The Writer's Dilemma

Okay, folks, I'm going to tell you exactly why you never want to be an unpublished writer. It's long and boring, so I decided to use my amazing technological and artistic skills to spice it up a bit.

At the most basic level, written communication is a message sent from one person to another person.

Or maybe from one person to a group...

Or from a group to an individual...

But this is what productive communication does NOT look like:

Without getting into a philosophical debate about trees and forests, we'll just say that if there is no recipient, deliberate communication is, by definition, a failure. (And you may disagree on some theoretical level, but just stick with me here, okay?)

So here I am, someone who likes to write. I'm also very sociable and I love it when my writing is received well. That's validation that my communication is productive and valuable. On the blog, the social interaction is easy. I always post a link to my blog entries on Facebook and people leave comments on that link. Sometimes people even go to the extraordinary effort to leave a comment on my actual blog. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside when people do that. Either way, I can gauge immediately if my communication was successful or not.

However, I'm also trying to become a fiction writer, which is fabulous if you're published:

But it's really crappy if you're unpublished:

That's me, right there. The lonely, unpublished author, creating messages that will probably never be read. And the worst thing about this is that I can only get feedback about my writing from other unpublished authors. So we're really the blind leading the blind, trying to figure out where the dang light switch is. I can go to writing conferences, which are something like this:

I actually love writing conferences, workshops, classes, etc. They're very motivational. I'm even organizing one for next March. But do they help me become a better writer? No. I already know, theoretically, how to write a story. I need somebody to read my stories and tell me exactly what things I'm implementing properly and which things need more work. It's called feedback.

My frustration with this simple concept--feedback--is killing me right now. I have a writer's group, but we are all in different genres and we're all unpublished. Blind, meet the blind. We can certainly help each other improve, but none of us can guess with any confidence what it would take to actually get published. There are critique groups out there with published authors, but I have yet to meet a group of bestselling authors that want to invite a newbie to their exclusive club. Still holding my breath.

I'm so frustrated with the blindness of the whole process that I want to just kill my ambitions and take the easy route: stick with goals that I know I can smash every time. Like baking a good batch of brownies. I make pretty decent brownies. I could just throw 100% of my effort into the world of Mom-ness. I'm not an awesome stay-at-home Mom, but at least I get plenty of feedback.

And being a dedicated stay-at-home Mom is a very worthy purpose. I'm proud of my efforts with the little monsters. But sometimes I want to use my brain a bit. And I've been told I have some talent for writing. And I enjoy it ... for the most part. But I've hit a brick wall and I have to step back sometimes and ask, is this worth it? I want to say "yes" because that's the mature and responsible thing to do. It shows a character of resiliency and determination. But is that a good enough reason to keep bloodying myself against a brick wall as I stumble around blindly in the dark? I don't know.

Some people have said, "If you're a true writer, you HAVE TO WRITE." I say: BS. Because that's ambiguous. I am composing sentences, ideas, and stories in my mind CONSTANTLY. There is this constant play-by-play in my brain that is analyzing the world around it. I am constantly "writing" in my mind, but do I have to put it on paper? Even if nobody is going to read it? How is that different from just forming the ideas in my mind? It's not.

So will I keep composing ideas and stories? Yes. I absolutely couldn't stop if I tried. But do I have to put them on paper? If a tree falls in the forest and nobody was around, who cares if it made a sound?

This isn't meant to be an announcement that I'm forfeiting all my writing dreams--just an expression of the frustrations that every writer faces. Because I think it's important to understand that raw writing talent is never enough to be a successful published author. It takes a lot of something--I'm not sure what--that I'm still trying to find.