A Decade in Writing & Calling yourself a Writer

Holy crap it’s a new decade already. That’s incredible to me. This weeks video I wanted to go over just what that decade of writing has been like for me – from the very beginning, in 2010, when I had quit writing and wanted to tip toe back after years away from it, to 2020 where I’m working on my 8thish novel and sending out my 42^nd query.

There is one thing I wanted to touch on in the video that didn’t quite make the final cut. It took me a long time to come back to writing and fully accept that I was a writer again.

Let’s back up. I quit writing in college for a variety of reasons – I had an ex that wasn’t supportive, I had grad school, and I was generally busy. I was also disgusted and frustrated that four years of kind-of-working on a giant fantasy novel kind-of-didn’t finish that book. I had nothing to show for it; I felt like a failure. Every time I returned to it I was gnashing teeth and poking a sore wound. Throw on top all the other factors I mentioned above and honestly it’s no surprise I walked away from writing circa 2008.

In 2010, in one of my earliest journal entries, I sent something off to a girl I was flirting with on the internet (who would become my wife. She’s my Timelord). A bit of a scene, a portion of a chapter. It wasn’t much, but she read it. After we got married, I started thinking about all those story ideas. All those half written scenes just languishing in notebooks. And I tentatively decided I wanted to write again.

Making that decision took years to work up to. It wasn’t until 2012 I dusted off some freewriting from a decade earlier and started writing. After shifting it from high fantasy to contemporary paranormal thriller, I “just dabbled. Just something fun, not big deal.” Fifty pages in, “It’s just a little thing.” A hundred and fifty pages in, “It’s not really much.” Three hundred-odd pages later I was staring at my first completed draft in something like 5 years – more, really, because that epic fantasy novel I’d started with never really had an ending that I liked.

I’d reached a new milestone.

I wish I could tell you this is the part where I believed in myself, that book became an incredible success, and I was BACK BABY, I was a WRITER.

That’s not what happened. For the book itself, Dead Eyes, it was a contrived mess with flat characters and a weird structure. It lives in my trunk with many other discarded drafts, and I have no plans of revisiting it. Mind you, I don’t look at that mess of a book as a failure – it was what I needed at the time. I need to just write something and get to the end to prove to myself that I could actually do the thing.

And as for the broader philosophical question of identity? Oh, no, I didn’t call myself a writer. I was a dabbler. A hobbyist. It was “just a thing.” I mentioned it to precisely no one besides my wife.

So I kept dabbling. I tried many more short stories that promptly got discarded, a few novels that I got 50-80 pages in before they tapered off. It wasn’t until 2013 that I started planning a historical fantasy called Nigel – Wizards wanted to kill Lincoln before he was elected – and even then, after years of semi-regular writing, I still wasn’t calling myself a writer.

For me the turning point was 2015, fully five years after those niggling strands of story had started appearing again, and fully three years after I wrote my first book back, and I was working on the second draft of Nigel. This was something like two-hundred thousand words into this attempt back.

That turning point is what I allude to in the video, Conquest 46. My wife and I went because Brandon Sanderson would be there, and it was a fantastic event. I was excited to see all the programming, but when we got there I sat down in the lobby in shock. I just kept flipping through the programming catalog, seeing all these people who worked day jobs and wrote. A teacher here, a lawyer there. Retiree, stay at home Mom. They’d done it. They’d gotten their stories published and out into the world; all they’d needed to do was finish their books.

And that’s what real writers do: they finish their books.

That moment, sitting there in that lobby, that was when I realized I wanted to be a writer. Not “was” a writer, “wanted to be.” But I resolved then to try and make that happen. I would finish Nigel, even if it took me months (oh how naïve I was; it would take me almost another year and a half revision it to realize the story wasn’t salvageable). And I would write the next book. I would also call myself a writer, because that’s what I wanted to be. So I set out doing that, working on my craft, trying to level up, getting better, trying to improve, and putting in the work. It probably wasn’t until 2017 that I felt completely comfortable calling myself a writer.

I’m telling you all of this not to scare you. I’m not trying to say “Look, if you don’t have 10 years, you won’t be a writer,” nor am I trying to say you ought to be declaring yourself a writer right now.

I’m telling you all of this because it’s okay to be patient with yourself. If you’re dabbling in writing, if you do a little writing “on the side” but it feels heinously uncomfortable calling yourself an actual WRITER, it’s okay. I’ve been there. I’ve done that and I’ve got the T-shirt. Be patient with yourself, keep doing the work, and enjoy the process. Keep doing the work, and eventually, you will.

Cheers, and be kind to yourself.