The Frustration of Not Knowing the 'Why'

A wise writer once said that writing and querying is a lot like crafting a perfect love note and then sending it out to one lover after another waiting for one of them to say ‘yes’. The only problem, they’re getting thousands of love notes every month from other suitors. Some, way hotter than you, and others look like they sleep and eat with Billy goats. It doesn’t matter. You’re all lumped into the same pile.

Nobody reads these so, I can say pretty much whatever I want about the process. Even if people were reading these blogs, at this point in my career, I would still write what I wanted to. The time for giving a damn has been left in the distant past. A line that I crossed over when my dad died. The loss of that great man made all of his teachings clear. Seize the moment. Don’t worry what others think. Be tenacious in everything. So, that’s where I’m at right now.

The process is terrible. You send out your manuscript. It’s as perfect as you can make it. You wait and wait and then you get a response.

“We don’t want it.”

Which, in the creative’s mind, translates to “We don’t want you. YOU weren’t good enough this time or any other time for that matter. Why try? Just give up. If we’re rejecting you it’s because the novel that you put over 500 hours of research into as well as interviewing dozens of people for was on par with some 18-year-old kid’s fan fiction about vampire and werewolf fucking that reads as easily as a preschooler’s letter to Santa.”

You sit. You wonder. You go back to the reviews your work’s received in the past. All five-stars and not just from your mom and friends. You look at your accomplishments and where your work’s been published. Seems good. You think “I don’t think I’m lying to myself about the quality of my work.” What does the quality matter if there’s no one there to read it. As I said on Twitter the other day,

“Some days it feels like I’m telling stories to a winding brick wall in an abandoned field with only crickets and lacewings for an audience.”

If there’s no one there to read it, what’s the point? Creating art for art’s sake is an honorable and wonderful hobby. Draining the pool that keeps refilling so that you can walk normally without sloshing around, overloaded with work that needs to get out.

I don’t know. I’ll keep doing my best. Keep honing my query letters. Keep writing. It’s just…like the stand-up comedian who only performs at home in front of a mirror and never touches the stage. It doesn’t matter if she is as funny as a Becky Pedigo or Paula Poundstone. If there’s no audience to hear the jokes, what’s the point? Who knows. Maybe, one day, when I’m eighty-eight and dying under a stack of self-published books that collapsed on my withering frame, I’ll be able to say with my dying breath,

“At least I never quit.”