I really dislike being a wannabe…
Given my meandering career path, I’ve been a wannabe many times in many fields. I won’t list all the instances, yet it’s safe to say that my hit-rate is around 80% — 8 out 10 attempts resulting in some measure legitimacy in my new field of choice. Now I’m pulling on an old thread – fiction-writing – returning to the position of wannabe once again.
My goodness, how many other wannabes there are in line ahead of me! I’d easily find this entirely frightening if any sort of livelihood depended on my success as a writer, and I’m having some doubt over the ways I typically speed past the competition.
When faced with similar odds, I’ve only succeeded when I’ve waiting for a backwater route to suddenly turn main stream — an alternate pathway ignored until recently that is clearly the new way ahead. Those holding their ships’ wheels steady-as-she-goes in the old direction are rarely prepared for this change, and in my speedboat primed-and-fueled I often have a temporary advantage.
Until then I bide my time waiting for some choke point in history to close off the old ways of doing things — forcing dinosaurs and upstarts alike through some technological change or other upheaval — shoving them into the same chaos of an unfamiliar space, into a newly-formed mainstream.
Perhaps ebooks will be the instigator or maybe something else. Or maybe the whole industry of publishing as we know it will end — replaced by universal self-publishing combined with a simple voting system to percolate the best writing to the surface — as deemed by consumers — rather than pundits.
From my perspective the crowd of wannabe writers is growing so large with blogs and other minor outlets pulling them into the field that no matter how well I write and no matter who does my editing, agency, and publishing – there are simply too many wannabes in this crowd for any leapfrogging strategy I can imagine, and it will require quite the historical calamity to let me sneak ahead of this pack in my speedboat.
I have other metaphors for this, yet it comes down to facing reality. I’ll either find a way to succeed in my writing sometime in the next few years or I’ll move onto other endeavors, because one thing I don’t do is pine and dream and hope without a reason to hope for very long.
And unless there is a better way to discover and promote truly talented writers beyond the current cacophony – many of us will give up and move on to other creative endeavors where we can be recognized.
Until writing is more about writing and not so much about personal branding, marketing, promoting, blogging, twittering, and general BSing – it’s only going to get a whole lot worse for the wannabes before it gets any better.
