May 21, 2013

I was asked on a survey last week whether I'm a published author, and I replied with "No."

Technically, in the weakest possible sense, I'm not. I'm writing under a pen name. Very few people I see in my daily life know that I've made ebooks available. For 95% of them, if I even identify myself as a writer (which does occasionally happen), when asked what I write, I respond with "Not very well." Oddly enough, in my public persona, the person who would be most closely identified as "me" to anyone else, I imagine that "I" would write terrible dramatic poetry, and the rare short-short story, in awful purple prose.

I have written a grand total of probably ten poems since I clawed my way out of my teenage angst phase, and I love to focus on form instead of content. I wrote a sonnet last year because I could, and published it in a small magazine; note I didn't even say "submitted it to," because there was very little in the way of a submission process. I handed it to the editors and said "If you don't want to take it, that's okay."

I seem to have developed some sort of preemptory knee-jerk reflex to dismiss my own writing as awful. I don't know when this began, and I think maybe I need to work on that. I'll put on an outfit that I like and not give a damn what anyone else thinks of it, as long as I like it. I'll refer to watching something on Lifetime Movie Network without a qualm. And yet, when it comes to my writing, when I allow people to see it, I end up apologizing before they read the first word: "I'm sorry, it's really not very good." I suppose I'm waiting for them to say, "You're right—it isn't."

Half the time I believe that apology is a lie. Half the time I think, "No, I'm very proud of what you're about to read. It represents a lot of time and energy I spent, and even if it isn't to your personal taste, I hope you enjoy it in some way."

The other half of the time, I think, "This is me being Ed Wood. This is totally me being Ed Wood. Anyone who has ever said anything nice about anything I've written was just trying to save my feelings. Secretly they all hate it. Why am I trying? Virtually any author is so much better."

But I don't honestly believe that every single positive review and piece of feedback I've received was just a total lie. Not honestly. So this is, at its heart, a self-esteem issue.

I'm supposed to be a cheerleader for my books. If I (electronically) hand a book to someone I've never met with an apology in my voice and a cringe on my face, that isn't going to sell anyone anything. "Well, if you have no faith in this, why should I bother even giving it a chance?" they might think. "I have a thousand other things I could be doing."

Would that there were some pill I could take that would temporarily give me self-confidence—without inebriation, anyway. I'd need a clear head for this, after all.

This makes me think that—right now, anyway—I'm not the best person to be writing the product description for my books. I only know what made me write it, and that was because I had these people running around in my head, or a vision of a green sash in moonlight and fingertips drifting along a rough stone wall, and I felt compelled to write it down, and then share it with the internet at large. When I read back over the stories, I see those things again, and a part of me wonders what the stories do to other people. Why are they appealing? What makes you go back and read it again, and if you wanted to convince someone else to read it, what would you say?

Hmm. All good things to consider while I'm on vacation.