There I was happily going about my day. Two days earlier, I had finished the first draft of my novel, a process that I’m embarrassed to say, took more than three years. I had written editorials for this newsletter two weeks in advance so that I would never miss an issue again! And I’d even pre-scheduled blog entries for a few weeks so that I wouldn’t have to worry about posting them on any particular day.
Queries were out to a few editors I wanted to work with and with nothing pressing on my plate, I turned to my much-neglected niche site, a project that is more a business experiment than any form of burning passion at this point, but I was happy. I had made headway on all but one of my projects and I was beginning to see results. And I was finally caught up on most things after more than a month away from work. Brilliant.
And then I logged on to Twitter. And saw a woman posting about bagging an agent. And then I felt the crushing weight of defeat once again. Because here I was working on a stupid niche website when real writers were out there doing real work that matters.
There are writers in this world who know exactly who they are and what they want to be. They know they want to write crime novels and even as they experiment with different forms of writing, sometimes for the money, sometimes for fun, they know that this is their one major goal for their writing life. They want to write a New York Times bestselling crime novel or they want to win the Booker for the work of literary fiction that took eight years to write. They know their end goal.
I don’t. And if my conversations with many of you are any indication, you don’t either.
If you asked me today whether or not I wanted to write a crime novel, I’d probably have to think about it. And in trying to answer this question before I started writing, I thought to myself, “Hmm… I could.”
That’s the bane of my life, that phrase “I could.” I’m fairly motivated and fairly committed to my work and so that “I could” soon becomes “Let’s try” and that soon becomes “Whee I’m having so much fun with this,” until well, it stops being fun. But now I have a new goal, a new writing career, and all my other whee-at-first-but-no-longer-fun projects are still there and still hold potential for success. And I have so many more ideas in that genre that could be fantastic and… well, it’s exhausting.
So I write for the major newspapers for a while and when that stops being challenging, I take a departure from that to write how-to articles for money and when the money stops being an incentive, I experiment with niche sites, and when that achieves a modicum of success, I start a novel, and so on and on and on.
These are all actually good things. Very good things. Because if I could manage to find a way to reach the end of most of these projects (and I’ve started doing that lately), I could not only be extremely prolific, but also keep my writing life and work interesting and challenging for years to come.
But what do I want to be when I grow up? What is my writing legacy going to be? I don’t know. And this depresses me. Because I like order and to-do lists and knowing the path ahead. I don’t like the uncertainty of not even knowing what I’m working towards.
And if the number of confused emails that land up in my Inbox are any indication, you don’t quite know what you’re working towards either.
Last year, my husband and I started a content marketing company. Totally the right fit for us creatively but we hate corporate mumbo jumbo and I refused to buy a suit. Wrong career choice.
Due to a tough financial year, I started doing a bit of guest blogging for small businesses and reaching out to corporates to ask if I could handle their marketing materials. Never have I sabotaged my assignments so quickly. I couldn’t wait to finish those contracts and get the hell out of there. Wrong career choice.
I started pitching editors at newspapers and despite lower pay, did fantastic work for them. Correct career choice. I wrote an e-course for writers and enjoyed every minute of working with my 100+ students. Correct career choice. I finished writing my novel and despite the frustrations and failures, kept at it. I spent hours writing material I’m not passionate about for the niche site. I wrote these newsletters and the blog posts, prioritizing them most days because they make me happy. Correct, correct, correct career choices.
I realized that many of the decisions we make about our long-term writing careers can’t be made by running numbers or by asking too many questions about them. It all comes down to a gut check. Your body either screams yes or it screams no (and if it doesn’t scream anything at all, stick with it a while longer until it does).
I have had a lot of different writing careers in this short span of my overall writing career and I still don’t know where it’s going or what it will eventually be. But I will have experimented, I will have tried, and I will have given every possibility a chance, until one day my muddled path will come together to form some sort of coherent whole.
Will yours?