Taking chances.

Sometimes as a writer, you have to take chances. Scratch that, you always have to take chances, because just by deciding to become a writer, you’ve already taken a pretty big chance. The whole process is about taking chances, from the writing to the editing to submitting.

Then, if you get something published, you’re taking the chance people won’t like it. (Believe me, there will always be someone who doesn’t like what you wrote. Accept it now.) You take the chance friends and family won’t support the fact that you’re “playing” as a writer or what you write about.

It’s not a vocation for the faint of heart.

I’m not the first one to say this, and I’ve said it before, there is no magic formula to what we “professional” writers do. We work our asses off at it. It’s a job. It’s a hard job, it’s sometimes an unrewarding job, but it’s what we love to do, it’s who we are, and we wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.

Fear holds us back. Not just in writing, but in life in general. If you try to say fear has never held you back, you either need to take your meds, or you’re lying to yourself. At some time in our lives, fear gets a stranglehold on our short-hairs and fills our minds and hearts full of lies about why we can’t ________.

For writers, you throw in rejection from agents and publishers, and it can end a career before it even begins.

But on the other hand, it means those writers didn’t want it badly enough.

I can hear some of you now. “Well, Tymber, that’s all fine and well, but you’ve got over thirty books out. You don’t have any reason to be afraid. You’ve made it.”

Bullshit.

Let me tell you a secret, sparky. I sweat every submission to my publisher. EVERY ONE. Even though my publisher told me TO MY FACE I didn’t have to have that worry. (Seriously, we were all at lunch one day.)

I STILL sweat every submission. And the books I self-publish, I sweat those.

Every book I write, at least once in the process, I sit back and think, “Well, this is utter donkey shit. It sucks.” Then I get back up on the donkey and keep riding that ass as hard as I can.

Here’s another secret: EVERY writer, no matter how “famous” they are, has moments of self-doubt. Fear, if you will, in their own abilities. They wonder if they’ll ever get that book finished. Or if anyone will like it. Or if that’s the book that will sink their career.

That’s not me making it up, either. That’s coming from writing books by people like Lawrence Block, Stephen King, and James Scott Bell. If they’re willing to admit they have fears from time to time, I’m certainly not going to lie about it.

It’s okay to have doubts and fears. It’s not okay to let those doubts and fears hold you back. And it’s not just in writing, either. It’s in life in general.

The things that make good writers successful can be applied across the board.

1. Work hard at your skills. Meaning take classes, read books, and strive to improve. All the time.
2. Never take success for granted.
3. Never rest on the success of your last success. Keep thinking and working and moving forward.
4. Never let fear hold you back.
5. Use criticism (valid criticism) to help better yourself.
6. Ignore the haters.
7. Work hard. (Yes, that was also #1.)
8. Have fun.