don't actually exist.

I formed some of my best friendships in the workplace, where we bonded over bitching about our jobs. Everybody does it. Everybody. Know what's really annoying? Being in the midst of a great bitch session when some Pollyanna employee intrudes on the conversation by announcing, "Oh, it's not so bad." Get the hell out! Nobody invited you, and now you're on the list, too! 

Writers are no different, except we rarely have a place to go and bitch, given the solitary nature of our work. My cat doesn't care; trust me. That's why this Reddit post struck a chord. 

All of us who read it know deep down inside the futility of the rant, but it's just like a 9-to-5 job; it's useless to complain, but it sure feels good. 

Just as I don't know what an HVAC guy goes through to do his job, non-writers don't know what we go through. I'll grant that our work environment is generally more pleasant than toiling in the sun on a ninety-degree day, so we do have that going for us. We also don't have to wait for the big hand to land on twelve to take a break. Every job has its plusses and minuses. 

I bet the HVAC guy doesn't work for a year on one job to only get paid a dollar forty-nine in the end, though. And that "paycheck" only arrives if we spend 1,000 hours posting on social media and withdraw money from our paltry bank account to pay for a book cover and professional editing and book ads and a website and any fly-by-night scheme that might work, but hardly ever does. He doesn't spend hours online looking for ways to crack the code for making money. He likely doesn't fall for some "expert" on the internet who says, turn the wrench counter-clockwise and voila! Only to find out that doesn't work at all and he's wasted a bunch of time he'll never get back. And now he has to start all over.

Writing a novel isn't easy. <--- This is not the way to write sentences, all you beginners out there. The other day someone was complaining about the sh*t he's gotten from people over his book, and when I looked at the preview, every sentence was five words long (at the most). "He went to the store. The store was crowded. He couldn't find a shirt." 

I got grumpy just writing that out. Imagine how grumpy a reader would get. It takes talent, or at least a very absorbent mind to know how to write, yet everyone-- Bob down the street, Hilda at the checkout counter, the lending agent at my bank--thinks they can do it. How hard could it be? I've lost count of the number of posts I've seen that say, "I want to write a book, but I don't know how to start." Well, that's a problem. Know how you start? By starting.

I had a work friend who decided she, too, wanted to start a blog, after she'd read one of mine. I encouraged her to do it, because, well, I admire people who write. She wrote one post. That was about fifteen years ago and she never wrote another.

Lots of people start a book, then abandon it after maybe one chapter. So here's another thing a writer needs to do: write something interesting to you, so you don't give up out of boredom. And even if your concept is interesting, that doesn't eliminate the boring parts that you somehow have to slog through with the intent of "jazzing them up" later. A novel is a damn lotta words! Day after day after day. I have to schedule my writing sessions for...reasons...but often when a scheduled session arrives, I don't want to do it! I have to force myself, even if I can't think of one single thing to write. I'd better come up with something, even if I'll end up deleting it later, because if I don't, this f**king thing will never get done. (It's not all fun and games, people.) I've written out an entire chapter, only to decide later that I didn't want the story to follow this path at all, and what was I thinking? I've just painted myself into a stupid corner. Then I have to pull out the can of turpentine, better known as the delete key. And thus, a whole day is wasted.

I'm not going to detail everything that's involved or how we obsess over one single word and roll it around in our minds and read it out loud and try substituting a different word and ponder whether that one makes the sentence more intriguing or if we should go back to the original word. It's one word! But that's what we do.

In my current novel, my main character's name was changed by her record company, so sometimes she's Leah and other times she's Layah, and I had to remember which supporting character calls her by which name when they speak, and why do I have her best friend referring to her by her new name, when he's known her all her life? That meant examining the entire manuscript with a magnifying glass to suss out any screw-ups. 

After everything, after a year of writing, after editing the damn thing the best way I knew how, after figuring out how to format a paperback, which I'd never done before and tearing my hair out over it; after posting useless crap on social media and buying promos that never netted more than one purchase and begging book bloggers and all the other humiliating things I forced myself to do, what was my reward?

Thirty-two copies sold. Oops, subtract the two paperback copies I purchased, so thirty copies sold. What writer in their right mind wouldn't be bitter? And it can't be chalked up to a rookie's first stab at writing. I've been publishing since 2016! I'm confident in saying that I know what I'm doing.

When my band was releasing music, I became its default publicist. We were a recording band, not a performing one, so my focus became "opportunities". Music supervisors for TV and movies, and to some extent, satellite radio like Sirius, would put out calls for a certain type of song; and there were online sites that charged a fee to submit to these openings. Unlike with book promo sites, the fee wasn't much ~ maybe $20.00 or so. We didn't write on spec, but if we had a track that matched what the person was looking for, I'd pay my twenty dollars and take a shot. Like with literary agents, we were routinely ghosted, but I kept at it for a while. Innocence was kind of fun. But the fact was, we were never going to get a track accepted, and now I suspect that most of these opportunities were artificial; a way for promo sites to make a buck.

Once we dissolved the band, we still had all these tracks, so I paid a minimal amount to an aggregator (like IngramSpark and Draft2Digital are for books) to get our music distributed to places like Spotify, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music. Well, as of today, one of my songs has 5,236 plays on Spotify, and you know how long it took me to write it? One day; not even a full day ~ a few hours. Recording and producing it might have taken a full day.

So, one day = 5,236. One year = 30. Authors, change your major; go into music. You won't make any more money, but you'll at least get attention. Unlike with your books.

The good part about Spotify is that there's nowhere for anyone to leave a nasty comment. No "review" section. If you listen to one of our tracks and you hate it, I'll never have to know! 

Creatives live and die by other people's opinions. 

 

No one tells an accountant, "Well, I don't like your numbers. My opinion is that they're not only bad, but wrong." And--poof! There goes his career! 

At a certain point, most writers have the same grumblings rattling around in their heads as the Reddit poster. 

It's just nice to get to voice them once in a while.