Why is today a great time to be a writer?
Because every time is a great time to be a writer. Let me explain. I’m not being an asshole. (Well, more than usual.)
It’s not a great time because of indy-pub (or self-publishing as it known to traditional publishers, who wish people would just call them publishers, like in the old days). It’s not a great time because of e-readers or social media sharing or the Golden age of television or kickstarter or Patreon.
It’s not a great time because fascism is on the rise in America and across the globe and this painful political awakening and resistance is sharpening the senses.
It’s great because you get to write, and as good as now is, better times lie ahead, because you will get better at this. Terrible times ahead, too, of course. But God you have to grab onto the good ones.
This paraphrases what Jack Dann told Cadwell Turnbull and myself at the Asimov’s table at Readercon 2019. (I think he was speaking mostly to Cadwell, whose first novel, the Lesson, I’d brought with me to be signed. The book evoked in Jack and the other successful novelists at the table memories of their first novels, and advice, real, heartfelt, ironic, mocking, self-deprecating sometimes pointed and blackly depressing echoed with the laughter and genuine good feeling.
It would be rude to quote it directly without permission, this wonderful moment of camaraderie and shared purpose, which I was glad to witness. (I haven’t sold a novel yet, but my publications had earned me a seat at the table.)
I tried to shut up and listen and enjoy the moment, too. I succeeded pretty well, as such things go for me. Feel like I’ve arrived. Though I will never arrive. No one ever arrives. And you have arrived the moment you write your first word. That’s about as good as it gets and it doesn’t have to get any better. But it will and it does. I hear. Think. Hope.
Calming and refuting the horrible voices inside me that say, “So where’s your novel? What’s wrong with you? You have proved you can do this now, what the fuck is the hold up, son? You’re sitting here poking at short stories and novellas and doing entry level graphic design for cash, having abandoned the corporate career, which is fine, for a goddamn twenty something. Thirty something. Forty something?
Fifty something?
But as the lunch winded down around dinner time Jack’s relentless clear eyed encouragement mixed with a funny, brutal honestly on the writing life was infectious, joyous. Jack was reeling from the hideous jet lag of his unbroken flight from Australia. Where is doing very well!
He has done great work and made great friends in this life.
And so will you. Maybe. If go and write now and take your piece of this writing life which is accessible to us all in bits and bites and sometimes huge delicious meals, and sometimes this becomes our lives, at any age, for some unknown number of years, because everything you have and gain will crash and burn, Jack told us. And you’ll keep writing, or stop, but you don’t have to. You never have to stop. And if you do stop you can start again, in a month, a year, five, or eighteen.
That’s me. The eighteen.
But you’re writing now, writing all the time, in your head, living your life, the voice I cultivate now whispers.
Make the most of it.
Good one. Nice to see Swanwick there. He looks the same as at our Clarion, just more gray. Great that you have a seat at the table, and we’ll-deserved.