Writing is a wonderful hobby. It’s inexpensive, very portable, and it’s a skill we practice in our everyday lives. But then when writing became something more, it became a passion, something I wanted to really practice and refine. That meant making a profession of it. And a dream was born.
Aspiring to be a professional author requires a complex balance. It takes confidence to believe that your writing is worth sharing with the world, and it takes humility to accept when the world doesn’t quite agree.
I want to write, I love writing, and I wish that I could just write without regard for what the world thinks, but the reality is that even though I recognize the importance of a day job, I can’t help but wish I could spend that time working on my writing. There is so much to do, so many things I want to learn and understand, and stories are how I do that.
Sometimes humility turns into doubt, “Who am I to presume that I have something worth saying?” Sometimes confidence turns into arrogance, “I should be ‘there’. ‘That’ should be me.” And that’s when I remember all the stories I’ve read, of other people feeling this way. Sometimes people share them openly as stories about themselves, other times it’s through fiction; Kvothe struggling to learn Naming in Kingkiller Chronicles, or Sazed’s personal struggles in the Mistborn trilogy. I see myself in them, and it helps to see myself in those I admire, to know that the writers we admire suffer the same pangs of doubt and frustration that I do, and it gives me hope that maybe that’s not all we have in common.