Carts before horses
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We've all heard the saying, "Don't put the cart before the horse." I have always understood this to mean that it is useless to buy a cart if you have no horse to pull it. A phrase steeped in history.
As I embarked on the journey toward eventual publication I allowed my dreams to soar. Wat publisher would I like to submit to? Would my story become a movie? Would it be a best seller? On and on these thoughts coursed through my head and before I even had a working outline, I poured over major publishers and all the many ways to publish.
I quickly realized that the business of writing was not as simple as I had imagined. In my naivety, I supposed that I would write the book start to finish, print it off, and send it to a list of publishers with illustrious dreams of an acceptance from someone and my name on the dust jacket of a book published nationwide. These dreams are of course some eight years old now.
In the time since I began Extermination of an Empire, with stars in my eyes; I have grown a great deal. Though what I have learned while I was cart shopping was a great deal about the business of writing. Publication is serious business. Any entrepreneur worth his/her salt would tell you that you don't sell a bad product. You work on it, you develop it and then when it comes time to sell it to the public, you want it to be the best that it can be. Often times you sink a great deal of your own money into the development before you can attract investors to ease the process.
Writing is much like a young business and our written word our product. The first draft will never be the draft that sells as the prototype is rarely ever a saleable product. We write because we believe in the story and this is a great thing. Does it mean we should crumble at the first sign of criticism? No. Are all of our critics wrong? Not entirely. Sometimes you have to learn what that criticism is trying to say. A dear author friend of mine gave a chunk of her novel to a friend who told her, "It needs space pirates." It stung. She felt like she had written a boring story and that no one would want to read it. Then she upped the momentum of the piece and sent it back to the same friend. Suddenly the friend loved it. It no longer needed space pirates.
That said, we need to remember, my young writing friends, that we need to first train our proverbial horses before we look to acquiring the proverbial cart. Take heart, keep writing and learn from your mistakes. You may get thrown from the horse a few times, but do not give up. Those who have succeeded have failed before. They have likely failed many times. What matters is learning from that.
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