Admit It: You Want To Be Published

I had a long and rather interesting conversation with a long time writing friend.  She’s a good writer, and one who likes to spend hours editing a paragraph or trying to “make the words right.”  She has also spent many hours in writing classes and working to improve her writing.

This is not a bad thing, but the problem most people have with her is that she writes “too much”. By this I mean she spends much of her time complaining about editing and dialogue, and not much time going to publishers or on anything else.

She wants to be published, but she wants to publish the bestseller that will lauch her career.  After a while my comment to her was, “Admit it, you want to be published.”

She does, but she wants her writing and her life to be just prefect for the time.  Unfortunately, there really isn’t a great time to be published — let alone a prefect time!

She is a wonderful writer, and one whom I think would make a lot of money with her writing, but she doesn’t want to admit that she wants to have a successfully published book.

I think she’s scared of hearing “no”.

However, that “no” is more common than any author will care to admit. Couple that with negative reviews — or semi-negative — and one quickly appreciates that this is a hard business. It is even harder when, like her, one has not published a blog (or even a blog post), or been online beyond any online writing classes.

To that end I did wish her luck, and she did ask for some advice from me. I gave her this: admit you want to be published, edit as best you can and send it out. “No” is not personal, in fact nothing really is except for you selling your published book.

Of course, she will do what she likes, but writing is only one part of a book, as I well know (and so do most writers.)  It is about having a passion for writing and the will to just keep on going.