The Truth About Why Some Writers Make It and Some Don’t

“Failure is the butthole to a world of new and wondrous possibilities.”

My writing has been a bit sticky lately.

You probs aren’t going to turn to your spouse after reading this thing and say, “Oh. My. Gawd. Hubert (or whatever your spouse’s name is) Lindsay Brown just provided me with exactly the profound insight I needed today to get on with my life.”

The problem is, I’ve got a lot on my plate at the moment. Seemingly out of nowhere, I am a super busy writer. The vision board hung above my desk is sullied with “must write” article ideas. Pinned there with colourful tacks are such hard-hitting headline ideas such as:

There’s a Shack in The Woods Where I Pee The dangers of stinging nettles

Stages of Sex While Listening To “Dreams” By The Cranberries

Classic Movies I Watched with My Kids and How They Ruined Those Movies with Their Stupid Commentary

And my personal favourite:

I Finally Waxed My Stash…And Other Places Did not go well

My audio play — you know, the one I’ve been talking about writing for roughly ten thousand years now — still isn’t started, but I’ve got some real solid ideas clanging around in the old brain.

I think I may be taking on too much.

It’s like all of the ideas are attempting to sashay through the creativity door in my brain at once, and now they are jam-packed in that sucker, providing me with exactly zero words of substance.

The thing is, I’m not freaking out about it. This is not the end.

What a lot of people don’t know about me is that I’ve been writing online for a long time. It’s actually very, very, very embarrassing because if you do the math, considering the number of hours I’ve spent publishing my stories divided by the drudgery of practising self-loathing and multiply that by my raging egomania, I should be a lot better of a writer than I am at this current juncture.

Somehow though, I’ve managed to carve out a little space on the internet with my embarrassing stories about life as Lindsay. And that’s something I’m proud of even without the egomania.

There is, however, a secret to my success — or, at least, what I like to think of as my current success.

And that secret is this:

Stop taking yourself seriously.

I spent years trying to hone the writer persona. You know the one — black fedora, laptop propped up on some corner table at your local coffee shop, drinking black coffee to match your hat and soul.

I wanted to publish with high-end literary magazines. That was my focus. I crafted long boring coming-of-age pieces, attempting to mimic the literary prowess of my favourite up-and-coming writers.

I’d devour lit mags, like Tin House and Prairie Fire, hoping to find the secret sauce that I too could drench my work in.

Alas, my ribs were dry, and all I received was rejection after rejection.

I always had a side blog, never monetized but always bustling with activity. It was the place where I’d share silly and fun stories — those pieces that I’d never dream of submitting to real live editors because they were nothing but the insane inner workings of my ever-erratic brain.

Of course, there were a few weirdos online who enjoyed them. Every day my following grew a little more prominent. People would tell me in the comments that my stories made their day.

They were laughing, but I didn’t care.

Back then, believe it or not, I wasn’t in this thing for the laughs.

Ugh, that actually pains me to write that.

The rejections continued to fill my inbox. Little did I know at the time, soon, all those rejections would break me. Then I could finally transform into the shameless sociopath you’ve come to enjoy for your reading pleasure.

Who can say when the break actually happened.

Was it when I received an outraged personalized rejection email from an editor on a fiction piece about a small boy who ventured into a hoarder’s home and got lost in the debris for three consecutive weeks? Did I mention that the hoarder was 400 pounds in this tale of wonder? Also, no, it was not a comedy piece. Very serious. Very very serious stuff.

The editor told me that I was a terrible person for writing such a tale and that I should be “locked up for this,” which made me decidedly unchuffed, as the kids would say today.

Or perhaps the break happened when I realized that serious writing, although cathartic, just wasn’t my deal, man.

I’m not a very feely kind of gal. In truth, I hate feeling feelings, so trying to write feelings convincingly was not convincing anyone. I started writing stories about my childhood, the loss of my business, my tribulations in marriage. I wrote them all in a dark humour vein, still bringing to light the issues but relaying the stories in a way that I felt profoundly more comfortable with.

Um, hello? An acceptance email? Two acceptance emails?!

Wait, people wanted to publish these funny stories of mine? What the fuck is this, yo?

It turned out, I was never meant to be a serious writer. I was meant to be a humorist that sometimes talked about serious things. This isn’t to say that all writers must write funny to be successful. But instead, writers need to let down their guard and stop trying to write what they think will sell or what they believe will transform them into that picture-perfect writer they have in their head.

I had to stop taking myself so seriously to get serious about writing. Maybe you need to stop telling bad jokes and write more seriously to get serious about your writing.

And now I’ve used the word serious far too many times in this part of the story.

Although having been published in a few literary magazines, they typically aren’t my platform of choice anymore. I’m too impatient to wait six months for a rejection or a whole year to see my story in print. No, thank you.

I like my royalties like I like my waffles — hot off the press and abundant.

I’m certainly not a household name.

Well, maybe I am in, like, ten households over the entire span of Planet Earth. I plan on growing that number; it’s in the works with this audio play, I swear.

Along with the secret to stop taking yourself so seriously, there is another, deeper secret. It’s the thing that separates the wannabes from the will-bes.

And that thing is faith.

That unique and unwavering faith in oneself. Because the absolute truth is, nobody will believe in you as much as you believe in yourself.

Gross. That was SO after-school-special.

Unfortunately, it’s the truth. Your friends and family will tell you they love your writing, but they will not read every word of it. Your fellow creators will follow you and cheer you on, but they will miss an article now and again, or they will forget to shout you out in a mention.

Your writing platforms will wrap you in gold-hued cellophane and present you to the world. And just as quickly, they will kick your ass to the curb because the next big thing has arrived.

This is the nature of writing.

It is painful and frustrating and oh so demoralizing at times.

Most good writers don’t make it in this industry. It’s not because they are terrible or the market is too saturated. It’s not because there aren’t enough readers or their ideas aren’t good enough. It’s not even because of that one time they made a pass at one of their writing friends, and the feelings were not reciprocated, and then it was suuuuuuper awkward for quite some time. And for the record, they were just going through some really weird and confusing stuff at the time, okay?!

The real reason that most writers don’t make it in this industry is that they fall into one lousy rut and don’t remember to bring a shovel to dig themselves out.

And, just…FYI.

The, uh, shovel in this scenario is supposed to be your faith as a writer, and the hole is potentially that asshole editor from the lit magazine that told you nobody wants to read about 400-pound hoarders with live children lost in their homes.

But because I have faith in myself, I’m still going to publish that piece! And it shall be glorious!

The writers who make it, the ones you keep seeing on your feeds and those shooting up in the social media ranks, have faith in themselves. They’ve done their time, failed their fails and fully expect to fail again. They’ve ridden that self-loathing dick of shame and got off on the other side.

“Got off” being the operative word here.

So to wrap this up, I will leave you with a semi-positive affirmation that I just thought up two seconds ago.

“Failure is the butthole to a world of new and wondrous possibilities.”

Oh…that wasn’t enough? It needs to be more inspirational? Okay…

“Failure is the butthole to a world of new and wondrous possibilities. Explore that butthole with persistence because sometimes new things (that we imagined would be the worst) end up being not so bad at all.”

Nailed it.

Originally published at https://vocal.media.