Someone on LinkedIn posted this words
Anyone ever just feel like one of millions of other “aspiring” writers?
As I partake of these social networks (which I love) I do get this depressing feeling that I’m just one of millions trying to get my book published and eventually read? How do all of you deal with this feeling? It sometimes, though not always, can be discouraging, as though there’s nothing “special” about what I’m doing.
I had the same feeling for a long time as well. But then my mother said something to me when I mentioned that I was working on another novel for the public to view. “That’s why we have people like you,” she said, “…not just anyone can do what you’re doing.”
I thought about those words from my mother, and a light brightened that dreary wave of suffocating thoughts. Mother was right. She’s right! Not everyone is actually writing stories and especially completing novels. I mean, look around. Besides the critique groups and fellow writers and forum authors, look at your co-workers, and work-out buddies, and movie-going friends, and dinner couple dating, and socializing and hang-out peers and Facebook and Twitter friends. Look at them. And see how they are looking at you.
THEY ARE NOT ONE OF THE ASPIRING WRITERS.
I mean, what writer hasn’t been approach (multiple times) by someone who said they had a “great story to tell” and they want to tell you all about it, and hint that they want YOU to write it for them (I always tell them they need a ghostwriter for that). These people, none of these people, are the aspiring writers nor are they trying to get published. And most people look you and say, “Wow, you wrote a book?” (That’s usually followed by that dreaded question of: “How many books have you sold?”), then you realize that you are doing something “special”.
When I began to look at it that way, it eased up that dreading feeling of: “I don’t think I’m going to make it…it’s just too many people out there doing the same thing I’m doing.”
This is the age where writers can see their stories in paperback by doing it themselves, when before, trying to wait to be “discovered” by a publishing house and/or agent seemed fruitless. This is the age where dreams can come true.
I’m a writer and I’ve completed and self-published novels.
