the arrogance of writers

Talking to a friend today about her first published book that went on to rave reviews, she told me about the "D" a professor of children's lit had given her in a class on that same book. And then she took another class with a different professor who glowed about it and told her she should be able to publish it.

I thought about this and realized that I was the same way. I kept writing and rewriting, thinking of new ideas, throwing out old ones. I had a writing group, but other than that, I had very little feedback from editors or agents. Just rejection after rejection. For five years. A couple of contest wins, which I suppose were encouraging. Other than that, I lived in my writing cave every day, determined that I would be published and sure in some deep part of myself that this book I was currently working on was "the one."

I don't know how I did that. I don't know how my friend did it, either. I look back on that time and think that it is pretty amazing that anyone keeps going in a situation like that. Twenty novels I wrote without getting published. That's a lot of words to have faith in myself.

You might call it arrogance, but that's what writers are. We are so arrogant that no matter who tells us no, we persist in writing. We are so arrogant that we think that other people want to PAY us to write down little dreams in our heads. We are so arrogant that we believe our books are better than anyone else's.

And yes, we are also sometimes so sure that we are failures that we put aside manuscripts that we once loved. We let critics and reviews so deep into our hearts that we can hardly breathe. We believe that every writer out there has done a better job than we have. We see all our flaws and they prick us like a thousand needles in the eye. We believe we will never make it.

And we keep writing anyway. I think that's pretty awesome of us.