Pursuing The Dream: Thoughts on Fourteen Years of Writing

I've wanted to be a writer since I was around 12 years old.  I started a lot of stories through the years, but only got serious about writing in the summer of 1994.  As the fourteenth anniversary of my serious writing time approaches, I have a few thoughts on those years.

A lot has changed in my life over those last fourteen years.  My stepdaughter has married and now has a kid of her own.  My little 3-year-old is now driving, and will be in college in under a year and a half.  The big old house we once shared with my wife's parents has gradually emptied out, with my wife's parents passing away and the kids growing up.  It's far too big for us now, and will be even more oversized when my daughter moves on with her life.

Physically I'm still reasonably healthy, though nowhere near the level of capability I was at ten years ago.  I look back at some of the things I did back then and am just amazed.  I used to ride my bike 4 to 5 miles to the YMCA, lift weights, go up and play basketball for an hour or two, then ride my bike back home.  I would die of multiple causes—heart attack, stroke, heat stroke, etc--if I tried some of those things now.

 I've become a better writer over the fourteen years.  Most of the fiction I wrote ten years ago looks like crap to me now—crap with potential, but crap nevertheless. One huge difference is in my attitude toward writing long stories like novels.  I've finished three so far, and I know that while the effort is by no means trivial I can finish the bulk of the rough draft of a novel in about a month. 

Getting a novel or any other type of writing published professionally by old-style publishers or profession magazines still eludes me.  I have gotten paid for columns in the website StrategyPage.com, and my print on demand book American Indian Victories has made some money, apparently a rarity in this market..  As many of you know, I won $500 for placing in the top five in the TruTV Search for the Next GreatCrime Writer here on Gather.  I can't really be classified as an unpublished writer or an amateur writer anymore.  Yet I'm a long ways from being able to make a living as a writer.

That last contest illustrates both the successes and failures of my writing career so far. Getting into the final five out of over 260 entries was an honor.  I appreciate all of the peope on Gather who enjoyed Char and rated it highly.  At the same time I have to look at the results and wonder.  I got my best novel (Char) into a situation where I was competing against only 4 other people.  I had cut through all of the noise that normally keeps a writer from being noticed.  I had my best shot yet, and I didn't win.  The top five placing was great and the $500 was great too, but Char is the best story I'm capable of writing after writing seriously for nearly 14 years.  And it isn't good enough to win in a contest of new novelists.  That's discouraging.

It seems like every seemingly insurmountable obstacle I get to the top of in this writing game is just a foothill hiding an even more formidable obstacle.  Finishing a novel seemed impossible when I started.  Getting to the top five in one of these Gather contests seemed impossible after my novel disappeared without a trace in the original First Chapters contest.  I did both of those things, and I'm still a long ways from publication.  Several of my Gather friends have gotten to the next stage.  They've found a professional agent.  They still aren't published though.  Even when they are published they won't have "made it".  A published writer still has a long ways to go before they can become a full-time writer.  Some of the old-timers say that it usually takes ten years from the time someone gets a novel published to the time they are able to write full-time.  Many mid-list writers get so discouraged after a few sales that they go back under a different pen name and start over because they've gotten stereotyped as a writer whose books will sell approximately x number of copies, and they never get the marketing push or distribution to move beyond that. 

Becoming a writer full-time is tough, and it probably should be.  After all, if I'm writing full-time that means that somebody else is doing the work to provide me with food, clothes, a car, and all of the other accoutrements of modern society.  Does my writing contribute enough to society to justify me pursuing it full-time while others do all the stuff that supports me?  So far the answer seems to be "no".  Maybe it always will be  If so, well so be it.  I've learned.  I've brought characters and plots to life.  I've enjoyed writing.  I'll continue to do so.

Writing is a tough business to break into, and I'm pretty sure it's going to get tougher as time goes on.  It's a matter of supply and demand.  The demand for printed material is going down.  That's partly due to competition from the many other sources of entertainment and knowledge that are now available.  Books compete with TV, DVDs, videogames and the Internet.  The book industry isn't doing so well at that competition.  Demand is also going down because the publishing industry has become increasingly "Hollywoodized".  Publishers too often look for the easy predictable hit, based on what has sold in the past few months or years.  Too often they try to manufacture talent, taking mediocre writers with compelling looks or personality and making them stars by sheer marketing.

There is also a more subtle problem.  The book industry is geographically concentrated primarily in New York.  As the right and left coasts of the US grow away from each other, and especially away from the vast center of the country, the publishing industry seems to be increasingly losing touch with much of its potential audience.  The bright, well-educated New Yorkers in the publishing industry seem fascinated by stories about New York, especially about bright, well-educated New Yorkers.  They seem to find it difficult to understand why the rest of the country doesn't share that fascination.  They also seem to find it difficult to understand why people in what New Yorkers like to call "flyover country" don't respond positively to books placed in a stereotype south or midwest where the locals seem to be a mix of trailer trash, characters from Deliverance, and characters from Mayberry.  If you don't understand your market you are not likely to succeed in it, and major publishers seem to be moving away from understanding their market.

So, for a variety of reasons demand for books is going down.  At the same time, supply is going up.  Twenty-five to thirty years ago it was much more difficult and expensive to write a book.  No computers.  No laser printers.  You typed the book on a typewriter, or wrote it longhand and hired someone to type it for you.  Revisions meant retyping the revised pages.  Research meant physically going to a library, rather than just going to Google.  Only the most determined people ever finished a novel.

With the advent of cheap computers and cheap laser printers, two things happened.  First, existing writers became much more productive.  That meant that there was less need for new writers and less room for them to enter the game.   Second, a lot more new writers actually finished manuscripts and sent them in to publishers.  The sheer number of manuscripts overwhelmed publishers of all kinds.  Just to give you some idea of the problem, as of about five years ago the professional science fiction magazines were recieving a thousand manuscripts in an average month from unpublished writers.  In an average year they might publish three of those stories.  That flood almost certainly hasn't slowed down, and it has probably gotten worse.

Wading through all of those manuscripts is time-consuming and expensive.  As the volume of submited manuscripts increased, publishers off-loaded more and more of their 'crap-filter' function to agents, usually refusing to even look at unagented manuscripts.  That shifted the torrent of manuscripts to agents, but it didn't solve the problem of oversupply.  Agents have become increasinly selective, and many of them simply no longer look at manuscripts from unpublished writers.

The fact that it is so hard to break into the writing game compounds itself.  Writers with the potential to create new demand don't make it through the crap filters. That reduces demand, which reduces the resources available to find new writers capable of getting readers excited and bringing in new readers.

I believe it is still possible for a new writer to break into the game and do well.  Some have.  I still hope to.  At the same time, the odds are stacked against writers.  Think about the odds against getting published in one of the professional science fiction magazines.  Your manuscript  can be in the top one percent of the manuscipts they get in a year and you are still competing against 120 other people for one of those 3 slots.  If your manuscript is absolutely the best they get out of a thousand recieved in a month you still only a twenty-five percent chance of getting one of those slots. 

The bottom line is that you have to be not just a good writer but a spectacularly good writer.  That isn't enough though.  You also have to be incredibly, irrationally persistent.  That isn't enough either.  You still have to be lucky.  If you are all of those things, congratulations.  You've gotten to the top of another foothill.  Now you can see the next level, the real mountain.

I want to be published, but I continue to write because I enjoy writing.  I know that if I'm published professionally that is a major step, but it is only the start of another decade-long struggle.