It seems these days like the glacial machinations of publishing are grinding ever more slowly. The near-infinite competition on Amazon is only being made worse by a cascade of A.I. slop. People spend hours a day with their hands are glued to their phones, staring into the glowing abyss.
It’s no wonder that I’m hearing from so many authors these days who are feeling like writing–and particularly pursuing publication–increasingly feels like an exercise in futility.
Heck, it can feel this way to me, too! I’m waiting on news about my most recent project, and my new creative project is more in the zone of “having some ideas” than “putting pen to paper.”
Why does writing sometimes feel like dropping a pebble in the ocean? Who would even notice the ripple?
Form from the ether
I’m learning Mandarin Chinese at the moment (stick with me, this is going somewhere). And, well, it’s difficult! Struggling to shape my mouth to make unfamiliar tones. Characters instead of letters. No tenses. Completely different sentence structures. Not even a direct translation for “yes” and “no.”
I’ve been at it for almost a year, most of the time feeling like I wasn’t really getting anywhere. But in these past few weeks… things started to click! I can now read Chinese characters a little bit. I’m starting to understand more of the Chinese that’s spoken around me.
After all those hours of studying, when it felt like I was trying to jam impossibilities into my non-pliant brain, something finally took shape. What had been amorphous all of a sudden become real.
That’s kind of what it’s like going down the writing path.
It’s a lot of work. Nothing happens. Then… all of a sudden something clicks and you have something you can read.
Earlier in my career, I wrote two novels, started querying agents, checked my email one morning in a dusty internet cafe in Peru, and all of a sudden found out I was going to be a published author. Other books I’ve written have stayed in the digital ether, never to take final form.
If you keep walking down the path, something will happen with your book too. It will take shape if you keep moving forward. (If you want it to.)
Searching for an oracle
But… what will happen, you might ask? What shape will it take?
These questions are often percolating when people come to me. Writers want an oracle who will tell them the reception their book will receive in the future.
Sadly, I’m not the oracle they seek. No one is. “Ask the moon and stars what will happen with your book,” I tell them. “I don’t know!” Oracles don’t exist.
It’s also worth slowing down and thinking about what we’re really asking. What’s the real question when we ask someone to tell us whether we should give up or keep going?
We want to end the agony of hope. We want to know whether it will have been worth it in the end. Basically, we want to pull the curtain and collapse the future into the present. We want to rush past the moment we’re experiencing.
And for what?
A book won’t save you
Nearly every author I know who’s been published by a traditional publisher has experienced a thud around their publication day.
The book is out. The world barely cares and keeps on spinning. You’re still you. You’ve accomplished an extremely difficult dream, so why does it feel a bit empty?
Holding your own book in your hands is an amazing feeling, but books don’t fill the void within. Neither does hitting the bestseller list or winning awards.
That sucking feeling on publication day is the insatiable void reasserting itself. So too are those questions the void whispers in our ears earlier in the process about whether writing a book is worth it. Whether anyone will care. Whether the dream will come true.
And if not even becoming the toast of the New York Times bestseller list will save us… why are we doing this again?
Pebbles in the ocean
The meaning you’re going to find in your book is not going to reveal itself at some point in the distant future. That meaning is also not subject to the whims of gatekeepers. It doesn’t really even matter whether your book gets published, though it probably doesn’t feel that way to you right now.
The meaning is already here, if you can stay attuned to it.
Because writing changes us for the better. Because we’re creating meaning out of that void. Because we’re leaving something behind that might make others feel less alone. Because we’re taking pain and turning it into light.
So yes. Sometimes it can feel like you’re dropping a pebble in a grand expanse of sea. It barely makes a ripple. That’s one way of looking at it.
But think about the pebble. Who knows what it’s going to encounter as it plunges into the watery depths?
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Art: Der Mönch am Meer by Caspar David Friedrich
The glowing abyss? An exercise in futility? The insatiable void?
What I really like best about the publishing industry in general and you in particular is your wondrous sense of irrepresible optimism!
As for Mandarin, I now have an overwhelming desoire for Chinese food and it’s one o’clock in the morning here in Ireland. Damn you, Nathan!
I must have missed my mark with the post then, I thought this one landed in an optimistic place! It’s genuinely tough out there right now, harder than past times I’ve experienced in the business, but only if what you’re seeking is external validation. The writing process is as rewarding as ever.
I think the state of the game is soul-destroying.
And your post confirms it:
If you find learning Chinese to be so difficult when you are immersed in the language and the people in your own life: you should be finding it second nature. The fact that you do not does not bode well for the rest of us.
You are very well connected in the writing/publishing industry – you have insider experience, you can count agents, editors, and publishers as your friends – the kind of connections that I would give my back teeth to have – and yet you find it to be the same closed-door policy slog that I do.
I have read all the books, completed the courses, and pored diligently over every word you have written on the craft of writing.
I write stories that have everything that they are supposed to have – they flow well, they are genuinely as good as anything else in the genre by famous named authors who are published on name and not on content or quality, and their errors and shortcomings, or are they just shortcuts? are plain to see and easy to avoid – but still, the silence from agents is deafening.
I would willingly give up this waste of my time if I could. I would be a happier man if I did. But I cannot. To not get up at 06.00, make a cup of tea, and then sit down to write for 2 hours would make the rest of my day impossible. It would be like trying to go out into the world with a great big obvious stain on the front of my shirt: I would feel terrible all day long until I could get back home and do something about it.
Writing is something that I must do – keep trying is something that I must do – but I have come to realize that I am pissing in the wind.
Well said!
Yeah, I again feel like I must have missed the mark if this post “confirms” the process is soul destroying. It’s only that if you let it be.
Personally, I found this post to be optimistic and affirming. Yes, it is tough out there right now, in both trad and self-pub, in all the ways you mentioned, But those things are outside of our direct control. The one thing we have control over is our own writing and our relationship with our books. The question of why we write is something each of us will have an individual answer for. Finding meaning in our writing, that’s crucial. Understanding that while externals such as hitting a best seller list, winning an aware, or garnering rave reviews are not up to us, our writing is.
I needed to read this today. Thank you 🙂
Interesting, Nathan. I agree that writing has an intrinsic value in itself. Though it’s a common sentiment that too many people write too many books, G. K. Chesterton, for example, declared completing ANY book to be an achievement. Npnetheless, writing, apart from a diary, is elevated when read by someone else. We are storytellers and seek story listeners.
Your opinion about present versus past conditions is widely held in publishing, yet I’m a bit older than you and never remember a time when publishing was other than a VERY nostalgic industry, always harking back to some earlier golden era, but with little certainty as to just when that was.
A few years ago I read a 1970 article about Science Fiction publishing at that time. The article estimated the number of US authors making a living from SF writing, How many? 25. TWENTY-FIVE!
So here we are, sitting around the metaphorical campfire of Nathan’s blog, exchanging stories about the publishing industry. Stories that may tell us as much about ourselves as about publishing.
Conjuring, writing, and editing, re-editing, and cutting unnecessary verbage is to me the essence of the craft. I couldn’t get published back in 2000. So I was hooked by a publishing house named Tate Publishing. They squeezed $6000+ out of me before they dumped me. They published my mini-tome(all 91 pages) and did zero promotion. I sold severeal copies at book signings that I arranged by myself. I still have the royalty check of .91 cents that tate sent me. It’s possible to get immense satisfaction out of miniscule events. I had to get my head right about writing. It has to be satisfaction for me or I should break my quill.