Judge success or failure on your terms and your terms alone. Only then will you know if you, personally, have what it takes.
I saw an interesting Reddit post the other day. The author claimed to have been writing for twenty-five years, but despite “Sending stories out. revising novels. taking writing classes,” it never really “clicked” for them.
Twenty-five years is a long time, and it’s in the same ballpark I’ve been writing for. In one of the replies, the author mentioned that they had been writing “since they left college,” which would make them similar to me.
The author then briefly mentioned some mental health issues and feelings of failure due to their perceived lack of success.
My response to this post follows, which I thought you’d enjoy reading.
The first thing I’d ask is, what is your goal? What do you want to achieve? How do you define success or failure? Because that’s what matters here. Are you trying to get a novel published through a traditional publisher? Do you want to get to a position where you give up the day job and make a living from writing? Or do you just want people to read your work and tell you they enjoyed it?
Decide what you want, and then you can work out how to get there or if you can get there.
You say you’ve been sending stories out for 25 years. To who? What kind? What length? Have you only been sending novels to agents/publishing houses? If so, have you thought about self-publishing? The landscape now is completely different than when you left college; if you wanted to publish a novel yourself, it’s easy to do so. Getting it noticed by readers and making sales is hard, but it would be through a traditional publisher, too.
Or have you been sending short stories to contests or magazines? Well, there are plenty of websites for any short story genre where you can post your stories, and people will read them, rate them and tell you what they think.
Or do you write because you feel compelled to write? Because you have a story to tell, and it doesn’t really matter if anyone else reads it or enjoys it? And the reason you feel like it’s not working is because you don’t like what you write and feel the story you want to tell hasn’t turned out how you want it?
Define success or failure in terms of what it means to you. Only then can you know if it’s time to quit.
But say you do quit, then what? How would that make you feel? What would the benefit be? I’m going to go ahead and assume that you haven’t been sitting at a desk writing without “success” for 25 years and not doing anything else. I assume you have a day job. In which case, is writing a hobby you could replace with something else? Or is it a passion that keeps you going day to day that would create a huge void in your life if you stopped?
To put this in context, I’ve been writing for about the same length of time as you. I turned 50 this year. I have published (through Amazon KDP and other channels) 7 “full-length” novels (60k words up to 120k), a handful of novellas and a whole bunch of short stories. I’m currently working on the 4th novel of a series which I originally intended as a trilogy, but now looks like it will be five books instead. Am I a huge success? No, not in sales or financial terms. Can I give up working and live off the earnings from my writing? Hell, no. Am I satisfied with where I am? Well, I’d like more, but generally, yes. Because, ultimately, I write for me. I write because it’s an escape from the daily grind. I write because I have a story to tell. And when someone buys my book or gives it a good rating or drops me a message to say, “Hey, enjoyed this. Hurry up with the next one”, it feels good. It feels like a success.
Judge success or failure on your terms and your terms alone. Only then will you know if you, personally, have what it takes.
