Being A Writer

I’ll confess to more than a little arrogance. But I’ll also excuse it somewhat by stating that writers need a healthy sense of their own worth, because otherwise they’d never write a word. It goes with the territory – to have the temerity to believe your words are worth reading, much less paying for, you have to believe that you can make magic happen with prose, or at the very least, tell a story well.

I happen to believe that being a writer is a noble calling, in the same way that being any artist of any sort is. Whether or not the world rewards you with riches can be the luck of the draw – consider what an acknowledged master like Van Gogh made from his art, which is basically nothing. No question his work is brilliant, and also no question that nobody really gave two shits while he was alive. The world can be unfair, and we only get one spin of the wheel. If you want fair, look elsewhere than the arts.

But I can remember as a child, reading the work of Poe and Lovecraft and Ludlum and Forsyth and Christie and LeCarre, and thinking that there could be few things as fundamentally important as being able to transport a reader to a different place, into a different world. As I aged and discovered the work of Orwell and Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace and Steinbeck and Hemingway, I further realized that one could tackle serious subjects with a certain grace, and even whimsy, and transform the way people view their reality.

Then the business of being an adult claimed my time, and I turned to mundane adult things, the making of money and chasing of women and building of empires, all the time thinking that to be a successful writer must be wonderful, because then you can have your financial cake and pursue a grand passion simultaneously. I mean, I’ve enjoyed some of the things I’ve done for a living, such as architecture, which still gives me tremendous pleasure for its artistic challenges, but mostly I did things because they made the most possible money with the least expenditure of effort, not because they were particularly redeeming or self-actualizing.

But all along, I managed to find ways to write. Be it ad copy, or manuals, or brochures, or how-to books, I wrote, honing my skills, putting them to use in the interest of communicating ideas or affecting behavior.

When I retired and settled permanently in Mexico, my idle meandering didn’t last long, and I wound up starting a design and build firm that had startling success – but after five or six years and over a dozen “important” builds and at least fifty design projects, I was restless. That too had become a grind, and I remembered why I had retired in the first place. It wasn’t about the money – once you have sufficient to live however you like, more doesn’t involve living any better if you’ve truly chosen a life you find fulfilling to start with. Rather, I’d been bored after a few years of navel gazing on the beach, and it’s not my nature to sit still too long.

A friend of mine had read some of my scribblings and badgered me with article after article about the new wave of self-publishers conquering the world, back around 2010. After a year of that he shamed me into trying my hand at it. I approached the business of writing and publishing the way I do everything – full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. For seven months and about 10 novels, I sold barely enough to buy beer and a couple of decent dinners, but I never let off the gas, and continued to pour all my time, money, and soul into the work. I caught a tail wind in early 2012 as Select was making waves, and hit the market with a decent backlist and the right product at the right time – and the rest is history.

But back to why I think writing is an honorable calling (if honorable can be used to describe inventing lies and selling them for a living), if not also a kind of alchemy. To write well you have to be literate, and it helps if you’re informed and have opinions, because otherwise you likely aren’t particularly interesting to anyone but yourself. To be able to create worlds on the page imbues the author with the power of a god, and if executed correctly, offers escape from reality to the reader, immersing them in a universe of your making. That’s an amazing thing to be able to do.

How many other gigs enable you to do that? Few, besides lying politician, I’d say. But while being a politician is largely anything but noble, to embark on an effort for which there will likely be slim, or no, reward, other than perhaps touching others in a profound way, is a sort of quest – a calling, if you will. It can be transcendental, and I believe can put one in touch with a deeper part of ourselves only reached through artistic meditation – what some might call the creative process, that joy of discovery wherein you read your prose a few months after writing it and think, crap, did I really write that?

That fugue state where you’re something larger than yourself is an amazing thing, to be cherished. To have the ability to share it, to effectively connect one-on-one with readers and enable them to enter your thoughts for a few hours, is incredible. And to be able to entertain to the point where someone’s willing to pay you is validating beyond description.

It would be wonderful if all books received warm welcomes from readers, just as it would be great if all puppies found loving homes. But the world has never been just, and many don’t. I think the trick to persevering in this business is to truly love the act of creation, and if you can earn a living at it, to remind yourself daily that you are the luckiest person alive. That’s what I do. And I believe I truly am. Okay, maybe not as lucky as a Kardashian or members of the lucky sperm club, but still. Lucky enough.

Which is my longwinded way of saying I’m grateful for the support of my readership, and as I close in on four years of publishing (June 11 is the big day, and yes, cocktails will be consumed, no question), I’m humbled at the opportunity the universe has provided me to do what I enjoy, and to be rewarded more than equitably.

They say that a lucky man is one who feels lucky.

I feel lucky.