Writing Into the Void:
On being a writer with no readers.
HELLO? IS SOMEONE OUT THERE? CAN ANYONE HEAR ME?
These calls out into the abyss are what it feels like when I send my written work out into the void of the inboxes of The New Yorker, Penguin Random House. This Brave Writer’s submission portal.
Certainly in the modern era of blogs, social media, and the 24-hour content cycle, it seems easier to get your voice heard, your writing read, your name to be known, but also seems impossible, as though our writing is entering a dark chasm — the Internet. With self-publication outlets such as Medium, the rise of influencer blogs, and let’s not even mention the black hole of Twitter, it is easier to publish and promote your writing. Yet, it’s exhausting to compete with the endless stream of content being published by equally, if not, superior writers.
I tread in this rolling sea of passionate writers, artists, creators who are screaming for their voices, their life’s work to be heard by someone. Anyone. And this sea is also our main barrier, as we try to break out from the overcrowded field of talent.
As I scroll through the slew of submissions responses I’ve received saying, “Thank you for sharing your work with us. Unfortunately due to the high volume of submissions…” I do wonder, why do I exert all this time and energy into writing? An estimated one percent of submitted manuscripts are published while the majority of publishers do not accept the work of writers without agents but in order to find an agent, a hefty portfolio of published works is essential, which of course, is hard to achieve when you’re constantly rejected. The life of a professional writer is essentially a catch-22; sadly hilarious, absurd, and nearly impossible to escape.
And even if you “make it” as a writer, writing professionally rarely pays a living wage. The average salary of freelance writers is $52,807, nearly $10,000 lower than the national median income and without the guarantee of basic health insurance, a retirement fund, and labor rights.
Not to mention the literal pain of writing. I had once heard this crass saying that “writing is like pulling teeth out of your dick.” Being biologically female, I cannot imagine the severity of that pain but I can guess what it’s like: grueling, agonizing, teeth piercing male genitalia, words lodged in the space between the right hemisphere of your brain to your fingers, aching to mold abstract ideas into Perfect. Words. It’s too tortuous that you reach a point where you wonder if you can tolerate getting anything else out of you and perhaps it’s best to be left alone.
So, why even try to become a professional writer? Shouldn’t I allow myself to become the cliche of a failed writer going to law school? Despite that I know the pragmatic answer is yes, I must say no.
What is greater than my fear of being rejected and failing is that I will not write merely due to that very fear. These characters and stories I keep with me would never form into a lived reality by black ink on paper because I had just kept them locked in my mind, neglecting to will them into existence.
While I was in college, this once-successful writer suddenly emerged in my mind. Perhaps she came into my mind from my own struggles with writing or from my curiosity about the universal middle-aged crises when we yearn for more from ourselves. Regardless, she was alive in mind. Her last book received mediocre reviews, she was longing for public validation and felt ignored by her husband and two teenage children. Her desperation, her loneliness, her innate desire to be seen, to be known for more than what others saw in her was my own. She lived in my mind for two years, until I finally just wrote her out into a short story. I was writing for my university’s newspaper at the time and decided to submit the piece for publication. Once my story was published, around one or two people liked the story on Facebook. There were no comments left, and maybe one re-Tweet on Twitter. Only one person probably read it — my editor. But what a satisfaction; my writer was here, existing out in the world through my own printed words. It was enough.
More often than not, I come across pieces in obscure literary magazines, student newspapers, social media posts — beautiful, genuine proses that reveal these writers’ most vulnerable insecurities, anxieties, and thoughts — and once I read them, I’d experience relief, as I am not alone in feeling these. These writers, whether I knew them or not, were out there, experiencing similar struggles. If these writers were being seen and heard by me, then I was seen, I was heard. We weren’t alone, as confirmed by their thoughts and stories that were like my own, ones they made concrete through shared words.
We writers need to write for that phenomenon of stories, tying our vast world together. In spite of the improbability and absurdity of the numbers game of getting published, the more we continue to write and submit, write and submit, write and submit, we will break through in some way and at that moment, it will be our greatest triumph. Then we’ll do it again. It’s a hustle; a draining and discouraging one that’s often too much to bear.
But our work goes beyond that; it’s the separate worlds beating and pulsating in our mind, the people we create or the humans we know and would like others to be lucky enough to know, the mutual endeavors, the stories that make us alive.
If we just remember that after each autoresponse stating, “please feel free to submit your work elsewhere,” the stabbing criticism and the meager paychecks, this can be enough.
I write this not knowing if maybe this will be read by hundreds of people, or maybe just Mom and Dad. Maybe this will receive thousands of hits or just a meager dozen or so. Maybe you’ll come across this, maybe you won’t and if you do, you’ll quickly forget about it. Nevertheless, it exists in concrete black ink on paper, ready to be found, ready to connect us in this shared experience without ever meeting. I write for that marvel. Thank God, I can.
