Hope is a good thing...no it isn't...yes, it is...no, sir, it is not...YES IT IS...

What drives the author aside from the insatiable need to bleed out the stories that are writhing around inside of them, fighting to get out? The typical author that I know would jokingly say “drinking” or “coffee”. Joking but not joking. I am firmly in the coffee category just like one of my favorite protagonists, Jack Reacher. Never met a coffee that I didn’t like.

Deeper. What drives the author to scribble notes on napkins and whip their phones out at funerals and jot down some notes about the direction of a plot or a chunk of dialogue that must not be forgotten, Uncle Darius’s body and eulogy be damned? I think it is hope. Hope that you’ll pound out the letters and they’ll reach fans and agents in defiance of naysayers, your own doubt monsters, and the ever-growing tide of ‘other authors’ that are flooding and clogging the channels that lead to the publishing houses. Hope that your thoughts will matter.

That’s the big one, isn’t it? Validation. I experienced it as a stand-up comedian. You have these ridiculous ideas bouncing around in your dome and in the darkness, somewhere, it made you giggle. Something about it tripped the funny trigger and you think, you hope, that it will trigger others, too. So, you fight the #1 fear that humans have (public speaking) and you toss the idea out into the void and it hangs above the audience, waiting, even if it’s a millisecond, it seems like a millennia. A titter is followed by a chuckle then a chortle then a guffaw and then an old lady pisses her pants. Super validation, holy shit.

Comedy is wicked damn difficult. Good comedy seems nearly impossible at times, until you figure it out. Being an author is even harder. I can tell a quick one-liner and get a laugh. I can go to an open mic and tell dick jokes and get my validation. I can’t go to an open mic for novels and read my 112k word book and get my validation. I have to put my work out there and hope that in the violent fight for the attention span of the modern human that my book gets picked up. Mine out of all of the hundreds of thousands that are bleeding their way into the market every.single.damn.day.

Hope. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope is the best of things. I heard this beautiful argument in a piece of magical cinema, The Shawshank Redemption. The kind of writing I aspire to given to us by the great Stephen King and Frank Darabont. There. That’s one of my hopes. I also hope to get published by a traditional publisher some day. I’ve already jumped into the self-publishing pool and I’m not unhappy with it. My dad was able to see a book with my name on the cover before he died. He was so proud. I, in turn, was proud. A moment that will always mean more to me than a thousand other good moments in my life strung together. A moment that drives me to continue on toward that publishing goal.

So, I continue to hope. I hope that books continue to be a source of entertainment. I hope that fellow authors whose work I respect gets to see the light of day beyond just hitting the eBook platform and their friends and family being their only customers. I, we, hope humanity cleans itself the hell up and starts acting civil. I hope I don’t get any vanity publishers coming at me anymore disguising themselves as the real deal, only to crash my hope after I hear their bullshit pitch. VPs? Nah, son. Not for me.

So, that’s what drives us. Hope. It is a good thing. Just as Andy Dufresne said. It always will be.