Is it strange to admit that one of the
biggest “ah-ha” moments in my writing career had little to do
with writing? I’ll show you what I mean, but we have to hop in the
time machine real quick—back to around 2006 or so. We’ll stop at
the front of a bookstore in the unincorporated little hamlet of White
Marsh, Maryland, where our hero—that’s me, in case you haven’t
been keeping up—is signing copies of his third novel, the now
(blessedly) out-of-print The Nature of Monsters. If
we hang around long enough—and we might as well; we have a time
machine, so what does a few hours mean in the grand scheme of
things?—then we’ll see that only a handful of people show up to
purchase books throughout the day. Many others show up, but it’s
really just to gawk. I’d slaved to achieve this status, author of
three published novels, and I couldn’t quite understand why I
hadn’t reached a wider audience. I was thrilled to sign a few
copies, but these people didn’t know me and bought the book based
not so much on my sales pitch, which was rather pitiful back then,
but—I surmise now—because of some pity they must have felt from
seeing me sit there, gloomy, dejected, pathetic. Then this kid shows
up wearing a T-shirt with the letters NB emblazoned in green and
yellow across the front, and it was like I was jolted by a sudden
bolt of electrical current.
Okay,
quick, let’s hop in the time machine again. Let’s spin back to,
oh, roughly 2002 or thereabouts. I’m the front-man to a local rock
group called Nellie Blide. I’ve got the longish hair and the
cavalier, post-grunge attitude, the whole nine. The band was never
really successful—we played some cool gigs, and had some talent,
but it was mostly for laughs, for fun—yet we’d managed to
accumulate a large number of fans.
One
of these fans, now in the present of 2006 (which is really the past;
hey, no one said this time travel stuff was easy to keep up with),
stood before me wearing one of our Nellie Blide T-shirts. The
following conversation went something like:
“Hey,
you were the singer in Nellie Blide, weren’t you?”
“Wow.
In fact, yes.”
“Dude,
I loved you guys. Whatever happened to you?”
“We
broke up.”
“That
sucks. So...you’re writing books now?”
“You
could call it that.”
“Awesome.
I’ll take two.”
“Two?”
It would nearly double my sales for the afternoon!
“Yeah.
My sister loved your band, too, man. I think she’d dig one of
your books. Could you sign them?”
So I
signed them, talked a bit more about music, then saluted the guy as
he ultimately strode away.
And
that was when it hit me—how easy it had been to acquire fans when
you were doing something you loved and didn’t care about the style
of music you were playing, how radio friendly (or unfriendly) it was,
or how to market your sound. And it occurred to me that the same was
true of writing fiction—that if you temper your material in an
attempt to appease everyone, you’ll wind up appealing to no one, to
include yourself. I was trying so hard to write what I thought I
should write instead of writing what I truly wanted to
write. Maybe this sounds like common sense from the outside looking
in, but friend, when you’re in the thick of it, sometimes you can’t
see the forest for all those damn trees, know what I mean?
If
this were a Public Service Announcement, I’d end it by saying
something cheesy like “Follow your heart,” or some such thing.
Yeah, it sounds corny—and sounds like common sense, too—but it
was a moment that really opened my eyes to this crazy writing thing.
Now let’s split; I gotta have this time machine back to the lab
before midnight.
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