You’ve mentioned how you spent years honing your craft, essentially writing dozens of books before getting published. During this time, did you ever feel like giving up and doing something else? If so, how did you overcome your self-doubt?
I’m an aspiring writer, and one of my biggest struggles is silencing my internal editor (who tends to be very loud).
My biggest crisis came when I felt that none of my books were ever going to sell because of several things.
1) Editors were telling me I was too long. 2) Editors were telling me epic fantasy by new authors no longer sold well. (Early 2000’s, after Newcomb failed.) 3) Editors were telling me to be more gritty and low magic, like GRRM.
I tried a few books in an attempt to ‘conform to the market’ whatever that means. (For me, it was shorter books, without an epic feel, with dark, gritty, ‘realistic’ characters that were anti-heroes.) I failed big time. The books were very bad.
That’s when I almost gave up. Nobody wanted what I wrote, and I couldn’t write what I wanted. That was when I decided, one night, that I was going to just stop caring. I decided to disobey everything editors were telling me and write the biggest, most epic, most awesome book after my own ‘style’ that I could.
That turned out to be The Way of Kings . (Twice as long as the books editors were telling me were ‘too long.’) Right after finishing it, before sending it anywhere, I got a call from an editor wanting to buy Elantris (one of the books I’d written before trying to conform.)
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