Sailor Jim; Storyteller

What’s the line?  ”Every time I pull myself out, they drag me back in!”

Man, as much as I respected Heinlein, you’d think I would have paid attention to what he said about writing.

I’ve quit trying to be a writer, jeez, how many times?  I get myself reined in.  I accept the fact that I’m a hell of a story teller, but that’s not the same as a writer and never will be.  I settle for writing my little stories here, letting the voices in my head pour out into my blog and being happy with that level of creativity.

Then I write something that makes me excited again.  I finally put something together that seems to have a commercial voice, seems to something that might actually be publishable, and I spend long hours at night polishing it.

And it always ends up the same way.  I always end up boxing up the rejection slips and letters with a copy of the story and stacking it in the closet with the rest of them.

Sometimes, I get on a binge and buy more and more “How to write fiction that will sell!” books, trying to figure out what it is that I’m doing wrong.  I’ve spent money on workshops and retreats, joined writer groups … hell, I’ve even paid professional editors to tell me what’s wrong with my writing.

The books never make much sense and often contradict each other; the people at the workshops, retreats, and groups all praise every piece of crap that I pen like I was the second coming of Heinlein; the editors tell me variations of “looks good,” “just keep writing and it’ll happen for you,” “remember to write about what you know,” and (once) “I wish I was still working as a editor; I’d buy this.”

By my estimation, I’ve spent so much money trying to learn what I’m doing wrong that the first sale I have will have to be novel, one that starts a bidding war between the major publishers, just so I can fucking break even!

I did it again, of course.  I thought I had something … apparently, I’m the only one who does, if these rejection letters are any indication.  Hell, my stuff isn’t even good enough to get a personalized rejection, something with an actual signature on the damn thing, much less any encouraging words or suggestions.

People keep pointing out to me that putting my writing on the internet is a mistake, that it’ll be unsellable if it’s been self-published this way.  What nobody seems to understand is that it’s unsellable, period.  The only thing I can do with my creativity is to give it away and be satisfied that there’s a couple dozen people who like reading it, because the simple truth is that I’m just not a writer.  I’m a storyteller who occasionally has bursts of literary masochism.