Sustained by a stubborn conviction that he could do it better than some of the literary “greats,” Man Shman learned that writing was simply too important to NOT do.
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In the meantime I was making laughable rubbish, but one day, I was sure, I’d write novels.
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As a kid, I used to be a huge Jules Verne fan, until I read Journey to the Center of the Earth and found it dull beyond excuse. It was such a disappointment that, in the middle of the anger, my head conceived a little thought which would take root and grow like a tangled vine.
My head said, This is terrible. Even I could do it better.
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That little thought took hold of me and carried me onward as it became an obsession, a hunger, a vice, and a primal urge. Even through my first private attempts, which unabashedly ripped their plot points off Back to the Future and The X Files, the new element had already been added to my self-concept. I was a writer. Even during those school vacations when I would write nothing but Power Rangers fanfiction, the way I was getting used to thinking about myself had become indelible. In the meantime I was making laughable rubbish, but one day, I was sure, I’d write novels.
One thing was clear since the beginning: what interested me was creating science-fiction. I remember the time my father, concerned with my aspirations, advised me to narrate a dog’s life or something equally mundane, but I was already devouring Spielberg and Asimov. While my brother suggested self-help comfort tales, I sketched alien invasions.
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Nothing ever came of those notebooks I filled with monotonous dialogues and arrogant infodumps. The most ambitious production of my high-school years was a team of costumed superheroes I called The Night Phantoms, but a better title would have been The Derivative Mashups. I’m of the faction of those who don’t think literature needs a division between “light” and “serious”, but it was only when I attracted the attention of an amateur editor in Spain (with a dystopian tale inspired by a chocolate commercial) that I felt justified in seeing (and introducing) myself as a writer. For anyone who wanted proof, I could just point at that website and let them marvel.
But people move on. That editor eventually closed the website. I entered college. Other worries became more central. Still, I insisted on letting every new acquaintance know that I was, first of all, a writer. Through my most depressed years, I clutched that part of my identity as my sole redeeming feature, the only fact of interest in a life that was a failure in all other respects. It backfired horribly during my creative blocks, when I feared I’d lost the only reason why people could ever like me.
When I started winning the minor prizes at local contests, a second door opened in my head: not only was I a writer, but one that people actually enjoyed reading. The prospect of a professional writing career now felt a little less illusory. Around that time I also joined the students’ affairs section of a newspaper.
Again, writing became the only refuge of my individuality in a life that functioned completely without my control.
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My father was furious that I had accepted an unpaid position, but, considering that I wasn’t even studying journalism (that would have to wait many years), I was delighted just by being allowed to use their desks. One day the editor remarked that he didn’t bother proofreading my submissions because he knew he wouldn’t need to touch anything. It felt like heaven.
What I write matters, was the feeling that grew inside me. What I have to say is valuable.
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Again, writing became the only refuge of my individuality in a life that functioned completely without my control. My father never accepted that I had become an adult, and his continued micromanaging would have finished its chokehold on my will to live if I hadn’t had access to an outlet for my thoughts.
Then the newspaper’s editor died of cancer, the section I wrote for was closed for financial difficulties, and my father found me a job at a small company he had helped found with an old friend.I began therapy. It didn’t work. I was too accustomed to use writing as a way to gain external validation of my worth, and without it I had no reasons to believe in my capabilities. Life was a pointless succession of identical days until I found an online magazine where, finally, I could be seen again. I even started a blog, but it didn’t last long. I didn’t want my family to see it.
Eventually, the magazine closed too. But by then I was already supporting myself in another city, and had begun studying journalism. Some very difficult and terrifying years followed, but I finished my first novel and managed to have it reviewed by a publishing house in Argentina, which would have distributed it immediately if I’d had the money they wanted to charge me for printing it.
I chose to self-publish instead. My sales were horrendous; only ten downloaded copies in four years. I got one review, which gave me five stars, but nothing else happened. The fears returned. Was I aiming too high, trying to present my daring new ideas to the ferociously competitive realm of science-fiction? I ended up unpublishing my novel, and I’m still in the middle of rewriting it, but I still think it’s an idea that can work. (I’ll let you know when it’s available again.)
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I wouldn’t be here telling you this story if during all those years I hadn’t been sustained by the stubborn conviction that I was able to do it better.
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I insist on writing science-fiction because it lets me explore questions that no other type of literature is equipped to deal with. I like to challenge suppositions and turn rhetorical questions into fully-fleshed experiments. I believe in arguing by exposition.
The Good Men Project is not the type of venue I would’ve thought I was qualified to join when I first started writing for the web. Most of the time I have trouble convincing myself that I have something important to say. Even in this century, when there are no dead trees to apologize to, it takes a dose of arrogance to write, to announce to the world that its limited time is well spent in having a look at my ramblings. But Jules Verne thought Journey to the Center of the Earth deserved the space it wasted on the shelves, and I wouldn’t be here telling you this story if during all those years I hadn’t been sustained by the stubborn conviction that I was able to do it better.
Photo: Flickr/Ulisse Albiati
I’m trying to convince myself to add my voice to the already crowded party, no matter what Steven Pressfield says. But I look at Winnie the Pooh and think what if A.A. Milne had never decided to write. That’s just one example I go back to.
Thank you for this article. It may sound stupid, but it made me feel a little less alone. I’m still stuck in the “writing fanfiction that is probably rubbish” stage, but I too write; I write to prove my worth, to give myself identity, to define my place in the world… I can’t imagine living without it. No matter how insignificant my writing is, and how disheartening it can get, your story reminded me that it’s too important to even contemplate giving up. So thank you for this.
Love,
QP
I, too, am a writer. I wrote for my school paper. Well, for my second school’s paper. I was in my senior year attending university whilst earning my BA in English Literature and BORED out of my mind, taking 21 college credits each semester, and being disabled by a spinal cord disease that kept me from working anymore as a professional dancer, all I had was school and being a single parent to a pre-teen son–so I decided to sign up at the local junior college to study journalism, and take another 21 college credits each semester that same year… Read more »