Another month has flown by and it’s time for yet another IWSG Post!
January 5 question – What’s the one thing about your writing career you regret the most? Were you able to overcome it?
My biggest regret is not taking writing seriously soon enough. I’m 60 now, and if I’d been serious about selling my work when I got out of college, maybe I’d have a name by now. As it is, I’m not sure if I’ll ever sell anything. Sometimes it just seems hopeless, but I keep plugging away because I can’t not write. I’m not sure if I would have sold anything at 25, but I wish I’d at least tried harder back then. Of course, those were the days without internet—no Submission Grinder alerting you to when magazines or anthologies were looking for stories, no handy online lists of agents and which of them you could trust—so selling would have been harder when I was 25. However, I might have made it if I’d applied myself.
Of course, without a time machine, I can’t overcome this regret. I can only remind myself that plenty of my favorite writers are older. And I often hear of older writers finally selling their manuscript, so there’s some hope at least.
It’s difficult to keep from feeling insecure when you’re a writer. The whole business is so damn subjective. You can get rejected for any number of reasons—none of which have any bearing on your ability to write well. The company may have just published something similar. Someone else may have just published something similar and your company doesn’t want the competition. Your work may just not fit with the company’s style. The editor may hate something you’ve included in your manuscript, like time travel or swamp monsters. And they may just be having a bad day and taking it out on their submissions. There’s a lot of luck involved in selling your work.
However, that’s no reason to stop believing in your abilities. You just have to keep sending your work out there. Somebody, sometime, will not be in a bad mood or not have seen your ideas recently enough, and you’ll make that sale.
