When I was growing up, I imagined being a novelist meant I would write for a living. This is not always the case. There is a darker side to the writing and publishing profession, even more disturbing than the constant criticism, rejection and pirating of e-books. We’re not all dedicating our lives to the manipulation of words for entertainment value. Most habitual readers I know don’t realize that gone are the days when writers were intellectuals and academics spending their whole lives with their nose in a book. In 2013 every other person I meet online claims to be a writer, many of them bestselling authors at that.
A writer in this decade is an everyman. You probably know one yourself because anybody can claim the tag now. They could be writing e-books, blogs or letters to the editor of a newspaper to supplement their income, but the fact remains that if you are trying to make a living from writing, your time will mostly be spent promoting and networking, and networking means you’ll come across the type of people who will inspire you to write a murder mystery just so you can make them the victim.
What’s brought about this change in the profession? I’m not one of those intellectuals or academics, so I can’t say. I am a person who has had a series of dead-end jobs but naively dedicated the last twelve years of her life to the craft of creative writing, making numerous sacrifices to find fulfillment. To me it’s a vocation rather than a career or hobby because no matter what I do I can’t stop writing. I mentally plot the story of job interviews during the event to cope with the pressure. When my husband had a stroke, I imagined the blood clot that caused it as a series of ellipses in our lives, whereas the birth of my son was an exclamation mark. People I don’t like have faces like twisty question marks and any bad luck I have is merely a comma. I ceased to become part of my own reality a long time ago. It verges on mental illness. This is not particular to a writer in the 21st Century and could be said of anyone so obsessive about the craft at any time.
Now there are so many would-be writers, there is no people’s revolution against the publishing giants, despite what many independent authors, including myself, have thought and said in the past couple of years. There are hundreds like me to whom writing is like breathing but thousands of bandwagon jumpers who rush out book after book then market them in questionable ways. I even had one man send me private messages on Twitter every day for almost a year in an attempt to get reviews for each book his wife has written – a total of twenty three in the last two years.
I self published through choice, without knocking on agents’ doors because I knew my novel was too contemporary to wait and within a few years would be dated. Self publishing is what the majority of wannabes do but it tars us all with that opportunist brush. The Internet is awash with distinctly average literature written on a whim by someone who never had ambitions to be a writer and was bored one day so self published on one of the many websites that allow you to do so without a book deal. I suspect many of them aren’t even readers.
Stories of people who have written twenty or more titles over the course of a few months and sold hundreds of thousands of copies both impress me and rile me in equal measure because despite having spent years working at it, as an independent writer without a publishing deal and only Amazon et al behind me, we are all on the same level. For the Silo, Lacey Dearie.
