Last week at one of my favourite blogs, The Professional Hobo, Nora wrote a very nerve-touching post about the lack of support she felt she got from friends when she published her first book – to summarise, she kind of expected a few more of them to buy and read it, and was disappointed when they didn’t. And I had to agree with a lot of her feelings and experiences.
Being a writer is a bit of a mysterious job. Unless you write (and get published, somewhere and somehow) yourself, I think it’s impossible to imagine how it really works. It’s easy to say “I want to write a book one day”, and if I had a dollar for every person who’s told me they think they’ll start doing some blogging “like you do” to earn some money (and think it’s really as easy as they make it sound), then I’d be a very wealthy girl. It’s such an intangible profession, and more so these days when people can make a living writing for the web, for example, rather than having a physical book on the shelves.
Friends and family reading your writing
When I first started getting some articles published, I was quite shy about sharing the results with people I knew. My Mum always got a copy first, of course, and always read it. She still reads a huge amount of what I write, no matter what the topic, and I heartily appreciate that (thanks, Mum! That’s her pictured, and she’s going to kill me for adding this photo). As I got more experienced at the whole publishing gig, and started to make at least half my living out of writing, then I got more confident about sharing magazine articles and website addresses with other family members and friends. But bear in mind, this was pretty much always non-fiction work.
I still have a hard time sharing my fiction work, but after my recent ABNA success have certainly got much better at it. I’m now not too worried about the time, some day in the future, when my friends and family will be able to go into a bookshop and read my novels. (Of course, if strangers read them, I’m more than happy about it. Strange, isn’t it!).
But my point – well, Nora’s point, really – is that a lot of my friends and family will never read any of my writing. Some of them are just not really readers, or might not be interested in the topic I write about, or in many cases have English as a second language and might feel it would be too difficult. But won’t they want to read it just because it came from me?
Apparently not. As an avid reader and writer, my perspective is obviously skewed. Whenever I’ve met someone who’s a published writer – it’s happened a few times that I’ve had colleagues with published novels – I’ve gone straight out to buy their novel, regardless of the topic. These are people I know, they write books, and I want to know what they write about. There’s no question about it for me. And so, unfortunately I guess, I kind of have these expectations about the people closest to me. But I also realise I have to let those expectations go.
So, from now on, I’m going to remember just to be grateful for the handful of family and friends who devotedly read what I write, and who I know will be lining up at their local bookstores one day to not only buy copies of my novels but also to sneakily shift them to more prominent places on the shelves. And I truly thank you people.
Do your family and friends read what you write? How do you feel about it? Let me know in the comments.
Tags: family and friends
Wow – Thanks Amanda, for the kind reference! This article was at least 6 months in the making, before the frustration of not being read (which for a writer is almost like not being heard when you talk) got to me and the article poured out. The first – and less refined! – version was gently massacred by my boyfriend as a sure-fire way to make enemies, and so the constructive roadmap for writers to get support was born.
But it still “rots my sox” that people don’t read/buy/support us writers in the way we would support them!
One of the underlying themes in the comments section, which I drew great strength from, was the advice to simply let go of the outcome of the writing….if people read it, great. Release expectations, and you won’t experience disappointment. That can apply to many areas of life, I think!
No problem, Nora
And I think you and your commenters are absolutely right about “letting go”, and not worrying about what people who read your writing think about it, *especially* when they are friends and family and sometimes not avid readers of any kind. It reminded me of a friend who read the novel extract I had up on Amazon for the ABNA contest – who hasn’t read a novel in about 15 years – and she told me she thought it would be better if I put more adjectives in. I tried to explain why they weren’t there, and show versus tell, etc, but afterwards I realised I should have just said “thanks” and walked away.