I spent 11 long years writing my first novel – 11 years that I wouldn’t have slugged-out had I not absolute conviction that getting the book out there was, at the risk of sounding grandiose, my calling.
The years of research, the weighty, off-book reference tomes drudged up from the British Library’s reserve stock, the overseas travel, all in service of my white-knuckled certainty that this was my gig, my bailiwick, my thing. But the thing tanked, garnering a total of 28 rejections before I raised the white flag and crawled back into my hole.
There’s a lot to unpick here, a bumper crop of salutary lessons for the beginner writer.
But the legacy for me has been this – a deep distrust in my own sense of conviction, of certainty about what I am meant for on this planet. At the best of times, my intuition, my sense of knowing has been well wide of the mark but this, this abject failure was the coup de grâce. It was slow and incrementally crushing of my self-belief.
But, I now realise it needn’t have been.
The problem was simple and less existentially harrowing.
I was an amateur.
And the solution, as Steven Pressfield describes in his brilliant, balls-to-the-wall treatise on the artistic battle, The War of Art, was that I needed to do one thing.
To turn pro.
The amateur and his work are one. He is so heavily invested in its work and its success that any failure is felt deeply, personally and fatally. It’s a rejection of his deepest convictions, his moral fibre, all the little, twinkly microbes swimming around in his gut.
As Steven Pressfield writes:
“Grandiose fantasies are a symptom of resistance. They’re the sign of an amateur…The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come.
“An amateur plays for fun. The professional plays for keeps. To the amateur, the game is his avocation. To the pro, it’s his vocation. The amateur plays part-time, the professional full-time. The amateur is a weekend warrior. The professional is there seven days a week.
“The moment an artist turns pro is as epochal as the birth of his first child. With one stroke, everything changes.”
So, with you as my witness, today I vow to turn pro.
And I think things are going to get messy around here.
I’m hitching my wagon to JW von Goethe.
In his book Turning Pro, this is how Steven Pressfield describes the experience…sounds familiar to me.
“Turning pro is free, but demands sacrifice. The passage is often accompanied by an interior odyssey whose trials are survived only at great cost, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. We pass through a membrane when we turn pro. It hurts. It’s messy and it’s scary. We tread in blood when we turn pro.
Turning pro is not for everyone. We have to be a little crazy to do it, or even to want to. In many ways the passage chooses us; we don’t choose it. We simply have no alternative.
What we get when we turn pro is, we find our power. We find our will and our voice and we find our self-respect. We become who we always were but had, until then, been afraid to embrace and live out.”
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