Guest Post by Nicholas Gagnier!
I'm very excited to share our first guest post from Nicholas Gagnier, author of the Olivia and Hale series and founder of Free Verse Revolution.
Writing
is a hard business. It is a game of expectations, like any creative endeavor
one chooses as a profession. To most people, writing is merely a communicative
tool, like reading or speaking. Transcribe what you need to, turn it in, and
forget about it.
To
a writer, especially a fiction writer, it is an absurd formula of characters
and story paired with proper syntax, manically perfected over and over, hoping
to stand out from the crowd long enough to secure the ever-elusive publishing
contract. To the average person, who may not give the physical act of writing
something a second more thought than necessary, our excitement can be
unfathomable. Our families and friends can be morally supportive but seemingly
bored hearing the proud author talk about it. And those sales numbers aren’t
going anywhere, are they?
Concerning the
fickle, franchise-conditioned consumer, striking gold in an era where anyone
can publish a book and audiences are saturated with possibility can seem
equally out of reach.
My
daughter, who is seven and has recently begun to notice Dad publishes books and that they are as real as anything in her school library, wants to be a writer. You
know, because monkey see. Growing up, I had no one to really applaud that
creative spirit and nurture it, so I am really proud of her and do just that.
At that same time, as I am saying here, you don’t set out on this path without
complete and total commitment.
I
was recently rejected by an agent. I didn’t tell the kid about it yet, because
it’s not something I attempt very often anymore, and I’m not ready to pour cold
water on her little dream. And still, the message of that
kindly-worded rejection letter rings clear- this is a hard business, and what’s
right for one person is wrong for another.
There are two lessons
I have learned about writing- the first, being receptive to criticism is a
skill, and you have to be able to see through the sting for the lesson. I used
to get really defensive if someone challenged my ideas, and now I kind of await the
day someone lobs a one-star review at me, to see what I can take from it. (At
the same time, please don’t take that as an invitation!)
The second lesson was
to stop writing for an audience, and write what I wanted. I might write some YA
romance, sell a million copies and get there the easy way, but no. I want to
write about the darkness in men and the broken heroes who rise up against it. I
want to write about every day, struggling people who unwittingly stand up to
save the world.
Self-publishing is a
business, and the learning curve can be both steep and expensive. It is simply
not enough to be writer, living in an age where screens outnumber books, print
media is constantly cited as endangered and the pool of talent is so large.
I started writing at
eight years old, splitting my creative interests between poetry and fiction.
Seven years ago, I created Free Verse
Revolution, which started as a vehicle for my own poetry and has flourished
into a multi-platform poetry project for multiple writers.
On the fiction side,
I have written seven novels, published four of a series and will release the
finale this summer. I have been rejected by at least a hundred agents and
publishers over the years, and faced far more disappointments than success. But
when my daughter makes a folded mass of papers with weird, kindergarten-level
storylines and atrocious examples of paragraphs, I can’t tell her any of this.
All she cares about is “Dad writes books” and tells her friends, teacher and
whomever else will listen to her yammer on about it.
And that’s when it
occurs me, I already have the only audience I’ll ever need.
Keep writing, my
friends.
Nicholas Gagnier is the author of the Olivia
& Hale series, which includes Leonard the Liar, Mercy Road, Founding
Fathers and Dead’s Haven. He is the creator of Free Verse Revolution, a poetry
project across social media platforms like Wordpress and Facebook.
He lives in Ottawa, Canada.
Comments
Post a Comment