It's the Pits!

By Nichole Giles

Yeah, you heard me. Getting rejections, having your work critiqued, more rejections—it’s not fun. And yet we still submit. We still write and ask other authors or editors to look at our writing and tell us what they think is wrong with it. We constantly subject ourselves to this torture and it becomes a vicious cycle that will someday, hopefully, end in a publishing contract.

But in the meantime, we live in this never ending cycle. I’m not going to lie. There are days I feel like a total hack. Every writer does. There are days I feel like my books (published and unpublished) are crap. There are days I wander around my house looking to do anything that will keep me away from my computer because I have no idea what I was thinking when I decided I wanted to be a writer.

What was I thinking?

Probably, I thought someday I’d write something that would influence someone else. Maybe I thought I’d have the opportunity to touch someone’s life, to help someone, or to make a person smile.

It could be that I just wanted to tell a story. Or that writing is the only way of silencing the voices that haunt my dreams, waking and sleeping. It could be that I felt a need to contribute to the literary world that has driven me to reach higher, stretch farther, and think harder than any other form of media ever could.

Maybe I wasn’t thinking at all. I was just feeling. I felt like a writer. I feel, now, like a writer. I am a writer. And rejection, criticism, and disappointments aside, I will always be a writer. So. Does it matter if I don’t find an agent/get a publishing contract/end up with a multi-million dollar deal? No. It doesn’t. Not in the least.

Because in the end, I want all those things and more. I am a writer. And what writers want more than anything is to write.

And so I will.


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