(note: I am challenging myself to write every day for 30 days. What follows may not necessarily be interesting or even coherent. Parental discretion is advised.)
Yes I know, the chick in that picture doesn’t much look like a writer, let alone literate — but hey, look at all that green!
Today I’m going to write about how I feel about writing for fame and fortune.
For the longest time, I’ve had it all wrong. I felt that writing needed an end goal. It needed a reward for the hours and care and love and passion put into whatever it is. Including articles like: “Real Men Don’t Bathe” which surprisingly has not been nominated for any kind of award.
But, I’ve come to my senses. As someone who has written extensively for most of his life, it was always in the back of my mind that I was writing for other people. I still think that is important, but I realize that it’s not the most important thing about expressing one’s thoughts.
As we’re entering the baby steps of a new year, I needed to reflect on why I am even writing at all. Is it for recognition and approval? For money? Do I write in the hopes of getting something external from it? Maybe to get a harem of exotic ladies fanning me with palm leaves and feeding me grapes?
Don’t ask me what that picture is supposed to be. It’s an example of how terrible Google image search is when you type “harem grapes” into it.
Anyways, no. I do not write in the distant hopes of becoming a rich spoiled Sultan wrapped up in a blanket and dangling off the chest of some busty lady, although that doesn’t actually sound too bad.
No. I’m writing for myself.
This was and still is difficult to admit. Both to my ambitions of wanting to become paid for my writing and to receive public recognition.
Why this has been difficult to accept is because I was a voracious reader from a very young age. My father would take me to the library every couple of weeks and I would check out armfuls of books. I’m sure it looked like pure gluttony to see a five/six-year old carrying a huge stack of books and I remember the librarian asking my dad if I was even going to read all of these.
I still recall the way he beamed with pride answering yes, I was going to be reading them.
Of course, reading so much and often has helped developed an arrogance inside of me while at school. At that early age, my classmates were still being taught to read and would hesitate and fumble their way through a text.
“Uhm, ah… Cook…ie was a… a…”
Destitute prostitute, I would inwardly blurt. Sitting back with my arms folded watching this kid trace his finger along the page with a scrunched up expression on his face. Usually when it came to reading anything in class I had already finished whatever it was and impatiently waited for people to catch up. Boy were they slow. Why am I so fast? Am I special? Smarter? Bigger? Stronger?
Of course I was.
That was how I first developed this sense of superiority within myself. I was a quick reader. It came effortlessly to me because I really loved books.
Naturally, I became decent at writing after being exposed to so much of it and there were victories scored during English class. I was told by a teacher at the end of high school that my future laid with writing.
But I didn’t pursue that and instead went into the trades. Because that is where the money was at the time. Alberta oil boom, yay.
I didn’t follow my passion or hone my craft. I spent a few years writing various different things and had a couple of books come of it, but the editing process was mindnumbingly cumbersome and I wasn’t sure if I could polish my work well enough to be able to get published.
Really, you try and write 300 pages and then go back to the beginning to make sure everything is exactly the way you want it to be. As a perfectionist, I would constantly be going back and back and back and back to try and make things better than they were. Eventually, it just became too much work and I lost interest.
It didn’t help that I felt intimidated by the publishing process. Do I have to find an agent? Will I have to self-publish and sell copies of the book from inside of a sketchy van on the street? Like a food truck?
I mean hey, it did work for James Redfield and the Celestine Prophecy.
Redfield originally self-published The Celestine Prophecy, selling 100,000 copies out of the trunk of his car before Warner Books agreed to publish it.
A hundred thousand copies from the trunk of his car. Talk about hustle.
Did I want to hustle like that? No. Honestly, I wanted the easy route. I wanted a big fat million-dollar advance on the first try. Like how Andrew Davidson did with his book The Gargoyle.
Davidson sold his debut novel, The Gargoyle — a centuries-spanning romance about a severe burn survivor and a possibly schizophrenic sculptress who insists that they were lovers in a previous life — to Doubleday U.S. last summer for $1.25-million, an almost unheard-of figure for an untested author (especially a Canadian one).
Great book by the way, I highly recommend it.
And that’s another thing which was intimidating. Books like the Gargoyle only made me feel inadequate. How could I possibly write that well? I liked my stories and ideas but felt put off by the perfection I’ve seen in other works, leading me to frustration and feelings of being inadequate.
It also didn’t help that most people who knew me thought that I had real talent and aptitude for this kind of stuff.
Arrogance + an inflated ego = entitlement.
That is what I began realizing looking back at the years I haven’t really pushed to get anything published. I was getting my approval from others in the form of compliments on whatever I gave them of my writing to read. It was enough. I could exist on this thinly-formed identity I’ve created for myself. To be known for potential but not actually executing on it.
And that really fucked me without my knowing it.
I wasn’t writing for myself, I was writing for others. To impress others. I didn’t really think a published book was going to happen. Even though I finished a few books, I didn’t think I could polish them enough to be happy with the results. I also didn’t think I could muster the courage to shop it in front of dozens of publishers to get rejected or to sell my stories from the trunk of a car.
I just didn’t want fame and fortune, really, because I didn’t believe it could happen.
No matter what I wrote, it wouldn’t be up to my standards. Even if it was, I would still have to deal with the business side of it all and that was a headache I was happy to be doing without.
All this is not to say that as writers, we should not aspire to being rewarded for our efforts. Absolutely we should. Claps, comments and little checks from Medium each month does go a long ways in providing incentive enough to write. But that is not why we should be writing in the first place.
We should write to please ourselves first.
Everything else is secondary.
So what does it mean for a writer to write without the expectation of reward?
It means to honor yourself. To maintain a relationship with your heart and mind. Even if your thoughts and stories aren’t appreciated, you will always have a fan who loves what you do.
That fan is yourself.
And that is all that matters to a writer. That they are happy doing what they do.
They are happy with themselves.
Fame and fortune is the byproduct of great passion and dedication.
A good writer recognizes the value of themselves and their work.
A good writer knows that writing affirms the value of who they are.
Regardless of what is being given in exchange by others.
Either you are at the gym working out to look good for people, or you’re there to look and feel good for yourself.
That’s the big question.
So… Whatever your talent is. Wherever your passion might be directed, it can be useful to stop and ask what is really motivating you. Why do you care so much? If it is contingent on the approval of others or the expectation of money, then you might be in for a rude awakening.
In these trying times, materialism seem to form the basis of our lives. Big houses, expensive cars, giant tvs and robot vacuum cleaners all knock at the doors of our psyche, begging to be let inside.
And once we get these things, we only want more. A bigger home, a nicer car, an 8k instead of a 4k television and the latest version of the Roomba.
Everything material is transitory.
Everything external doesn’t last.
What will last is how you feel about yourself.
What is worth striving for is the expression of your passion. Not for dollars and likes, but because this is what fires you up and gets you out of bed in the morning.
Are you expressing your passion?
Do you love who you are while doing it?
Then, that is all the reward you need.
Words to ponder and live by.
Strive to impress only yourself.
And the harem will follow.
