by Dame Devon

We received a great email from a reader (we LOVE it when readers ask us questions, either here in the comments or through the email link on the right sidebar) and I’m going to give my answers today.  Other Dames might chime in over the next couple weeks with their perspectives too.

Melissa asked:

How did you know you wanted to be a writer or more to the point how did you know writing would be the right profession for you?  Do you feel at times you need to push yourselves to write even when life gets chaotic?

The easy answer?  I’ve always needed to create worlds and people and places.  Reading is my  escape from the stress, pain, and frustration of day-to-day life, and writers have given me multitudes of fantastic places and people to enjoy.  Reading has quite literally, kept me going when life was at its darkest.  I have always wanted to give back in that way–to give people a chance to escape the pressures of life and spend a little time away from it all with fantastic people and fantastic worlds.

Being a writer is what and who I am.  I would write even if I weren’t published.  But being a published writer takes a lot of time, research, trial and error, and years and years of sheer determination.

So maybe part of the question is really: how did I know I had the chops to make it in the publishing world?

I didn’t.  But here’s my secret: I can’t be permanently discouraged. I can be knocked down and temporarily give up.  As a matter of fact, I wrote short fiction for fifteen years.  The sell-through rate on short stories is something like one out of every fourteen submissions.  That means you’re raking in at least thirteen rejections for every story you write. Fifteen years of being told “no” a dozen times or more for everything I wrote, gave me two things:

1. It kept my ego in check. I know I’m not perfect.  I know I need to continue to learn and improve.  I honestly hope I always feel the need to learn and improve.  Smug writers are stale writers, and if I ever get smug and stale I hope someone will slap me upside the back of the head.  Because smug and stale won’t let me give the reader the fantastic escape I hope to provide.

2. It taught me the business of getting published and staying published is hard. Really, soul-breakingly hard.  It doesn’t get easier.  You learn more, you try more, but it is never as easy as you hope it will be.  Once a year for fifteen years I threw my hands in the air and gave up on the whole writing business. No, really.  I did.  But since I can’t be permanently discouraged, I’d be back at it a couple weeks or a month later, back at the learning, back at the doing, back at the trying.

I love writing.  I love the challenge of getting a story started, up on its wheels and wobbling, then racing down the hill.  I love that amazing angel-chorus moment when something I write sells, or is read by someone who likes it and enjoyed escaping into my world.  I love learning–and there’s so much learning involved in both being a writer, and the business side of being a published writer that it boggles the brain.  I love writing enough to endure the pain that goes along with it.

Which is a nice segue into the next question: do I ever need to push myself to write when life gets chaotic?

Oh, heck yes.  I have to push myself even when life isn’t chaotic.  That’s normal.  I’ll have good days when the words and ideas are flowing, and I’ll have bad days when I can’t keep the suck out of a single sentence and sitting down at my computer feels like I’m rubbing sandpaper over my spine.

There are tricks to get me in the mind-space to write, but mostly what gets me to the desk every day is love. Writing isn’t a perfect or easy way to create.  But I love it enough to get over the flaws and fears and frustrations, and just keep trying.

Thanks, Melissa for such a great question!

Related posts:

1. Is Writing the Right Thing?
2. Thank you, Dear Readers
3. No Guarantees

This entry was posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 12:01 pm and is filed under General Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.