You dream to be a writer? Writing is not easy. Every author knows that. It can make us insane. This will happen especially when you use this talent as your career or you're just seeking bigger readership. Gone are the days that writing are fun, playful and adventurous. This time, you will endure the reality, writing is stressful, tiresome and can turn us into semi-zombies. Here's why:
You will battle for the cliches.
"I want an original one!" That would readers and editors always gonna say. But the sad truth is nothing is already new. We live on the same Earth and sun. You will sponge your brain to new ideas. Everytime you come up something new, your mind will quickly argue it was already done before. The sad fact when your editor/reader says your story idea is cliche. What a heartache!
You never know when your novel will be perfect.
As you embraced professionalism , you make sure your final draft is flawless before submitting it publishers. Chances are, you never know when your novel could be totally polished, even if you edited or revised it for many times, you will still see errors on it. You will still find way to write some prose better. You will spend a lot of sleepless nights doing it. So, you think your manuscript is perfectly done, you have just passed it to a publisher but when you review your manuscript again, you find it's still having tidal waves of grammatical errors, inconsistentsies, unchecked facts. But your manuscript is already on striking perfectionist editors' inbox. You have nothing to do but to cry. "Oh my God! What the fuck I have done?!"
It doesn't mean if your manuscript is good, it will be published and become hit.
Your novel is now very good, spectacular and perfect. You became Nostradamus, you predicted it will become a bestseller, it will subdue Harry Potter, it will make you a billionaire. No! I don't want to destroy your illusion. Publishing is very subjective. What is trash for you, will be a treasure of others and what is treasure to you, will be garbage to them. That's why you can read a wholly total junk book out today. "Why in this world this was published?!" you may ask and hit your head against the wall. The most unoriginal, cliche, boring, faulty story you ever read is published or has just got millions of read. Too poor, it will make us insecure. Nobody knows what will the editors want and what will the readers crave. No one knows what will be the next trend.
Rejection will kill you.
Our book rejected for some reason even the most mundane ones. Some will say, it should not be taken personally, since publishing is subjective. Maybe you just met a lady and called her fat, you don't know she's the evaluator of your precious story, then she rejected your work. See, it just a silly circumstance, the reason why rejection doesn't mean your novel is bad at all. But let's be honest, one rejection is like a lightning that will strike our enthusiasm to write. This is when our creativity lessen, our mental block is getting more serious. The stress ranks over the joy. You have now eating a lot of paper or destroy your computer, crying what's wrong with you.
That is how the writing world works. But as you can see, the pitfuls of writing is the readership stage. As many suggested, try to separate the art from marketing. By this, if you follow your passion amidst in these difficulties, you might be a legendary author someday.
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