Thursday, May 27, 2010

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 There are days I feel like my books (published and unpublished) are crap.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.


**Be sure to stop by my new book review blog and become a follower. You won’t be sorry!

6 comments:

Keith N Fisher said...

:) you make me smile with every chapter.

Nichole Giles said...

Thanks, Keith! You make me smile too.

Anonymous said...

First, thanks for this. Just...thank you.

Second, you're an incredible writer, Nichole. Truly. Don't doubt it.

Nichole Giles said...

Thanks L.T. I think the same about you. Shall we roar now?

Unknown said...

I have been feeling these very feelings as of late. I have even been wandering my house wondering what I could do other than be at my computer. I'm sure I could do the dishes, or the laundry... but that keeps me away from my writing! What a twisted feeling!

Thanks for sharing. Good luck.

kelly miller said...

something to lift you...
In our world there have risen brilliant stars
Bursting from all the fields of excellence
One day our members will exceed all by far
As the world increases in divergence

Zion, one day, will be praised by the whole earth
Kings will come to gaze upon her glory
To hear songs of Christ, as too new arts give birth
Which depict the best events in history

Who's obsessed enough for this worthy goal?
To tell each story with love and pathos
Imagine masterpieces in perfection
The greatest of all in production...

Our own talent, obsessed with dynamism from a worthy goal, could put into such a story life and heartbeats and emotions and love and pathos, drama, suffering, fear, courage; and they could put into it the great leader, the mighty modern Moses who led a people farther than from Egypt to Jericho, who knew miracles as great as the stream from the rock at Horeb, manna in the desert, giant grapes, rain when needed, battles won against great odds.

-Spencer W. Kimball