Kater on Being a Writer
Kater just posted a fantastic mini-treatise on how to go about being a writer and making a living at the same time. It’s a zero-bullshit warts-and-all treatment of the subject, but it communicates beautifully how important — and how rewarding — it is to find a way to do the things you love:
Sometimes I get down because I’ve written and rewritten and rewritten well over a million words of fiction and yet my sales still haven’t even come close to, say SFWA membership requirements. And then I’ll start writing, and I get involved in my characters’ lives, and I want to read it out loud to my husband because I’m so excited, and I point out the trailer park where my character’s mother lives (completely confusing my mother, who thought I was talking about a real person) and I fall asleep thinking about my characters, and wake up thinking about them. And then I remember: this is why I write. Because it’s like reading, only better. Because I need to create. Because I believe in these people I’ve created, in their stories, and if I love them enough that I stay up till three am because I can’t bear to stop reading, then maybe someone else out there will feel the same way.
It reads like a recipe for hope. But not the kind of recipe with unicorns and rainbows and little fairies sprinkling success dust all over you: it’s the kind with craggy mountains and deep chasms and evil leprechauns beating you with rubber chickens.
Good recipes of this variety do two things very well: they tell you why your goal is worth all the difficult, and often dispiriting, toil they prescribe; and then they tell you that the toil is, itself, the reward.
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