You Aren't That Good. Keep Going.

I was reading @Corbyn's blog entry Building Confidence in yourself and your writing and started working on a response to it when I realized I had enough for my own post. Credit for the inspiration goes to @Corbyn, read their post first.

Point 2 is particularly important, since we're always told "Write the kind of book you'd like to read." Well, the kind of book I like to read often has things like "Hugo Award-winning" or "by the master of the genre" in front of it, and I ain't that good. It's like asking someone who's just plunking out their first original song on a piano what they like to listen to and why, and hearing "Well, Beethoven's Ninth is pretty good, I like the way he layers the various instruments on each other." Not going to happen. And I know that my WIP, assuming I finish it, even if it gets traditionally published, is never going to be the sort of thing that wins awards. At best, it'll amuse the reader for the time he or she is reading it, but once they put it down, it'll probably drop out of their memory banks pretty quickly.

And that's okay.

Because I go back and read For Us, the Living by Robert Heinlein; a book so terrible it was never published in his lifetime. A book so terrible it never should have been published, and never would have been published had he not forced his way through it, set it down, and kept going. He knew he had something that people wanted to read inside him, he just had to keep digging until he found it. Now, I'm not nearly as enamored of Mr. H's work as I was when I was young, but his sales and continued following prove that he had something to say, something that never would have gotten out to the public if he'd looked at his first efforts and said "Fuckit, it ain't Melville" and given up. Everything you do can be improved. Everything you do gets easier the second time, whether it's popping a blister, making love, or writing a story. The first time you did it, you fucked it all kinds of up, but once you've done it twice or ten or fifty times, it'll become second nature, and you'll be able to look back at that first attempt and say "Damn, that really was horrible, but look at this one."

Now I've got a forgettable urban fantasy to crank out, see you in the airport bookstore.