So most of you now know (because I won't shut up about it) that Sofawolf has decided they would like to publish the novel I've been working on for more than two years, God of Clay. Originally supposed to be one book called The Fire Bearers, the story got too big for one book... and then too big for two. So now the plan is to release three books: God of Clay, Forest Gods, and God of Fire. My admittedly ambitious hope is to release one a year, starting with God of Clay, which is tentatively marked for release at Rainfurrest 2013. It's completed except for whatever final edits Sofawolf sends me, and we're looking at artists now.
In addition, I'm about 25% of the way through the first draft of Forest Gods, which is far bigger and more complex. It's the first time I've ever completely outlined a book from beginning to end before writing. I was warned by some people that outlining is a terrible idea; that it stifles creativity and prevents the story from growing organically, but I've found that exactly the opposite is true. Without worrying as much about the structure of my story, I'm freer to let the characters grow and develop and find their voices. It's an exciting process, and every day that I sit down to write, I'm glad to be doing it. I'm hoping to have the first draft of that done by April, and my beta readers are already getting the first look at it.
I am so, so excited, you guys. Sofawolf isn't strictly a narrow-niche publisher anymore; they've got recognition in the broader scifi/fantasy arena now, what with their artists receiving multiple Eisner nominations and Ursula Vernon's Digger winning a Hugo. They're looking to branch out, and so am I.
So what's it about?
God of Clay and its sequels are set in an ancient world, long before modern civilization rose and spread across the planet. On the edge of the great forest, straddling the edge of the savanna, a village struggles to settle their lives. They have been pushed ever southward by drought, fire, and the advance of the Firelands, the massive, uninhabitable desert that crawls inexorably southward. Clay, the middle son of the King, reveres the gods and seeks to serve and obey them, just as the stories of the people prescribe. There are older, stories, however---forgotten stories.
The leopard god, Doto, is the son of Kwaee, god of the forest. He remembers the stories of the fire bearers, the furless, apelike minions of Ogya, the fire god, and how they led his advance a thousand years ago, burning the forest to feed his insatiable hunger. They were defeated and scattered to the far reaches of the world, but now they have returned, and made an encampment on the edge of the forest once more, and they have brought with them the terrible flames of old. Commanded by his father to bring back a fire bearer, he makes his way to their nest and capturesone, a weak and despicable thing that calls itself Clay. But on the journey back to Kwaee, he will learn that nothing is what he thought.
Their two worlds are spiraling toward a terrible conflict once more, and invisible to all, Ogya kindles his own malevolent plans.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Monday, October 1, 2012
Weirdos Who Hate Multiplayer Games
There have been a growing tide of these antisocial jerks over the years, and I'm one of 'em.
Multiplayer video games have been around approximately as long as video games themselves (Hello, Pong!), but over the last few years, they've seen a bit of an upswing. Many popular single-player franchises like Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed have all seen multiplayer modes added in--sometimes organically, sometimes awkwardly and cynically jammed in. The president of EA, Frank Gibeau, recently boasted that he had refused to green light any game that was strictly a singleplayer experience.
The backlash startled him. And it seems to startle and confuse a lot of people in the industry, both developers and players alike. David Vonderhaar, the game design director for Black Ops 2, the upcoming entry in the popular FPS, recently gained a bit of notoriety for saying, "As popular as Call of Duty is, there are a lot of people who don’t play multiplayer, and quite frankly, this bugs the shit out of us. They should all play multiplayer."
Why wouldn't people play multiplayer? Gamers who love multiplayer modes express a level of bafflement and anger at people who refuse to join in. I've followed a number of threads on this topic, and their proposed reasons eventually boil down to either, "you hate multiplayer games because you suck at them," or, "you are lying. You love multiplayer games. Everyone does, because multiplayer modes are just more fun."
Early this year, IGN conducted an informal poll of its readers to try to determine why it was that some of us just didn't want to play ball with the rest of them. Among popular answers were that people just played games to relax, that they didn't enjoy the competitive tone of multiplayer, that multiplayer was repetitive and mindless, and that they were turned off by the abusive attitudes of the other players. All these are good reasons to dislike multiplayer, but I don't feel that they get at the heart of what's wrong, at least for me and people I suspect are like me.
I have a friend who keeps trying to rope me into playing these games with him, and I have once or twice, and while the experience was not unpleasant, neither was it compelling. Just the mere fact of playing this game with another person was stressful on a mild but ever-present level. Like the mystified developers of these games and the industry that reports on them, I was confused by my reaction and struggled to find and articulate its source. Then I realized it had much less to do with the nature of the game and my experience of it. It wasn't that it wasn't fun, or that the people were abusive, or that it was repetitive and mindless. It wasn't that I disliked competition, or that I was closed-minded and unwilling to try new things, or even that I suck (although I certainly do suck at multiplayer, to a deep, abiding, and unredeemable level).
It wasn't about what I liked or disliked, what I could or couldn't do. It was about what I am: a goddamned introvert. For me, video games have always been, like books, a place I could go to recharge, to get away from people and disappear into the safety and comfort of my mindspace. I could be somebody else; I could explore a strange world; I could take part in a story; I could indulge my obsessive-compulsive desire to check off lists. In short, I could play. I could be a stealthy thief slinking along a rooftop, or a silent, stony warrior laying waste to an untamed wilderness. Without some chatty companion who at best is making continual, encouraging suggestions, and at worst is actively trying to destroy my playing experience. For us introverts, whenever there are other people around, we can't really play. People take energy and focus. There's always a level of discomfort, the same as when you're reading a book and someone is right behind you, reading over your shoulder. It's like that in multiplayer games. You're being observed, even engaged with, and that mere fact of other people means that the game changes from play to work.
Games were part of my private space, my secret garden where I could go to be alone and thrive. And I have always both loved and been fiercely protective of my gamespace. I don't want to let other people in there. It's mine.
And that's why I and other introverts react so strongly against the inexorable shift from single to multiplayer, from explorations of fantasy worlds to "social games" -- a horrible phrase, as oxymoronic as any introvert has ever heard. When we hear industry leaders stand up and say that the single player game is dying, or that Zynga owns the future of gaming, terrible things go on in our heads. That is our secret garden being bulldozed to make way for a shopping mall.
"You need to have a social experience," Gibeau says, and he doesn't understand why it rankles. We hear these people speak with greedy enthusiasm about a future in which there is no world for the quiet introvert: all games will be multiplayer. And it's not rational, but instinctively, we fear this idea taking hold. We fear that one day, there will be no more reading books in your armchair; all books will be read in public in a chorus reading from a giant Kindle. There will be no more darkened living rooms and cinematic bliss; all movies will be watched in a crowded theater with live Twitter feeds scrolling down the sides. And there will be no more talking to yourself alone, because all words will be With Friends.
Multiplayer video games have been around approximately as long as video games themselves (Hello, Pong!), but over the last few years, they've seen a bit of an upswing. Many popular single-player franchises like Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed have all seen multiplayer modes added in--sometimes organically, sometimes awkwardly and cynically jammed in. The president of EA, Frank Gibeau, recently boasted that he had refused to green light any game that was strictly a singleplayer experience.
The backlash startled him. And it seems to startle and confuse a lot of people in the industry, both developers and players alike. David Vonderhaar, the game design director for Black Ops 2, the upcoming entry in the popular FPS, recently gained a bit of notoriety for saying, "As popular as Call of Duty is, there are a lot of people who don’t play multiplayer, and quite frankly, this bugs the shit out of us. They should all play multiplayer."
Why wouldn't people play multiplayer? Gamers who love multiplayer modes express a level of bafflement and anger at people who refuse to join in. I've followed a number of threads on this topic, and their proposed reasons eventually boil down to either, "you hate multiplayer games because you suck at them," or, "you are lying. You love multiplayer games. Everyone does, because multiplayer modes are just more fun."
Early this year, IGN conducted an informal poll of its readers to try to determine why it was that some of us just didn't want to play ball with the rest of them. Among popular answers were that people just played games to relax, that they didn't enjoy the competitive tone of multiplayer, that multiplayer was repetitive and mindless, and that they were turned off by the abusive attitudes of the other players. All these are good reasons to dislike multiplayer, but I don't feel that they get at the heart of what's wrong, at least for me and people I suspect are like me.
I have a friend who keeps trying to rope me into playing these games with him, and I have once or twice, and while the experience was not unpleasant, neither was it compelling. Just the mere fact of playing this game with another person was stressful on a mild but ever-present level. Like the mystified developers of these games and the industry that reports on them, I was confused by my reaction and struggled to find and articulate its source. Then I realized it had much less to do with the nature of the game and my experience of it. It wasn't that it wasn't fun, or that the people were abusive, or that it was repetitive and mindless. It wasn't that I disliked competition, or that I was closed-minded and unwilling to try new things, or even that I suck (although I certainly do suck at multiplayer, to a deep, abiding, and unredeemable level).
It wasn't about what I liked or disliked, what I could or couldn't do. It was about what I am: a goddamned introvert. For me, video games have always been, like books, a place I could go to recharge, to get away from people and disappear into the safety and comfort of my mindspace. I could be somebody else; I could explore a strange world; I could take part in a story; I could indulge my obsessive-compulsive desire to check off lists. In short, I could play. I could be a stealthy thief slinking along a rooftop, or a silent, stony warrior laying waste to an untamed wilderness. Without some chatty companion who at best is making continual, encouraging suggestions, and at worst is actively trying to destroy my playing experience. For us introverts, whenever there are other people around, we can't really play. People take energy and focus. There's always a level of discomfort, the same as when you're reading a book and someone is right behind you, reading over your shoulder. It's like that in multiplayer games. You're being observed, even engaged with, and that mere fact of other people means that the game changes from play to work.
Games were part of my private space, my secret garden where I could go to be alone and thrive. And I have always both loved and been fiercely protective of my gamespace. I don't want to let other people in there. It's mine.
And that's why I and other introverts react so strongly against the inexorable shift from single to multiplayer, from explorations of fantasy worlds to "social games" -- a horrible phrase, as oxymoronic as any introvert has ever heard. When we hear industry leaders stand up and say that the single player game is dying, or that Zynga owns the future of gaming, terrible things go on in our heads. That is our secret garden being bulldozed to make way for a shopping mall.
"You need to have a social experience," Gibeau says, and he doesn't understand why it rankles. We hear these people speak with greedy enthusiasm about a future in which there is no world for the quiet introvert: all games will be multiplayer. And it's not rational, but instinctively, we fear this idea taking hold. We fear that one day, there will be no more reading books in your armchair; all books will be read in public in a chorus reading from a giant Kindle. There will be no more darkened living rooms and cinematic bliss; all movies will be watched in a crowded theater with live Twitter feeds scrolling down the sides. And there will be no more talking to yourself alone, because all words will be With Friends.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Ideas, anyone? Anyone?
The question every writer gets asked the most--I'm told--is, "Where do you get your ideas?" It's so common that many writers just make up a rote answer to tell people. They trade answers with each other when they get together in their secret writers society meetings that you're not invited to, in which they talk about you, the fans, and make some seriously snarky comments about you all, let me tell you. But in general they have no good answer to this question because to them, there IS no answer. The ideas are all around them, all the time. Hounding them. Gnawing at them with tiny idea teeth. Keeping them awake. A better question might be: how do you get away from the ideas? I know that a number of writers distinctly believe that there is nothing special about them whatsoever: that everyone has ideas for writing all the time, and they just don't know to recognize them as ideas. They're unconscious notions, your brain toying with the world around you as you pass through it: questioning it, tilting it, testing it, and all of these are story ideas. You just have to learn to recognize it.
This could be true, I suppose, but I've never seen it in my life, despite trying. Ideas are very hard to come by: they must be scrabbled after and then defended with tooth and nail, as though they were gold and precious gems. It's been my experience that people who have an aptitude for a thing often don't recognize their aptitude as real talent. Because a thing is easy for them, it must be easy for everyone. To me, whistling a pleasant tune is as simple as breathing. I cannot fathom how someone else couldn't do it, and yet many people cannot whistle. So, too, I think some people's minds do not catch creatively on their worlds. I think they do not know how to say, "what if?" and "wouldn't it be strange?" and then follow those thoughts to anything approaching a story idea. So I envy and mildly resent people who have to beat these story ideas away with a kind of mental broom so they can focus on the ones they want. I'm lucky if I get two a year.
That said, right now I have three story ideas knocking around inside my head, and they all seem pretty good. And they're a bit insistent. When they start coming, it seems, they come in groups, hunting me like a pack of hyenas, like they're living things on the other side of reality that have sensed that maybe they can use me to get through to this side. Ideas attract ideas.
So maybe that's what it is with writers. Maybe it only takes having a few at a time, paying attention to them, using them, before the other ideas out there notice what you're doing and begin clamoring for their turn. I mentioned on Twitter that it's a little scary, and that's why I decided to write this post, because I felt like that needed a bit of followup. Why would it be scary? How is it scary?
Well, it's scary in the way that falling in love is scary. In fact, it feels kind of similar. Something from inside you is working, making you feel things and want things whether you feel like it or not. It's bigger than you, and you can't say no to it--well, maybe you could, but the idea of it is just awful, like the thought of turning down a million dollars. And you know it's going to change you in some way, take you somewhere. You don't know who you'll be or where you'll be afterward. And it's fantastic.
Come on, ideas. Let's do this thing.
This could be true, I suppose, but I've never seen it in my life, despite trying. Ideas are very hard to come by: they must be scrabbled after and then defended with tooth and nail, as though they were gold and precious gems. It's been my experience that people who have an aptitude for a thing often don't recognize their aptitude as real talent. Because a thing is easy for them, it must be easy for everyone. To me, whistling a pleasant tune is as simple as breathing. I cannot fathom how someone else couldn't do it, and yet many people cannot whistle. So, too, I think some people's minds do not catch creatively on their worlds. I think they do not know how to say, "what if?" and "wouldn't it be strange?" and then follow those thoughts to anything approaching a story idea. So I envy and mildly resent people who have to beat these story ideas away with a kind of mental broom so they can focus on the ones they want. I'm lucky if I get two a year.
That said, right now I have three story ideas knocking around inside my head, and they all seem pretty good. And they're a bit insistent. When they start coming, it seems, they come in groups, hunting me like a pack of hyenas, like they're living things on the other side of reality that have sensed that maybe they can use me to get through to this side. Ideas attract ideas.
So maybe that's what it is with writers. Maybe it only takes having a few at a time, paying attention to them, using them, before the other ideas out there notice what you're doing and begin clamoring for their turn. I mentioned on Twitter that it's a little scary, and that's why I decided to write this post, because I felt like that needed a bit of followup. Why would it be scary? How is it scary?
Well, it's scary in the way that falling in love is scary. In fact, it feels kind of similar. Something from inside you is working, making you feel things and want things whether you feel like it or not. It's bigger than you, and you can't say no to it--well, maybe you could, but the idea of it is just awful, like the thought of turning down a million dollars. And you know it's going to change you in some way, take you somewhere. You don't know who you'll be or where you'll be afterward. And it's fantastic.
Come on, ideas. Let's do this thing.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Why You Should Keep Writing
Those who know me well know that I hate self-help gurus. There are few things more irritating than someone who has beat cancer and is now on the inspirational talk circuit trying to tell people that if they're just positive and try really hard, their lives will be amazing and their problems will be solved.
It doesn't work like that. People who are successful always seem to be blind to the the role luck played in their journey. For every guy who fought cancer and won, there are a thousand who lost. For every guy who took a business risk and it paid off big, there are a thousand who went bankrupt. There's something arrogant and sort of despicable about a guy who has had great fortune in life and has decide to attribute that great fortune to his own positive attributes. It's a justification of vanity, a way to feel like you're better than all the people who didn't succeed. It's not that they weren't lucky; it's that they didn't try. It's because you are better than them.
So when I hear someone tell me to "follow your dreams," or "winners never quit; quitters never win," or any of those other bullshit inspirational quotes about success, I groan and roll my eyes and am not inspired.
But there is a reason to shoot for what you want most of all, and no one ever told me what that was, at least not in a way that I could understand. I've learned it recently, and I wish I had known it sooner.
See, as far back as I can remember wanting to be anything, I wanted to be a writer. I planned to have my first successful novel published by the time I was 22, and have my work read in classrooms by the time I was 26. Yeah, I know.
Anyway, after I left high school, things didn't work out so well. I was a promising student. I had scholarships to Rhodes and to Washington University, but neither of them were sufficient to cover the enormous cost of a college education, and because of complications in our family, I didn't qualify for federal student loans. I was bright. I was supposed to go to a great school. But I couldn't.
Instead I got sent to a startup university run by some religious nuts. That situation turned out as predictably bad as you might expect, so I fled to California. I lived on the good graces of some bad people while attending community college and working low-end jobs. But I still had dreams of being a writer. I cranked out really shitty short stories and published them to mailing lists where I had some chance of garnering acclaim, even though there was no way these things could ever be published, anywhere. I thought I was hot shit, real talent, and nobody could tell me otherwise. Eventually I finally got into a proper 4-year university and enrolled as an English major with a creative writing minor.
There I learned that, beyond the untrained quality of my previous stories, what I was doing wasn't real writing. Real writing was literature. It was men going through life and wondering why they felt so emotionally distant from everything. It was people in other countries experiencing Hardships. It was exploring the subtleties of unusual relationships. It wasn't the fantasy books I grew up on. Those were Shit. Genre fiction was Shit. The thing that I loved and that I loved to do was Shit. One professor who I respected and looked up to categorized it with pornography: cheap gratification with transient or no value. And you can say what you like about stuffy, closed-minded academics, but when the people you like and respect, the people you rely on to teach you how to do the thing you love, tell you that it's worthless, over and over, for years, you buy into it.
Worse, I hated writing literary fiction. It was tedious and dreary and self-important. There was no joy in it. It might have been art, but I was starting to think that I didn't like art. And even if I did, so what? The mantra I heard over and over was that having a career in writing is next to impossible. You have to be lucky. You have to be writing the right thing at the right time, and get it in front of the right people and then maybe, maybe, if you're really lucky, you might earn enough from it to scrape by a meagre existence. The J.K. Rowlings of the world? The Stephen Kings? Those are one in a hundred million. By this time I knew that even if I had some talent, I wasn't the best of the best. I knew that my dream was a foolish one. It was never going to work. I would never be a successful writer. I'd never be able to live off of my writing, never see a book with my name in a Barnes and Noble. The world had no need for new stories. People were reading less and less every day. They watched television or movies. Books, the books I loved, the books that I had dreamed of writing, were just the archaic relics of a past era.
I didn't like writing. What I wanted to write was garbage. UNINSPIRED garbage. And I'd never be successful at it. My dream was dead. And so I gave up on it. I actually made myself believe that I'd never really liked writing that much anyway; that I'd only kept doing it because it was an easy way to get praise or attention from people. It had never really been in me to begin with. I knew people who were REAL writers, REAL artists, who said that they HAD to keep writing because they were COMPELLED to, that if they didn't write, the stories drove them crazy. Those were real writers, the people who had the passion. But I didn't feel that way. I didn't have a head filled with stories; story ideas were always difficult for me, and if I had them, I didn't feel compelled to put them down on paper. It was plain to me that I had never been a real writer to begin with.
And so what was I? I had given up on the only thing I'd ever really loved, ever cared about doing. I felt antsy and dissatisfied. I wanted to do something else with my life. People asked me what I wanted to do, and I didn't know. I couldn't tell them anything. I had no goals, no path forward, nothing that I strove for. My dissatisfaction deepened into depression. My self-esteem went into the toilet. I was nothing. I was nobody. I had no skills, no aptitudes, nothing I could do that was really worth anything. In abandoning and denying my dream, I'd given up on my whole life. My life, the thing that I only get one of, my one chance to grow and be happy and enjoy this world and find meaning in it, and I'd given up on it. I didn't know why I was depressed, why I had begun to hate myself so much. I just knew that I had, and I didn't know any way to fix it.
Eventually, I joined a writing group at the invitation of a friend. With his encouragement, and that of other people in the writing group, I began writing again. It was rough going. I was shaky at it, and uncertain, and I didn't like it a lot of the time. But I kept doing it, and gradually I came to discover that I had been lying to myself the whole time. I wasn't just okay at writing -- I loved doing it. I found meaning in it. I found passion that I thought I had lost. I remembered what I wanted to do with my life.
And now I'm writing books, and I don't ever plan to stop. I am a writer. I'm getting better at it all the time, and that makes me happy and excited. I owe so much to the friends who encouraged me and got me writing again and kept me at it, because I found my dream, and I found that it's not worthless.
So here is what inspirational speakers should say. Here is what I wish someone had said to me.
Following your dream is not about success. It's not about achieving. Not about winning. Most people who pursue their dreams never really achieve them. You do the thing that you love because if you don't, it kills you, not necessarily in big obvious ways, but in small, subtle accretions of self-hatred and despair. You do the thing you love because not doing it is giving up on life. It's giving up on yourself. And that makes you suffer. You do the things you love so you can love the things you do. So you can love your life. It doesn't have a point beyond that. It's not about success.
Success is a lie. Winning is a lie. Doing is what matters.
It doesn't work like that. People who are successful always seem to be blind to the the role luck played in their journey. For every guy who fought cancer and won, there are a thousand who lost. For every guy who took a business risk and it paid off big, there are a thousand who went bankrupt. There's something arrogant and sort of despicable about a guy who has had great fortune in life and has decide to attribute that great fortune to his own positive attributes. It's a justification of vanity, a way to feel like you're better than all the people who didn't succeed. It's not that they weren't lucky; it's that they didn't try. It's because you are better than them.
So when I hear someone tell me to "follow your dreams," or "winners never quit; quitters never win," or any of those other bullshit inspirational quotes about success, I groan and roll my eyes and am not inspired.
But there is a reason to shoot for what you want most of all, and no one ever told me what that was, at least not in a way that I could understand. I've learned it recently, and I wish I had known it sooner.
See, as far back as I can remember wanting to be anything, I wanted to be a writer. I planned to have my first successful novel published by the time I was 22, and have my work read in classrooms by the time I was 26. Yeah, I know.
Anyway, after I left high school, things didn't work out so well. I was a promising student. I had scholarships to Rhodes and to Washington University, but neither of them were sufficient to cover the enormous cost of a college education, and because of complications in our family, I didn't qualify for federal student loans. I was bright. I was supposed to go to a great school. But I couldn't.
Instead I got sent to a startup university run by some religious nuts. That situation turned out as predictably bad as you might expect, so I fled to California. I lived on the good graces of some bad people while attending community college and working low-end jobs. But I still had dreams of being a writer. I cranked out really shitty short stories and published them to mailing lists where I had some chance of garnering acclaim, even though there was no way these things could ever be published, anywhere. I thought I was hot shit, real talent, and nobody could tell me otherwise. Eventually I finally got into a proper 4-year university and enrolled as an English major with a creative writing minor.
There I learned that, beyond the untrained quality of my previous stories, what I was doing wasn't real writing. Real writing was literature. It was men going through life and wondering why they felt so emotionally distant from everything. It was people in other countries experiencing Hardships. It was exploring the subtleties of unusual relationships. It wasn't the fantasy books I grew up on. Those were Shit. Genre fiction was Shit. The thing that I loved and that I loved to do was Shit. One professor who I respected and looked up to categorized it with pornography: cheap gratification with transient or no value. And you can say what you like about stuffy, closed-minded academics, but when the people you like and respect, the people you rely on to teach you how to do the thing you love, tell you that it's worthless, over and over, for years, you buy into it.
Worse, I hated writing literary fiction. It was tedious and dreary and self-important. There was no joy in it. It might have been art, but I was starting to think that I didn't like art. And even if I did, so what? The mantra I heard over and over was that having a career in writing is next to impossible. You have to be lucky. You have to be writing the right thing at the right time, and get it in front of the right people and then maybe, maybe, if you're really lucky, you might earn enough from it to scrape by a meagre existence. The J.K. Rowlings of the world? The Stephen Kings? Those are one in a hundred million. By this time I knew that even if I had some talent, I wasn't the best of the best. I knew that my dream was a foolish one. It was never going to work. I would never be a successful writer. I'd never be able to live off of my writing, never see a book with my name in a Barnes and Noble. The world had no need for new stories. People were reading less and less every day. They watched television or movies. Books, the books I loved, the books that I had dreamed of writing, were just the archaic relics of a past era.
I didn't like writing. What I wanted to write was garbage. UNINSPIRED garbage. And I'd never be successful at it. My dream was dead. And so I gave up on it. I actually made myself believe that I'd never really liked writing that much anyway; that I'd only kept doing it because it was an easy way to get praise or attention from people. It had never really been in me to begin with. I knew people who were REAL writers, REAL artists, who said that they HAD to keep writing because they were COMPELLED to, that if they didn't write, the stories drove them crazy. Those were real writers, the people who had the passion. But I didn't feel that way. I didn't have a head filled with stories; story ideas were always difficult for me, and if I had them, I didn't feel compelled to put them down on paper. It was plain to me that I had never been a real writer to begin with.
And so what was I? I had given up on the only thing I'd ever really loved, ever cared about doing. I felt antsy and dissatisfied. I wanted to do something else with my life. People asked me what I wanted to do, and I didn't know. I couldn't tell them anything. I had no goals, no path forward, nothing that I strove for. My dissatisfaction deepened into depression. My self-esteem went into the toilet. I was nothing. I was nobody. I had no skills, no aptitudes, nothing I could do that was really worth anything. In abandoning and denying my dream, I'd given up on my whole life. My life, the thing that I only get one of, my one chance to grow and be happy and enjoy this world and find meaning in it, and I'd given up on it. I didn't know why I was depressed, why I had begun to hate myself so much. I just knew that I had, and I didn't know any way to fix it.
Eventually, I joined a writing group at the invitation of a friend. With his encouragement, and that of other people in the writing group, I began writing again. It was rough going. I was shaky at it, and uncertain, and I didn't like it a lot of the time. But I kept doing it, and gradually I came to discover that I had been lying to myself the whole time. I wasn't just okay at writing -- I loved doing it. I found meaning in it. I found passion that I thought I had lost. I remembered what I wanted to do with my life.
And now I'm writing books, and I don't ever plan to stop. I am a writer. I'm getting better at it all the time, and that makes me happy and excited. I owe so much to the friends who encouraged me and got me writing again and kept me at it, because I found my dream, and I found that it's not worthless.
So here is what inspirational speakers should say. Here is what I wish someone had said to me.
Following your dream is not about success. It's not about achieving. Not about winning. Most people who pursue their dreams never really achieve them. You do the thing that you love because if you don't, it kills you, not necessarily in big obvious ways, but in small, subtle accretions of self-hatred and despair. You do the thing you love because not doing it is giving up on life. It's giving up on yourself. And that makes you suffer. You do the things you love so you can love the things you do. So you can love your life. It doesn't have a point beyond that. It's not about success.
Success is a lie. Winning is a lie. Doing is what matters.
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