Trepidation: Why?
It was the great Wayne Gretzky who said “You’re guaranteed to miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” Sage words from a man I barely know (it was a friend who introduced me to the quote). The words have rung true with me through the years, though, and I’ve always hoped to hold it as my guiding principle.
I thought I was bold when I started doing Elf Blood. After all, it takes a certain amount of faith in one’s own abilities to put a comic up online for all to see, that it will be readable, of sufficient graphical quality, and overall entertaining enough to capture an audience.
Since I’ve taken more serious steps towards becoming a professional writer, at almost every turn I’ve been given more and more reasons to doubt the point of even trying. The first, major blow is realising that you have a LOT of learning, practice and skill acquisition to do. Then, it’s discovering that acceptance rates for scripts, novels, articles etc. are incredibly low. Sure, you can prop up your own ego by assuming that your own work will be sufficiently better than that of the competition, but eventually you have to face the fact that even if your work were good enough, it may not be the right time in the market for it. Add to that the horror stories of people trying again and again and again and never getting anywhere.
All of that adds up to a monolithic titan of doubt. If so many OTHERS have tried and failed where you are about to tread, who is to say that you won’t crash and burn either? Who are you, with your arrogant confidence and your little pieces of paper, to say “My work is good, you will like it”? Who is to say that your quality is even good enough to pass the initial hurdles?
It weighs down heavily, and I’m certain that this fear of rejection has been dragging me down and stopping me from sending out material, or otherwise getting myself out there and noticed. I overthink things, I second-guess myself, I automatically assume the worst. Yes, many have failed multiple times and never gotten anywhere. But you know what? Many have failed even MORE times, and have hit it big, because they had two things: Determination to succeed, and a willingness to learn from their mistakes.
You can’t make mistakes if you don’t try. Sounds like a good thing? Wrong. So wrong. Mistakes are the painful lessons that teach you best, and if you can weather them and perservere, maybe you do have what it takes. It’ll still be a massive amount of work to get there, right enough, but dammit you’ve got to be proud of what you’re doing and believe in yourself.
So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to reinvigorate myself, and reapply my efforts to my future goals. Giving up is not an option, because it guarantees failure. I will fight to the very end to claw my way to where I want to be!
Right, enough passionate rage for one blog post 😛 Enjoy today’s page, and I’ll see you on Friday! Cheerio!
M.
Well I wish you the best of luck with your endeavor and I hope you make it. Good luck and see you on Friday.
Cheers, dude, it always gives me a boost to know you guys are behind me 🙂
Good attitude about life in general–you can’t win if you don’t play. And even if you do play, you’re not going to win if you don’t play hard.
While we’re on analaogies, although I perosnally don’t like baseball at all it’s a good sport for messages because, unlike a lot of sports, even the best teams in the world lose. A lot. The best batters strike out all the time. The best pitchers get home runs hit off them regularly.
Whch is to say you’re going to lose, and get beat up (metaphorically) a lot in the quest, but that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong, it just means you need to keep trying. Sometimes you lose because you make mistakes, and those times are valuable, and sometimes you just lose because.
My personal favorite quote is from The Edge: “What one man can do, another can do.” Not will, of course, but can. It’s empowering as a thought to get you moving on just about anything.
Personally, I can see the realities of what it takes to “make it” as a professional writer, and I don’t like the odds. Which isn’t going to stop me from telling stories, I’m just not going to play the game the old fashioned way–I’ve got enough marketable skills in other areas to earn the money to bootstrap myself as a manga self-publisher, and that works out two ways: Either I “fail” and it becomes vanity publishing, in which case I still got to tell the story I wanted, or enough people like what I had to say, and I “win”. Either way, the game was worth playing.
Sage words, sage words. What encourages me is meeting up with old friends (as I did this weekend), and finding out that they too are in the same boat. Even the ones who focussed on doing art as a career are working their way up slowly. And y’know what? I think it’s great. The hard work is all part of it, it shows our dedication to the craft and it gives us something to look back on when we DO make advancements.
Except the old friend who apparently got given a luxury flat and a shedload of money. He’s apparently still cool, but that does nothing to calm the rampant jealousy in my gut 😛
The strongest people are not those who show strength in front of us, but those who win battles we know nothing about. ~unknown
Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will. ~behappy.me
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. ~Einstein
I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong. ~Franklin
Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time. ~Edison
I wish I were a glow worm, A glow worm’s never glum.
‘Cause how can you be grumpy, when the sun shines out your bum?!
~unknown
If we lived in the same city, again, I think I would have a much brighter outlook on life 😛
because,… all the glow worms live in Glasgow!!!!!