Four years ago, I took a flying leap off a cliff and decided to see if I could write a novel, with no training and no experience since high school English (we won't discuss how many moons ago.) My ignorance of both the craft and the industry were monumental, but ignorance can truly be bliss. By the time I began to understand the size of this behemoth I'd tackled, I'd been fortunate to also receive enough encouragement that I had talent to keep me following the trail of bread crumbs for a while longer.
I've never been more scared or more exhilarated. Never felt so much out of my depth, never had a bigger gutcheck in my life but two years later, I sold my first book, The Bodyguard's Bride, and now have sold three more to Silhouette and have received seven award nominations on Bodyguard. Along the way, I learned a lot of hard lessons that would take more than this space to repeat, but let me try to hit the one major theme that has proven most valuable: Write because you love it, not because you expect to get published. Easy for me to say, I know, because I've gotten That Call, but I've also discovered that those who tried to warn me that it wasn't the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow were right.
You need to have a fierce love of the act of writing for its own sake, whether or not you ever get published, and you need to guard that joy with every fiber in you. That love and the joy it gives you will be all that keeps you going sometimes, published or not, and it's the easiest part of all of this to lose. If you can walk away from writing without feeling like someone cut your heart out with a rusty knife--do it. This business does not tolerate the faint of heart.
That said, you cannot let fear rule you. Fear is a destructive emotion lying in wait for you at every point on the spectrum and you gain nothing by letting it guide you. It's the easiest thing in the world to do it because we are, by nature, emotional and sensitive people, we artists, trying to operate in an often-hostile environment.
This is a tough business, no two ways about it. It's tough on everyone, as SARA's very successful Pamela Morsi will tell you. It doesn't matter that you're on top--you still have something to prove each time out, always another list to make, another sales record to topple . . . and everyone below you is waiting for you to fall.
I think it might have been in Dune that the phrase was uttered, "Fear is the mind-killer." Fear is a negative emotion, and it impairs your ability to do your best work and to present yourself to your best advantage. My husband, a Vietnam vet, has taught me a lesson I've fallen back on a million times since I started writing. He measures every risk and every obstacle or setback by this yardstick: "Hey, nobody's shooting at me--how bad can it be?" (I adore the man. He's so sane, compared to me.)
I've taken that viewpoint and learned to work through my fear (I'll never get published, I'll never find an agent, I'll never sell a second book, everyone will hate my second book . . . the list is endless) and make myself spin that fear out to its worst-case scenario, i.e., OK--assume I never get published, now what's the worst thing that can happen? Will my family hate me? Will I be a worthless human being? Will I . . . you get the picture. I find that it seems to be a natural human instinct, when faced with a problem, to immediately find a level of acceptance once you know its dimensions and start working on a solution. Once you start doing that, fear gets reduced to a manageable level. If you can face that fear, whatever it is, look it straight in the eye and realize that there is some way you can live with it, work with it, and/or solve it, then it loses its power over you.
That removes desperation from the equation. It clears your mind to make sound decisions, to let your creativity flow, to enjoy life so that you refill the well from which your creativity comes. Getting this clarity is a critical part of the ability to do what is every bit as important as writing beautifully, which is to persist. To endure, to look all the rough parts of this business in the eye and laugh. (Well, okay, maybe laughter is hard to come by some days, but you get my drift.)
I still get scared, I can still work myself up in knots, but I do it a lot less now and I truly have learned that I'm a lot tougher than I ever dreamed, and that I can dare a lot of things--and live to tell about it. You can do that, too. You can survive and you can thrive, and the only way you'll ever fail is to give up on your dream, whatever that dream may turn out to be. Rejection letters be hanged--if you're learning and growing and guarding that flame of joy that warms your soul, you're already a winner, whether New York has discovered it yet or not.
Jean Brashear's new release, A Family Secret, is available now from Silhouette Special Edition, August, 1999. Its sequel, Lonesome No More, will be out in February, 2000
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