The following speech is based off an address I gave at the 2023 D&E Indie Author awards, an annual event where previously unpublished authors compete for a chance to get a publishing deal with D&E. Unfortunately, as none of the contestants met the quality standards of our label, no prizes were awarded that year.  

Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Feel the air come in through your mouth and let it slowly out through your nose. Now, go walk over to a mirror or pull out your phone and look at yourself that way. Take a few more deep breaths. Relax. Try to get your heartrate below 120 bpm. Wipe away the sweat and mucus all this heavy breathing has caused to course down your face. Now, look at yourself.

Just awful, isn’t it? What an absolute disgusting excuse for a human. Who could ever love this pathetic, pasty lump of ever-loosening flesh? It’s almost too much to bear. Don’t worry, you can close your eyes again. Now, try to remember why you became a writer in the first place.

You did it because it made you feel superior to other people who didn’t write, people who weren’t creators. You did it because you wanted fame and money. You did it so you’d have something to shove in your abusive father’s face while he was on his death bed suffering from a three-year battle with liver disease. You did it because it made that horrible creature you just saw in mirror seem like something somebody could love.

And now that your writing has failed and nobody bought your book and nobody gave you good review and you walked in on your own family reading it aloud together and laughing at passages that weren’t meant to be funny, what’s left but despair and depression and an early death?

No.

You are better than people who don’t write books. You are more important. You are smarter. You are more creative. You are more interesting. If you weren’t so physically unappealing, you would be the life of every party.

A true writer doesn’t despair. A true writer doesn’t suffer from depression or kill themselves or project their self-hatred toward others in increasingly depraved ways. A true writer remembers that the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, just as the players gonna play, play, play, play, play.

Just remember, that every failure is simply a seed for a later success. Those past books you’ve written that didn’t get published, those short stories that never got picked up, those blog entries that nobody read, those are just sperm that never made it to the egg. But you’ve got many more loads where that came from, many more nuts to bust inside the womb that is the literary world. That’s a metaphor, of course. Please don’t send samples of your bodily fluids to literary agents. Experience tells me they don’t care for it.

Every time you write, you get better. It doesn’t matter what it is. Whether it’s a cozy mystery about lesbian nuns trying to figure out who threw the vicar from the church steeple, or a letter to your wife’s lawyer explaining why you haven’t been paying your alimony, you improve as a writer.  

If you want to become great at tennis or some shit, you have like a three year window to be great. Not for writers. Great writing takes time. Most writers don’t write their best work until their 50s or 60s. And if you’re in your 70s and you’re reading this article, there might be a miracle drug soon that will let us live until we’re 200, you never know.

Becoming a great writer is marathon, not a sprint, in that seems to go on forever and it mostly just makes you want to die. But unlike a marathon, writing isn’t pointless. If humans didn’t tell stories, we’d be no better than the common tarsier, resigned to a life of eating berries with our bare hands until we die, our only hobby arranging those berries by size. But we’ve evolved. And though it’s hard to tell from looking at you, you, as a writer, are the most evolved creature on the planet.

Maybe lately you’ve been staring at your computer screen with fear and disinterest. I know the look well. When I walk into my publishing company, pretty much all of my workers have the same look on their faces. You worry the next thing you write will be terrible, or you worry the next thing you write will be great but go unnoticed. Buck up, fight through it and write anyway. Take some aspirin if helps. Or drink some booze. Or microdose LSD. Or do all three. This is your temple. Treat it like one.

Keep writing. What’s the worst that could happen? You might write a few pages that you’ll later decide are not good? Of course not, that’s not the worst that could happen, we writers are more creative than that. Maybe you get electrocuted as a surge of electricity shoots through your keyboard whereas you’d have been spared if you hadn’t been writing. Or maybe, you write a book that amounts to libel and all of your possessions get collected by a repo company and you’re forced to live on the street and you try to get your degree but you show up late to all the finals and you also forgot to put your clothes on. I forgot what my point was…

In conclusion, I believe in you. Even if you’ve submitted work to me and I sent a letter back mocking your writing style and telling you you had no chance at becoming a writer, I believe in you. Take your favorite authors as inspiration. They were struggling at one point. Look to them for guidance. Stake out their houses to learn their secrets if you have to.

You have two choices now. Take the red pill, continue writing, continue chasing your dreams, keep writing until you are published and become a best seller, or take the blue pill, sell insurance in the suburbs of Indianapolis and die of heart failure at age 58.

It’s up to you.