Being a successful writer is less about everyone knowing your name and work and more about the impact your work has on the minds of the people that read it. Being a successful writer is about inspiring and forging the path for the next generation of young minds that find it easy to imagine and access the expansive universe of creativity.
Most authors go their whole career without selling a million copies or becoming billionaires, even millionaires, but their work lives on long after they are gone. Each author has in them the ability to write a seminal work that will impact the minds of readers across the globe long after they turn the final page. That’s the meaning of “The Great American Novel.”
Even though it seems like progress is slow and life keeps passing by at breakneck speed, understand that writing has never been a profession one could make a quick buck off of. Writing is more like a treasure hunt or a voyage across the sea. It’s never really about the destination or possible riches at the end of the hunt but the transformative journey one takes within their mind and soul.
Writing is more perilous than many give it credit for, the tribulations that come along with the profession like writer’s block, technology and mainstream media, real life, social obligations, etc. make writing a lot harder than it actually is. The greatest obstacle to writing is also the thing that makes writing possible which is the author’s creativity and their ability to actualize it, the space between imagining and manifesting those musings onto the blank canvas known as paper.
The written word has always been powerful as it drives everything we do, especially our ability to succeed. In a saturated market where many authors are trying to make their masterful creations and quirky machinations known to the world, it is the select few whose words make it to the public eye and inspires the minds of young and old readers around the world.
The mark of a successful writer is their single-minded dedication to the craft and their remembering the reason they started writing in the first place. A writer with a strong why can withstand any how and a writer who is consistent in their mission to inspire young minds and forge the fantastical pathway into the expansive world of creativity will ultimately win out.
To be a successful writer, you must understand it is not about you but the readers, especially young, that grow up in a world that shames people for dreaming and abhors originality while paradoxically craving it, shunning it while paying millions and billions to those who take age old concepts and convey them in new and innovative ways.
Never let the world tell you your writing doesn’t matter because it does, and the one thing that makes your writing special is the fact there is only one you and your story is one only you can write.
Keep writing!
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