How do you deal with some of the frustrations that come with being a writer?
We suffer beneath many frustrations. There’s the frustration writers block. There’s the frustration of not having enough time to do the work we really want to do. Of course, the ultimate frustration is not having our work published, or perhaps worse: having a published book, but no one’s buying.
I’ve dealt with, and continue to deal with, all of these frustrations (and many others). After wrestling with these frustrations myself—in my own mind, on paper, wandering around the kitchen at 2 AM speaking into my phone—there is one solution that continues to come to mind. It is great and wonderful and terrible in its simplicity:
Keep writing.
I know. That’s probably the most . . . well, frustrating answer I could I have given to you or me. There are plenty of other actionable items we could add to this list: you could take courses, or spend money on Facebook ads for your book, for example. You can read books and articles like this one, and watch YouTube videos about any topic under the sun related to your frustrations as a writer. God knows I have.
But the one solution that I keep coming back to is that I must write.
Gary Vaynerchuk points out that if you really want success with the thing you love to do, design a process you love. There are no guarantees in any pursuit, whether that’s law, medicine, creative arts, financial work, you name it. So, you’d better come up with a process that you really enjoy. I really enjoy the process of writing novels. All of those frustrations I listed at the top of this article are still true—sometimes on a daily or even hourly basis all at once. But I still love the process of writing.
If you’ve gotten this far in this article, you probably do, too.
With no guarantee of financial or emotional success, how do you deal with all of those frustrations? You keep writing. You write because, as Stephen King points out, to not write is death. More than once in the last decade, I have considered quitting altogether. I have thought about going back to school, getting a graduate degree . . . “I’m just going to work full-time at a library or somewhere.” (That’s not a bad gig by the way.)
The problem is, the thought of never writing another word of fiction chills my heart. I already know that I may never ever publish with a New York publisher ever again. But in this day and age, there is no excuse not to write the things that we love and share them with the world. The internet has utterly and forever changed publishing. Find your audience, and you will be fine.
I am not trying to diminish the size or weight of those three frustrations, or the many other frustrations I didn’t even list. They are real. They hurt sometimes. They can cause distress. But if you are a writer, the only way forward is to keep writing. Perhaps we need to try a new genre, or a new format. Maybe it’s time to take a class in poetry, or essay writing, or creative nonfiction. I have taken these classes and gotten a lot out of them. More than once, they’ve reignited my desire to continue writing. I am also not dismissing all of those videos and courses I mentioned. They can be very powerful as motivators, or to inspire us to try something new and different.
Through it all, we must write. We must not just merely suffer anxiety, but rather be anxious to set forth to tell our stories.
If we cannot or will not do that, then the frustrations have won. Let’s not give them the satisfaction.
I say this at the end of most of my articles and posts about writing, but today, it takes on a slightly more serious meaning:
Keep. Writing.
I mean it.