Dana Kaye
“If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.” – A League of Their Own
There is a reason not everyone has written a book let alone published one. There’s a reason not everyone has hit a bestseller list or gotten a rave review in the Times. This @%!# ain’t easy.
How many people have told you they’ve had a great idea for a book? 20? 50? 2,498? But only a small percentage of those people will actually write it. That’s because writing a book is hard. You have to practice and hone your craft. You have to dream up plot points and develop characters. If you’re writing crime fiction, you have to put your characters in a situation where it’s impossible to get out….and then get them out!
Writing a good book isn’t easy. Writing a book, period, isn’t easy. There are days when words seem forced, where every page you write gets thrown in the garbage, when you bang your head against the wall because you don’t know what’s going to happen next. But you keep going. You sit in the chair, take a deep breath, swig some coffee (or some scotch) and keep moving forward.
So you’ve accomplished the difficult task of writing the book, but it’s not over yet. Now that you’ve written something, it’s time for people to reject it.
If you’re an author, you’ve dealt with rejection. You’re writing group criticizes aspects of your story, agents and publishers turn you down, your mom keeps calling you asking, “When are you going to write a nice story about a cat?” Sometimes, getting published seems impossible, and you toy with the idea of packing it in and getting a real job. But again, you’re a writer. You love writing. So you revise the parts your group had trouble with, you crank out another batch of agent pitches, you tell your mom you’re not coming home for Hanukah and hang up.
And after all the blood, sweat, tears, and rejection, something magical happens: You get a publishing contract.
But it’s not over yet.
Your editor wants changes to the manuscript, your publisher wants to change the title, your gritty suspense novel is now a cozy with a pink cover and mom got her wish, they want you to include a cat. You drive across the country visiting bookstores where no one has heard of you, you try to ignore the scathing Amazon reviews, and through all of this, you’re trying to finish book two.
This isn’t to be negative or bring you down; it’s to illustrate how amazing it is to be an author. If everyone could write a book, publish it, get rave reviews and be a bestseller, then the esteem of being an author would be gone. The difficulty is what makes it fulfilling, the hard is what makes it great.
