Wednesday, June 22, 2011

How much ego should I wear today?...

This writing, publishing business can do weird-ass things to your ego. Rejections knock you round but you have to toughen up and forge ahead, having faith that what you have written is good enough to be printed, bound and sold for money. But there are thousands of people out there with the same self belief and confidence - can we all be right to feel this way? How many rejections can an ego take? And if we get an acceptance it changes everything. Some one else agrees with our self belief and is willing to bank on us. No longer is it 'I hope I'm good enough'. We can now say "I am good enough'. But we are only as good as our last book, (unless you are some strange literary icon who can dine out forever on the strength of just one book) and if we want to stay writing we have to start the whole process again. Think you have this writing thing in the bag because you've been published? Probably not.
You must have faith in your own talent to keep trying, keep submitting but because the appreciation of writing is such a subjective thing you are guaranteed not to please all of the people all of the time. It is confusing to be loved by some and dismissed by others. In New Zealand I think there is a particular difficulty in balancing your ego as we don't like our poppies too tall. And while we all get that self-promotion is now an expected part of our job descriptions certain quarters frown upon this. We must keep our fingers crossed that others will choose to talk about us and our work in public forums which is a little sad when you consider all the work and effort that has gone in to getting our story published. So if I seem a little split personality sometimes, please excuse me. It just means I'm not sure what percentage of ego to wear.

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