Maybe they belittle your writing. Remind you it’s just a hobby. Ask if you’ve been published and then how much that paid. Remind you not to quit your day job. Or they dismiss your genre completely. It isn’t literature.
Or they pay lip service, provide generalized support…
…but never actually read you. Or if they do? They don’t mention it.
And of course, they never write reviews.
Yeah. That’s a thing. My wife and kids and most of my pre-writing friends don’t read my work. In the 90s I used to flog them with it, as I sold to semi-pro markets. Even the wife, kid, and friends who are SF readers never read me. And my wife reads several hours of genre fiction a day.
She could get through my published work in three weeks.
Ouch. Oh, and the amazing thing is, you can actually blog this, and not worry about it, because they’ll never notice, because they don’t read the blog either.
Maniacal laughter. Sullen staring. Rubbing of the temples.
It’s tough. You rely on these people to some degree for emotional support, or financial support, your whole life, and then, when it comes time to validate the time you have poured into this… they can’t put in a few hours of effort to inspect the output.
Why?
Who knows.
Look. It’s weird. Believing in someones prose, anyone’s prose, is a kind of hard work. Entering that willing suspension of disbelief. Losing yourself in someone else’s story. Your friends and family carry all this baggage about you, your strengths, your failings, your blind spots, and as they read your work, sometimes, this memory of you stands on their shoulder, this grinning homunculus poking them in the face. Who is this character supposed to be? Who is this romantic interest? Oh gross, my Dad is thinking about sex?
You get the idea.
Of course, some friends or family will read what you’ve written, and tell you what’s wrong with it. How to fix it. That’s hard to deal with too. Are they writing and publishing in the places you do? No. But they can tell you why your work isn’t working. For them.
So what is the answer?
Let this go. It doesn’t matter. You’re being a drama queen. This is life, dude. Yeah, other people’s wives, kids, family, friends read their stuff and LOVE it…. yeah. You’re not them. Deal with it. Move on.
If they aren’t editors, if they aren’t agents, they’re just a few random people you happen to know. With random opinions. Sure, they’re your people. But they aren’t your readers, and they will probably never be. You don’t work for them.
Someday some of them may get on board. Probably not. I thought, if I started publishing a lot in bigger magazines….
Nope!
But I like to think after I’m gone, when my kids are longing to hear my voice, that they can pick up some of what I write, and read it, and smile, and hear me again.
Why not? It’s a harmless thing to imagine.That we win in the end. After we’re gone. The payoff. It’s the ultimate existential loophole of the artist. I’m fucking Van Gogh who sold two paintings and some drawings in his life. Prove I’m not.
You can’t.
It’s a cheat. But use it. What we’re doing is hard. You can’t let the opinions of random people get you down. Slow you down. Shut you down. Or stop you.
Even when you love them.
I hear you. It doesn’t matter. We don’t write for family or even, really, friends. We write for the people who resonate with our work, or for ourselves. Or who pay us for it. I write reams of corporate content that my clients deem worthwhile if one reader turns into a customer. There’s a flurry of activity as I write those pieces, meetings, deadlines, important seeming activity. Then it’s all gone. Some of my stuff stays alive on the web, where it’s useful to me as work samples, then I’m using it for the same purpose as my clients. And then there’s my novel-in-progress, read by three and a half people so far (one of my readers seems stuck in it, maybe bogged down, maybe tired of reading in general, I don’t really know, or even, really, care that much). The only definition of “writer” that makes sense to me is “one who writes.” Or is compelled to. Nothing else.
Those last five paragraphs were just what I needed to hear today. Thank you for writing them.
Thanks! Thinking a lot about this kind of thing since losing my parents, and the reality, the inevitability of my own death sinks in.