I didn’t say I could rite. I said I’m an author!

Sometimes, when I see a hornet’s nest, I get this uncontrollable urge to pick up a stick and pound it until I’m blue in the face. This has been happening more frequently of late as I set out to fulfill my obligation to the greater community as a reviewer of books.  

I shouldn’t really be writing this post. In fact, I shouldn’t even be thinking about it. No good will come of the things I have to say. No movement will spring to life on the back of the problems identified here. And no aspiring writer will ever thank me for suggesting they might be a hornet. But I’m going to say it anyway. Not because anyone wants to hear, but because I need to get it off my chest.

When I was about eight, I found an old, discarded vacuum cleaner leaning against the side of the apartment block where I lived. Something about the sleek, oblong contours of the housing invaded my prepubescent imagination with all manner of possibilities. But the one that stood out – the one that grabbed me by the ears and screamed, “pick me!” – was the idea that I could use the motor in the battered, old thing to propel a spaceship that would take me to the outer reaches of the galaxy and beyond. Anyway, I ran into some hitches during the design phase, one thing led to another, and the project was eventually scrapped.

Had I succeeded, I would not be writing this today. But I didn’t. Eventually, I came to accept that when it comes to space travel, a good idea just isn’t enough. You needed certain skills, for one. You also needed people who knew what they were doing to help you, materials, a suitable launch platform, years of hard work and tireless dedication. Basically, I grew up.

Many years later, caught in the throws of yet another great idea, I drew on this experience. This time there were no vacuum cleaners involved, only a fantastic idea for a book that would surely captivate the imagination of millions, and propel me to international super-stardom shortly thereafter. All I needed was a laptop and a little free time. After all, I was literate, relatively intelligent, and I’d read plenty of books. How hard could it be?

And so, if only for a little while, I lived the dream. The words came to me in droves. sometimes entire paragraphs would leap onto the page in a single mad frenzy of inspiration. At others, I would be scrambling to catch up with my overheated imagination, which knew no bounds and respected no limitations. In those mad, hectic weeks, subsisting primarily on a diet of Red Bull and rolled cigarettes, I gave birth to my masterpiece, one fourteen-hour day at a time. In fact, I was so confident about the prospects of success that I opened a publishing account with Amazon long before I reached the end. By the time I did, I already had a book cover uploaded, a synopsis written, and an empty bank account ready to receive my soon-to-be millions. And there I was, mouse pointer hovering over the “upload” button when it finally dawned on me that I didn’t know a god-damned thing about writing, editing, publishing, or even what I was supposed to do once all these things had been taken care of.

I’ll not lie, it was a sobering anticlimax. I had poured so much of my heart and soul into that book. The idea that it might not be everything I had imagined struck me as both unfair and cruel. And it was in this, my darkest hour, that I heard the voice of my childhood self whisper in my ear.

“Jon,” I heard myself say, “Where the fuck did you dig up the idiotic notion that an idea and the desire to achieve it were all it was ever going to take?”

Putting to one side my surprise at the profanity, it was a very good question. Where did I get the idea? Growing up, I’d had numerous and similarly harebrained ambitions. But all these I had cast aside with little lasting negative impact on my self-confidence. Why then did I believe so emphatically that being an author was any different? And that’s when I had the second major epiphany of my adult life.

It wasn’t any different!

People thought it was because they have an inherent tendency to ignore reality when it impinges too heavily on what they need to believe. And lacking any tangible barriers, that belief is free to soar to heights of absurdity rarely seen in otherwise perfectly rational human beings.

Needles to say, I capitalized on this insight and applied myself to the pursuit of rational ends. I didn’t give up on the idea of becoming an author. But I did divest myself of the notion that I was an author. I also took a step back and made a practical assessment of my work. What I concluded, rightly or wrongly, was that I had something. I was cautious to identify it with anything so lofty as talent, but there was potential for talent. And I set out to discover if, through hard work, dedication and time, I might achieve it.

Several years have passed since my rude awakening. In that time I have continued to write almost every day. I have also dedicated a good deal of time to research in an effort to gain a greater understanding of what publishing actually entails. What’s more, I continue to study the craft itself, reading works dedicated to grammar, style, character development, and setting. Whether I have yet to make good on my   aspirations remains to be seen. What I have not done – what I have abjectly refused to do – is publish my work prematurely.

And so we arrive at the final lesson in this short narrative.

Are you ready?

Hold on to your hats.

I spent money!

That’s right, I took some of the hard-earned cash out of my paycheck and invested it in my writing. And here’s why; I’m not an editor. Nor am I willing to delude myself a second time by pretending that I am. Many editors are also authors, to be sure. But these are two distinct disciplines, and ability in one is no guarantee of proficiency in the other.

The average novel consists of over 100,000 words. The ability to competently asses the applicability of each, as well as the myriad of intricate and often confusing relationships they bear to one another through the hierarchy of sentences and paragraphs, is no meager skill.

I once heard English described as the bastard son of a bastard son. As much as I love the language, I understand why someone might say that. English is an accident of history, built on a foundation of which logic is not always a part. I came face-to-face with this unpleasant truth some years ago in Budapest, where I was an English teacher for a while. Hungarian – a language I learned to speak fluently in my time there – is built on very clear and uniform rules. It has few nuances in use, and none at all in spelling. Yet for all my proficiency in speaking the language, I would never venture an attempt to write creatively in it. Literature is an art form. As such, it transcend structure, and cannot be taught like a science.

So what if you have the ambition, but you don’t have any money? Bearing in mind that we are primarily talking here about self-publishing, there are four things you can do. One, abandon the idea of self-publishing and find a literary agency willing to represent your work. Two, befriend the people you will need to get the job done. Three, get a better job or take out a loan. Or four, win the lottery.

The question of fairness, relevant as it may be to society in general, is not really of any practical value here. Abandoning your own work ethic in protest at the economic disparity of the age is not a rational thing to do. True, civilized society extends certain rights and privileges to the citizen. But the last time I checked, the guarantee of success in ones pursuit of choice was not one of them.

You can of course ignore everything I’ve said here and go for broke. I don’t particularly advise it, mind you. But in choosing that course, at least you have the full weight of the constitution behind you, which guarantees the right to the pursuit of happiness by any means not in direct violation of the law.

My advice would be to keep your chin up, your manuscript in your desk drawer, and your eye on the prize. If you can’t afford an editor, a designer, or someone that actually knows enough HTML and CSS to compile a professional eBook, approach an Indie publisher and see what they have to say. If they tell you to go back to the drawing board and start again, go back to the drawing board and start again.

And if every effort under the sun fails, is there some point at which you should just give up and throw your lot in with the circus, dream up a few stereotype-heavy, 5-star reviews and tell the world it can kiss your ass? No, there isn’t. But god knows, most people will.