First things first, my apologies for going missing in action. Between a lot of work coming in from my “day job” and launching my latest novel, Maid for More, I haven’t been able to pop in here. There was even a moment in time when I couldn’t get a moment to work on a new novel, one that I started while preparing to publish Maid for More. But I’m back and back with a realization…
The more I write and publish books, the more I accept that the difficulty with writing is not coming up with ideas, the difficulty is doing the actual writing.
This newsletter/blog is indicative of this. It’s not that I don’t know what to write, it’s finding the time and sitting down and writing the words. And that’s not easy, there is
finding the time;
juggling work, family, and social commitments;
there is the work itself, do you even know what you’re writing?
how much or how little do you write?
what if the words are crap?
self-doubt, self-doubt, self-doubt, and more self-doubt;
Thankfully, I watch and listen to a fair amount of YouTube videos and podcasts in the space of writing and self-publishing, and through them, two instances are stuck in my mind.
One was an interview with Zadie Smith who has a new book out called The Fraud in which she told the interviewer that writing was hard. Now imagine, here is this celebrated author and she is saying the process is hard so why should I, a regular schmegular writer, be down in the dumps when I hit an obstacle in my writing? So, I take a beat or two, do something else, and let the problem fester. My brain may give me grief every now and then but when I give it a problem to figure out, it does its job well.
Two was a secondhand account of a panel that consisted of sci-fi writers including, Octavia Butler. It was said that she had mentioned that it can be difficult to do the work of writing to which another author scoffed and said that you just do the work. Now, I must drop in here that the person who scoffed was an old, white man which makes me consider the writing process, who does it, and their stance on it through the lens of gender, race, and class. But that might be a post for later this month. Ultimately, here were two people’s points of view on writing and I can choose which one I will be taking in my writing journey.
Three, yeah, I’m just throwing this in. It’s not an interview or a panel, it’s a movie on Netflix in which a visual artist got his big break in the art world. What stuck with me is that he didn’t stop when he made it big, instead he had to be in the studio knocking out artwork. From this, I realized that art, writing, and what may have you will have to take on an almost industrial nature for it to profit the artist/writer.
But does a writer want to profit from their work? Is that a dirty notion in the minds of auteurs? At the end of the day, do I, as a writer, want my work to support me?
Can you keep a secret? The answer is a muddy mess because somewhere along the way, I was convinced that work, the type of work that supports one, is not the thing that lights me up from the inside and vice versa. And yet…
And yet, here I am developing my next novel which is the first completely black romance and I am enjoying it so much. I may have even found someone to create the couple for the cover art.
Every day, I do something to promote my existing books and work on the new book, and hopefully, in doing so day in and day out, I can convince myself that being a writer of novels is honest, sustainable work.