Good news: I’D TELL YOU I LOVE YOU BUT THEN I’D HAVE TO KILL YOU is back on the New York Times bestseller list. Yeah. Week eleven. I’m…floored.
To honor the occasion, I thought I’d bring you another list: Eleven things I’m starting to learn about writers.
Now, of course, it’s hard to generalize an entire subset of the population, but lately I’ve been amazed by the number of things writers have told me that are things I’ve thought myself a thousand times.
So here goes:
1. we all think we’re bad at our jobs a good portion of the time. Really bad.
2. we all live in fear that someone is eventually going to find out how bad we are and take away all the good things that have happened so far in our careers.
3. we all hate writing (at least part of the time).
4. and yet we all HAVE to write or weird things happen to our psyche.
5. we all stress out over deadlines.
6. we all worry about money–even the writers I know who make decent amounts of money because (according to numbers 1 and 2 above) we live in fear that we’ll never make another dime in this business.
7. many of us were reluctant readers when we were teens (which makes sense, I think, that we would try to write page-turning books because we understand all-too-well how easy it is to put a book down and walk away from it.)
8. we all get really annoyed when people chat us up at parties about the book they’re going to write someday and how being a writer must be the easiest job in the world.
9. we all suffer from deadline-induced bouts of questionable dietary habits and/or personal hygiene.
10. we all (even the BOYS!) feel like crying and/or throwing up when we get really, really intense edit letters.
11. if we’re smart, we also know those edit letters will make our books better in the long run.
And speaking of edits…
Later gators,
Ally