The Truth is That Writing Has Been Kicking My Butt Lately

I wish I could say that my writing has been going amazing and that I feel good about all the novels that I've been writing, but truth is doubt has been whispering in my ear for months now. I'm worried I'll never get published. I know self-publishing works for some people, but I want a traditional publisher. I won't settle for less. Self-publishing is like me forcing a relationship just because I want love so bad, and the traditional publisher is the love that you find when you aren't looking.

I'm not going to lie, I've been querying for years and my patience is wearing thin. However, I've allowed myself to get rejected so many times now that I'm simply used to the feeling, and I automatically start over again. I'm going to send out more queries today while staring at all my previous rejections that I now have hung up on my wall.

I've done a lot of revisions, and so far, three of my novels seem to be finally completed. But no agent is interested in them. At this point, I have to move on to the next novel I want to write. I guess what I've been struggling so much with lately is being able to get myself to move on. I'm in love with all of my books that I write, so I have this urge to be completely done with them before starting a new one. And the rejections make me feel like they aren't done, so I've been wasting my time making unnecessary revisions when I could be writing the dystopian book I've been dying to write.

So I volunteer at a crisis line, and I recently started my own in-service to educate about eating disorders and the appearance ideal. Now I want to write a dystopian world that calls out society against the appearance ideal that's causing so many people to starve themselves. I want to write it so bad, but whenever I go to grab my pen, I don't want to start. I think it's because I've never written a dystopian before, so now there's all this pressure for perfection.

I'm hoping me writing about my struggle helps other writers feel better about their own struggles. I feel like some people assume writing is easy but it's not. Even if you're talented and enjoy it, it takes so much commitment and perseverance and ignorance of self-doubt.

You start where nobody knows who you are and it's hard to get a career moving. If I only wrote and was never published I'd be okay with it. The problem is my books have messages that I want readers to hear; I want them to take away things from my books. That's why my desire for the career is so huge.

The biggest aspect feeding my self-doubt is the luck aspect. I want to know that if I work hard enough that I could get published. But it makes me jealous that some of it is meeting the right person at the right time. I could have a perfectly marketable book but zero support. It's hard living with that. Really hard.

I just wanted to be open and honest. We live in a world where every day we share our successes and good parts of our life on socials, and I think it makes rejections and failures feel worse than they really are; it makes them feel like they need to be kept as secrets. I want to share my failures to change that a little bit. It's like with my eating disorder in-service. Starting out, I may not be able to touch that many people. But I have to start somewhere, and helping even some people is better than none.

I was talking to my best friend the other day and she was telling me about how even if I don't get published how I could still touch people's hearts. And at first I didn't believe her. I came back at her like we were in a debate, telling her about how I need an audience. And then she finally made me see that the reason I want to get published is because we've always been taught more is good and I'm comparing myself to writers like JK Rowling that probably has billions of readers all across the globe.

I can still touch smaller audiences. The people that have read and liked my books, that's something, right? I think I forget about that a lot. I'll never be pleased with myself. I'll always want more readers, more books published, more books written, etc.

What I need to do is enjoy my writing for now and try not to stress too much, and see what the writing world has in store for me.

What us writers need to do is start bragging about our rejections. Put them on your wall and laugh, and if you're me, you can say, "Look, there's like thirty agents so far that a few years from now are going to regret their decision."