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Let's talk about today's harsh writing advice: the idea that other writers are your competition. This is a variant on a piece of "known wisdom" that women are fed from birth, the idea that when it comes to girls "there can be only one."
One girl at a D&D table of six is seen as fine and equal; two girls is "taking over."
I have also experienced this as applied to non-straight/GNC people, where if there's one bi person at the table, cool, we have some diversity, but if they want to invite their trans BFF, THE QUEERS IS TAKING OVER.
Shows with an equal number of male and female characters are seen as "female-dominated," and shows with more female than male characters are "just for girls," while the same does not necessarily apply in reverse.
And it was a lie when I was six years old and being told that only ONE girl could get all the boys, only ONE girl could have friends that weren't girls, BETTER CRUSH THEM ALL IF I WANT TO WIN. It was a lie then, and it's a lie now.
Will you be IN competition with other writers? Yes, absolutely. And will that hurt sometimes? Yes, absolutely. I've cried in hotel rooms when other writers got opportunities I was hoping for, I've looked stung and whispered "but why not me?" when things were announced.
When I teach classes on writing for anthologies, I tell new writers, the ones whose names WILL be on the cover, but aren't there yet, that they have to be ten times better than me to get the slot if we both submit a story, and it's true.
I'm a big anthology reader, and I buy anthologies with stories by authors I know and enjoy reading: I don't buy them for people I don't know. Even a theme I like that has NO names I recognize may not get my attention.
But I don't tell those new authors that we're competing with each other, because we're not. They're competing with the perfect story they have in their heads, not the story I wrote. And I'm competing with MYSELF to impress the editor.
Most of my dearest friends are other authors, many writing in genres similar to or overlapping with my own. They're the ones who understand my job, who don't tell me that my problems are "good problems to have" or accuse me of bragging when something baffles me.
They're the ones who understand the pain of paying taxes as a working writer, or that sometimes you can hold a $40,000 check in your hand one day and be sobbing because you can't afford the expensive cat food your kitties prefer the next.
(Money is weird when you get paid once a year in big lump sums, at least 1/3rd of which goes straight to taxes, while being billed monthly.)
But more...writing is weird and hard and often super arbitrary. Why am I the last one standing from my urban fantasy year group? Was I The Best Of Us? I didn't know then, and I still don't know now.
But I had good covers and writer friends who were willing to help me with new kid promo and a masculine-sounding name, which we THINK skewed sales, since a disappointing number of Dudes won't read UF by women out of fear of graphic sex scenes. But we don't KNOW.
Mostly what I had was what I still have: the fanfic-honed ability to write fast and clean, meaning that while I still need to be edited, there's something there BE edited. So I hit market saturation very, very quickly.
I have been directly "competing" with two other authors in my whole career, once by their choice (an author who decided that I was somehow Stealing Her Readers, even though we wrote very different books in very different genres) and once by neither of ours (an author...
...where someone in a position to know better decided to Highlander us against each other, as if There Could Be Only One, no matter what). Both times, I shrugged and ignored it as much as possible, because I don't want to be "in competition" with my peers.
I do not like everyone. I never have. This doesn't change the quiet conviction that I should be able to convince everyone to like me. I know it's impossible. I keep trying.
Other writers are not your competition. They are your peers and your best helpers, and you want to make friends, because those friends will be able to support you when shit gets awful. They will UNDERSTAND in a way no one else can.
I've had people who otherwise love and respect me tell me that their job isn't as hard as theirs, because all I do is sit and type, not deal with co-workers or office politics. Any traditionally published author you ask will know that's bullshit.
THIS IS NOT THE FUCKING HUNGER GAMES. We CAN support each other, we CAN make alliances, and yeah, sometimes Jessie will get the tie-in contract you wanted, but Jessie doing a good job may mean Jessie can suggest you for the spin-off.
Send flowers, not hornets.
Send flowers, not hornets.
The world sucks enough right now. Let's not be assholes to each other on top of everything else.
