Making Stuff Up for a Living
In the film adaptation of Misery, there comes a moment when Paul Sheldon (James Caan) winds a page out of his typewriter, scrawls THE END on it, and carefully adds the sheet to a stack of other finished pages. You remember the scene: It’s a special day. There’s a bottle of champagne chilling. An afterglow cigarette. A single match.
When I was eighteen years old, I wrote my first novel. As you might expect, it wasn’t very good, but I didn’t know that then. I expected — quite confidently — to be a full-time writer by twenty-five. That gave me seven years — more than enough time, I figured, to write a few books and become a breakout success story.
I idolized other authors who had done just that — Michael Chabon, with The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, or Alex Garland with The Beach. I read novels about writers. I bought into the idea that novelists were special, that they were of a different breed than everybody else.
The scene in Misery painted a certain picture for me. In it, I saw my future: The mysterious, perhaps reclusive author, biding away his days in a cabin someplace, pounding out novels that captured the world’s imagination as never before. Maybe I would have little rituals that I would perform when I completed a novel, too.
Maybe the world would throw me a party.
The long, long, long haul
Twelve.
That’s how many years it has taken me to not finish my great novel. Twelve long years of false starts, rewrites, hard drive crashes, do-overs, and even a detour into a graphic novel adaptation. Twelve years, with piles and piles of words, and no novel to show for it.
Oh, there were books before it — three of them. I finished writing those novels without any problems. Never published them, but that was okay. They weren’t really ready. The fourth book — that’s the one that was going to change everything. I was twenty-three when I started writing it. I’ll be thirty-five this year, and I’m no closer to finishing it.
Here’s another number: Six.
Six months is how long I’ve been a self-published author. It’s also how long it’s taken me to write my last four novels. That’s not only considerably less time than you might imagine writing a novel might take, but it’s also dramatically shorter than twelve years.
Six months is a whisper. It’s nothing. But in six months, I’ve found something that, for the last decade or so, I’ve only dreamed of.
Readers.
A problem of expectations
The gap between traditionally-published authors and the rising crop of self-published authors has been closing for a little while now. There are a few ‘indie’ authors (as we like to call ourselves sometimes) who have found enormous success, who have sold a million books without the marketing department of a big publisher behind them. Maybe you haven’t heard of these indie darlings — yet — but they’re out there, and soon enough, you will.
It's a long article, but worth the read: https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/making-stuff-up-for-a-living-2b1d097bb230