Every writer has to begin at the beginning.
I know this sounds like a cliche, but it’s not. Think about it. Every. Writer. Dickens, Tolkien, Charlotte Bronte, Stephen King, Nora Roberts – even Mr. Shakespeare himself. All of them were at one point unskilled, unknown, and unpublished. I’m willing to bet that at some point in their lives, each one of these well known authors felt like what they were writing was going nowhere.
Sometimes, the beginning feels like the void before creation, or the Big Bang, or however the universe came into being. The prospect of creating something in the middle of that vast emptiness is mind boggling. Add in the extra dimension of trying to publish whatever we manage to create and knowing we’ll need to fight to bring it to the attention of readers and it’s a wonder every single one of us isn’t rocking in a corner somewhere, clad in a straightjacket and gibbering at the moon.
Somewhere along the line, every writer you’ve ever heard of caught a lucky break. But here’s the thing–in order to catch that lucky break, they had to be ready. Which means they wrote things without knowing whether those things would ever be read. They practiced. They persevered. In a sense, they made their own luck.
Perhaps you have heard of a little book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? The author, Douglas Adams, didn’t actually set out to write a book. He wrote a screen play. And this is what he had to say about the night it first aired:
“The first episode went out on BBC Radio 4 at 10:30 P.M. on Wednesday, March 8, 1978, in a huge blaze of no publicity at all. Bats heard it. The odd dog barked.
After a couple of weeks a letter or two trickled in.” ~Douglas Adams
Douglas freaking Adams, you guys. Words he wrote, characters he created, are now catch phrases that are part of casual conversation. There is even a Towel Day every year. And yet, he too experienced that terrible silence so many of us fear when we’re launching a book.
Stephen King threw Carrie into the trash can. His wife pulled it out and talked him into submitting it.
You get the picture. If you feel like you’re spinning your wheels with your writing and going nowhere, write anyway. If you’re in the desert of bleakness at the middle of a novel and have lost all hope of ever writing anything good, write anyway.
Writers are not good judges of their own work. You never know when your lucky break will come, or which book you’ve written might suddenly strike a chord with readers and take you to the top of a list.
Write even if none of these things happen, if you never catch a lucky break.
Write because you’re a writer, damn it, and that’s what you were put into this world to do.