Permanently Overshadowed (Or, Klatchian Coffee Overdose)

Marie Antoinette allegedly said "There is nothing new except what has been forgotten."

All stories are remixes of stories that have come before. Martin's SOIAF is, arguably, "what if Tolkien except the exact opposite happens to the heroes?" Tolkien himself wrote a classic quest fable, with a twist at the end drawn from the real-world experience of surviving war. We all take the stories we've heard and recombine them, adding in bits and pieces of what we've learned in our own lives.

Is anybody else going to want to read your particular recombination? I don't know. But I do know that it's uniquely yours, and that's worth something.

As for "mighty shadows" - two things about that.

1) Some screamingly best-selling books are really not that well-written at a craft level (no, I'm not going to name names). It's very nearly impossible to tell which books are going to take off, even for experienced publishers.

2) There are thousands of books published every year, and most of them aren't bestsellers - but they have a readership. People enjoy them. People love them. Someone's life is happier/richer/easier/more thoughtful because they've read those books. You may indeed never cast an outsized shadow as a writer, but that doesn't make your work less important to the people you touch.

Quote from a song I heard some years back: "Compare where you are to where you want to be and you'll get nowhere." I didn't really understand it when I first heard it, but it's true. If your ambition is to be Martin, that's great! But if all you focus on is how you're not Martin yet, you're going to discourage yourself out of the running before you start.

Take inspiration. Recombine. That's how it's done! Find joy in creation, and keep going.

Liz has said it all.

Self doubt is the enemy of creativity. The doubt is always there lurking, but you can't let it make your decisions for you.

Are you hungry? To write? Be published? Take that hunger and ambition and get to work. And as other wise people have said: Keep your eyes on your own paper. It doesn't matter if you want to be like Martin or if so-and-so can write it better. So what? They're not you. So do you.

Good luck.

Critic Harold Bloom made up a name for this I-can’t-measure-up-to-the-greats phenomenon: “the anxiety of influence.” Pretty much every writer has experienced it, and many have written about it.

The thing is, the odds of making it into some canon of supposedly great writers are most certainly against you, as they are against almost all of us. (Canons aren’t set in stone, but that’s another issue.) Writing is hard. Selling a book is hard. Getting good sales with a published book is hard. Becoming famous or a cultural phenomenon is incredibly hard, and impossible to control. As Liz pointed out, many worthy writers with enthusiastic readers will still never get there.

So how do you know if there’s any point to writing? Simple: if your stories keep coming back, if you can’t keep them out of your head, write them. If you find yourself writing those stories for their own sake, not for the sake of any imagined future acclaim, then you’re not losing anything by doing it. And you might reach some readers along the way, and experience some wonderful moments (as well as, I can’t lie, many rejections).

Try to think of those writers you read not as unattainable gods that taunt you, but as your guides and teachers. Whatever your own writing level, you absolutely can learn from the best. I went through phases where I would practically copy another author’s style (not story); many writers do. As long as you’re aware of it, you can learn a lot, and your own style will gradually break away from the model and become more yours. Those writers should be your inspirations, your reminders that you can always get better, always try new things.

If you want proof that famous writers had these same fears, read the letters of John Keats. He died at 24 nearly 200 years ago and is renowned worldwide and yet he spent much of his short life being (very brilliantly and eloquently) insecure about his abilities. There may be better, more modern examples, but that’s my favorite.

It's so hard not to compare your own writing to professional authors who have 20+ years experience ahead of you and the like, and even then a lot of things they write are also a combination of influences and not stunningly original in every single way. Please also bear in mind that many authors are also their own worst critics and think they are talentless hacks churning out utter garbage...meanwhile readers are lapping it up and talking about how wonderful it is. We are not always the best judge of our own work.

There are incredible works out there, and there are some books that got published that make me think, I can do better than that. I'm fine not being great. I just want to write better today than yesterday.

Some days I think my book is excellent, there will be readers.

Other days I think, so many great books out there, mine is not on that level.

There's nothing wrong with the happy middle. It's a fine place today.