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Cheery title, innit?
So something I've been ruminating on for a while - and is applicable to most creative, long form art processes - while I try and assess how best to satisfy my creative needs, is how to deal with the very real probability of "Never making it".
First, let's put aside the complicated question of what "It" is and just assume its something reasonable (like selling 1 of 20 novels you've written in your life to a small press). That's just a whole can of worms I can't be bothered to wrestle with - I know people mean well when they say things like "Just write for your self, the journey is its own reward!", but sorry, I want other people to read and enjoy my stuff. It's like spending a day baking and decorating a delicious, beautiful cake and then no one seeing or eating it.
So I've found that while I can power through your line-by-line writing anxiety, the second I try and make any qualitative assessment on anything larger than a few pages or a scene, I start to panic. What if this is the wrong scene? Or it jars with another scene? Or it's from the wrong PoV? Now yes, I can stave these off and delay them a bit for the edit - but then it's just a case of scaling up the problems. What if the scene is actually fine, but the whole plot thread doesn't work? What if the problem isn't plot, but a whole character isn't working? What if your central theme lacks conflict?
....keep scaling....
What if the premise lacks punch? What if your attempted subversion of a trope simply doesn't work? What if, by being brave, you try and highlight something sensitive and end up offending huge swathes of people? To put it bluntly, what if your book just sucks, and you have to bin it?
.....keep scaling.....
What if your next book also sucks? What if you do get a bit better - but you still haven't left the city limits of sucksville? What if the plotted trajectory of your improvement means by the time you leave Sucksville, you'll be over a hundred? What if you never improve - only move from one paradigm of sucking to another?
....and ultimately.
What if you dedicate your life to failing in the pursuit of success that never comes?
The problem here is that typical "advice" doesn't cut it. Statistically speaking, there's a very real chance that this will happen; I'd take a fair wager that the number of aspiring writers with 10 or more books to their name who've been published is less that 1 in 5. So that's an 80% chance of writing as a hobby, and doing it wrong - ergo, the typical mantra of "if you try and keep at it, you'll succeed!" is statistically garbage. I can train and train and train, but I won't ever run a sub 10 second 100m.
So yeah, I can inure myself a bit about the anxiety of not writing well on a first draft, and push everything back to the edit. The problem I've got, is that I've no tools to push that worry back beyond the 15th edit, beyond when I throw that book in the bin, and beyond the fear of repeating that 25 or 30 times before death takes us.
How does everyone else deal with this fear of long term failure (other than excessive alcohol consumption)?
So something I've been ruminating on for a while - and is applicable to most creative, long form art processes - while I try and assess how best to satisfy my creative needs, is how to deal with the very real probability of "Never making it".
First, let's put aside the complicated question of what "It" is and just assume its something reasonable (like selling 1 of 20 novels you've written in your life to a small press). That's just a whole can of worms I can't be bothered to wrestle with - I know people mean well when they say things like "Just write for your self, the journey is its own reward!", but sorry, I want other people to read and enjoy my stuff. It's like spending a day baking and decorating a delicious, beautiful cake and then no one seeing or eating it.
So I've found that while I can power through your line-by-line writing anxiety, the second I try and make any qualitative assessment on anything larger than a few pages or a scene, I start to panic. What if this is the wrong scene? Or it jars with another scene? Or it's from the wrong PoV? Now yes, I can stave these off and delay them a bit for the edit - but then it's just a case of scaling up the problems. What if the scene is actually fine, but the whole plot thread doesn't work? What if the problem isn't plot, but a whole character isn't working? What if your central theme lacks conflict?
....keep scaling....
What if the premise lacks punch? What if your attempted subversion of a trope simply doesn't work? What if, by being brave, you try and highlight something sensitive and end up offending huge swathes of people? To put it bluntly, what if your book just sucks, and you have to bin it?
.....keep scaling.....
What if your next book also sucks? What if you do get a bit better - but you still haven't left the city limits of sucksville? What if the plotted trajectory of your improvement means by the time you leave Sucksville, you'll be over a hundred? What if you never improve - only move from one paradigm of sucking to another?
....and ultimately.
What if you dedicate your life to failing in the pursuit of success that never comes?
The problem here is that typical "advice" doesn't cut it. Statistically speaking, there's a very real chance that this will happen; I'd take a fair wager that the number of aspiring writers with 10 or more books to their name who've been published is less that 1 in 5. So that's an 80% chance of writing as a hobby, and doing it wrong - ergo, the typical mantra of "if you try and keep at it, you'll succeed!" is statistically garbage. I can train and train and train, but I won't ever run a sub 10 second 100m.
So yeah, I can inure myself a bit about the anxiety of not writing well on a first draft, and push everything back to the edit. The problem I've got, is that I've no tools to push that worry back beyond the 15th edit, beyond when I throw that book in the bin, and beyond the fear of repeating that 25 or 30 times before death takes us.
How does everyone else deal with this fear of long term failure (other than excessive alcohol consumption)?