What No One Tells You About Writing

A piece inspired by rejection and acceptance

What they don’t understand about being a writer and what they don’t tell you is that even when you get paid you don’t feel like a professional. You feel like a kindergartner with crayons trying to learn the business of school rather than focusing on learning to put letter sounds together to read and write. When you are a professional writer you’re also a novice, an intermediate, a student, and an advanced practitioner of writing.

When you wake up in the morning after you have arrived: gotten paid, won an award or published anywhere you expect to feel like a real writer, but you don’t. You don’t feel like you live up to the profile on your website or business cards. You open your eyes and everything just like yesterday, only it’s today.

You feel like you’re still a newbie. And you are — underneath all the layers of the light and the dark which is where the writing comes from in the first place. You follow all the rules — this is the beginner in you. The beginner that doesn’t trust the process that is your own. Then you sell a story. The celebration is fleeting because then the dark seeps in and tells you it is not good enough — it was only $20. You submit some more. Someone publishes your writing or your writer group loves it and sends you texts that they keep thinking about your story…