A writer's path is fraught with a smattering of obstacles, ranging from writer's block to the endless stream of people hammering away at their confidence by continually asking, "Why do you want to be a writer? Why are you putting yourself through this? Why not do something else that makes more money?" While frustrating, none of these problems compare to those presented by the Beast that is the publishing world.
If you're a writer, I mean a real writer with your heels dug in and your heart set on it, then you will find a way to get through the writer's block and the people whittling away at your confidence. That just comes with the territory. What you're not ready for, what none of your writer's training has prepared you for, are the closed doors and the silence you are going to receive from the publishers and literary agents of the world. Nobody tells you about that.
If you've finished a novel, or a series of them, it can be astonishing how many people you know will say to you, "Wow! You've finished an entire manuscript?! Why haven't you sold it yet?" The answer they privately think to themselves is, He must not be very good. At least, this is what you suspect. And here's the real horror...Maybe they're right. How would you know that you suck? (We'll get to this topic in a later blog.)
Many almost certainly assume that because of the recent technology explosion on Earth, it can't be that hard to submit and be discovered. Can it?
You want to tell people that there's something you have to say, that it's worth saying, but that the path to becoming published has become only more difficult because of technology, not less. Technology has made it so that everyone--and I mean everyone--thinks their work should be read. They've ran it through a spell check once or twice, maybe a grammar check, and, since Microsoft Office said it all checks out, it must be good to go, right?
With the advent of things such as Microsoft Office, competition between writers became fierce. And, unfortunately, spell check--that wonderful, beautiful tool--just made things so much more difficult for us. For, you see, there are the three spellings of "there", "their", and "they're", and the computer doesn't always know which one you mean, so...
Yeah, bad (or, shall we say, incomplete?) writers think they're good simply because their computer can find no error.
Here's something interesting to think about. Once, when people wrote on typewriters, it was a monumental achievement just to finish a full manuscript--all that messy business with white-out made it a nightmare for editing. If one had the patience, one was only in the running with a scant few others who had the same rare patience to finish a work and edit it.
Now, since word processors make things so much easier and faster, publishers and literary agents must wade through mounds upon mounds of would-be writers, and your piece is just another layer to that mound.
This is just one of the obstacles that hamper your search for a publisher willing to listen: competition with others. The planet is now 7 billion strong. Everyone wants a job doing something they love. Computers are everywhere, even in your hand as you walk about, and they all have a spell check and grammar check that remove your responsibility to KNOW the difference between "there", "their", and "they're".
Seven billion people. Everyone wants their dream job. Computers making it easier to check spelling and grammar but not quality.
You do the math.
(to be continued in Part 2: Chasing Trends)
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