From Nathan Bransford:
I recently finished a new novel, and I’ll be honest with you: I’m pretty scared!
I don’t feel like people talk about this part of the process very much.
Whenever you hear writers talking about struggles and failures, they’re often discussed when it’s all over, after that person has already gone on to find success. Those struggles are contextualized as a dramatic interlude in an otherwise nice, neat, inspirational narrative that culminates with someone overcoming those obstacles and roadblocks.
I see very few people talk about this part, while they’re actually in it, where you’ve finished something and you have literally no idea what is going to happen with it. No idea whether it’s going to be a success or disappear into a drawer never to be heard from again. No idea whether there will be a happy ending for all those struggles and whether it will actually feel worth it in the end. The part where you’re just plain vulnerable.
. . . .
More than any other book I’ve written, and I’ve written… uh… *counts on fingers* seven now, this novel was personal. I followed my own (possibly insane) artistic vision no matter where it took me. I tried to trust my instincts. I slogged away for years even though the plot was insanely difficult to execute.
More than anything else, I wrote this one for me. I gave up blogging for a while. I kept going even when I thought I was crazy and even in the face of negative feedback. I had to get this thing out of my system.
Was that the right move? Should I have tempered my instincts? Did I write something the market doesn’t want? Did I go too far against the grain? Did I not listen to other people enough? Was the whole thing several years of misguided work?
I LITERALLY HAVE NO IDEA.
. . . .
Does following a more meaningful writing process mean I’m on the right track?
Like I said, I have no idea. But I do know that I feel better about this one. I distantly trust that I’ll still feel good about it even if it ends up in a drawer, because at least I wrote this for the simple personal satisfaction of having pulled it off.
Still, that doesn’t blunt the creeping terror of having spent hundreds and hundreds of hours on a single project and facing having it come to very little or even nothing. It doesn’t dull the pain of the prospect of it disappearing, to not have it validated by the external world, especially when there are bills to be paid and when, in the end, I think most writers just want to be seen and to feel that profound, primordial satisfaction when someone reads your book and actually likes it.
Link to the rest at Nathan Bransford
His main worry seems to be that what he has written is something the market won’t want. There’s a simple way to solve that: don’t write for the market. Write for yourself. Which is what he says he has done for the first time. So his worry is understandable…or maybe not. I myself would only worry about whether the market wants what I wrote if I actually wrote something for the market rather than just to fulfill my need to write. I guess I really can’t understand someone who worries about what the market might want when they’ve written just for themselves.
I have no idea after finishing a book if it will sell or tank. I put it up and try my best to keep my focus firmly on the next book, where there’s still hope of better things to come. That makes the current book irrelevant, and therefore a hell of a lot easier to let go so it can do whatever it’s going to do without crushing me in the process.
I, likewise, have no idea what this author is saying. Is writing “for the simple personal satisfaction of having pulled it off” not enough? If not, then after 7 novels you’d think he’d have learned something about Marketing.
How can he “literally have no idea”? None at all?
Baffled.
As the kids say, WTF?
The OP comes off more as some drama queen rather than as a writer with six books under their belt. I would have thought the first book would have been the scary one – though maybe time has dulled their memory of it.
My suggestion to them is a double shot of their preferred painkiller until the scary goes away and they’re eager to see what happens – good or bad.