It’s tough to work on a book with other people, especially if they’re scattered all over the place and never have more than a few hours each month to get anything done. For the past few months, I’ve been working with some fellow writers to put out an anthology. A project like this takes lots of time, dedication to the craft of actually writing something meaningful down, an anal retentive eye for accuracy, loss of sleep and a skinny wallet. None of us is Stephen King or Stephenie Meyer, so even though those great best-selling authors work hard, we work another kind of hard and without the backing of an agent or a waiting list of anxious fans.
We’ve pumped out pages of manuscripts. We’ve picked the pages clean of passive sentences, and reviewed them over and over until our eyes are dry. Now the time has come for the details outside the manuscript, such as what will go on the back cover and in the spaces between each writer’s manuscript. We each must do a bio page in which we condense our writing-related accomplishments into a short paragraph or four. It’s taking longer than we anticipated.
Along with the trauma of having to speak well of oneself (which I covered in a prior blog about performance reviews), this exercise requires a trip back in time to when none of us came even close to being true writers (which we may still not be now). That is hard.
I remember back in elementary school when a teacher told me that I had been selected to go to an advanced writing workshop at the high school. They made it sound like either a death sentence or the worst piece of news they could break to me. I was ecstatic at the news, and the workshop was (in my mind) a validation of my talent. In a place where a select few adults chose the select few children, this meant something. The way they communicated it to me, though, I realized that it didn’t mean I was special. Of course not. I was a kid, and there were great authors out there well beyond their tween years.
Realistically, writers are a special breed. Not many become Stephen King or Stephenie Meyer, and the few spots open for other good craftspeople are tough to get into. When it comes to talking about myself as a writer, I think about how that faculty member told me the news that I was chosen for something related to writing. I then take a deep breath, start tackling those non-passive sentences, and review them until my eyes are dry.
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