Ask the Author: Can I really become a published author?

Dear Mandy,

So this is kind of random, but I wanted to be an author as a teenager and kind of gave up because it was made out to be impossible by the adults in my life. Is getting something published realistic?

Answer:
Yes.

Seriously. That’s the short answer. And I know that answer because I spent a lot of my own life believing the opposite. When I was a kid, my grandmother had a wall of old National Geographic magazines. I would sit and page through them, fascinated by the photographs and the stories of places I had never seen. I dreamed of writing for National Geographic someday. I wanted to travel the world and write about the things I saw.

I was always writing something. But somewhere along the way, though, I got the message that kind of life wasn’t for “people like us.” And where I came from, there was a fairly narrow idea of what people like us were supposed to do. Someone of my socioeconomic background and geographic location was expected to either pick a husband or pick a factory to work in. If you picked a bad husband, you probably got both.

There wasn’t much room in that equation for becoming a writer, traveling the world, earning degrees, starting a publishing company, or building a life around creative work. Those things belonged to other people. People with money. People with connections. People whose families had already done those things. People who knew how to navigate worlds that weren’t exactly designed for people like me. And that’s why your question isn’t random at all.

This is an incredibly common experience, and it isn’t limited to writing. It happens with painting, music, acting, medicine, farming, entrepreneurship, skilled trades, and just about every other career you can name. For every possible career, there are parents somewhere telling their children that people like them don’t do that.

Sometimes it’s because they genuinely don’t think their children can afford to pursue a particular career. Sometimes it’s because they don’t understand the career themselves. Sometimes it’s because they’re afraid their children will fail. And sometimes it’s because they have their own ideas about what kind of work is respectable. Parents can have very strong opinions about what their children should do with their lives. The problem is that those opinions can become limitations long after the child has grown up.

One of the things I’ve learned from earning multiple degrees in business, of all things, is that no career is practical for YOU if it isn’t what you are meant to do. That’s something I wish more people understood. “Practical” is not a universal quality that a career either has or doesn’t have. A career can be perfectly practical for one person and completely miserable for another. If you spend forty years doing something because someone else told you it was the sensible choice, but you spend those forty years wishing you were doing something else, I’m not sure that’s particularly practical. And sometimes we are meant to do things that nobody in our families has ever done before.

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I certainly didn’t follow the path I imagined as a kid. I didn’t become a National Geographic writer traveling around the world. My life took a much more winding route. I earned degrees. I worked in higher education. I kept writing. Eventually, I published books. I started an independent publishing company. I built a life in which writing isn’t something I do only when I have spare time—it’s an important part of who I am. None of that happened because someone handed me a roadmap. I had to figure it out as I went.

That’s the part of this question I really want to emphasize: you do not need to know exactly how you’re going to become a published author before you start writing. Publishing is difficult. I’m not going to tell you otherwise. You have to write the book first. Then you have to revise it– multiple times. You have to learn about publishing and decide whether traditional publishing or independent publishing is right for you. You may have to deal with rejection. You may have to learn things you never expected to learn about editing, cover design, marketing, distribution, or contracts.

And yes, having money and connections can make some of those things easier. Someone who can afford a prestigious creative writing program may have access to mentors and publishing connections that someone without those resources doesn’t have. That’s real. But it isn’t the same thing as saying that publishing is impossible without those advantages. It isn’t.

The publishing industry has more than one door. You might pursue an agent and traditional publisher. You might publish independently. You might start with short fiction or essays. You might write a novel. You might discover that you’re actually a poet or a children’s author or a nonfiction writer. Your first book might not sell very much. Your second might do better. You might spend years writing before you find the right opportunity. There isn’t one correct route.

You don’t have to prove that your dream is going to make you rich before you’re allowed to pursue it. If you wanted to be an author as a teenager and gave up because adults convinced you it was impossible, I would encourage you to ask yourself a different question now. Not “Is this realistic?” Ask yourself, “Do I still want to do it?” If the answer is yes, then start there.

Write the story you’ve been carrying around. Take a class if you can. Read books about writing. Join a writing group. Finish something. Learn how to revise it. Send it somewhere. Publish it yourself if that’s the path that makes sense for you. You don’t have to leap from “I used to dream about being a writer” to “I am now a successful author.” You just have to take the next step. Because difficult and impossible are not the same thing, and sometimes the people who tell us our dreams aren’t realistic aren’t actually describing our limitations. They’re describing the limits of what they can imagine.

For a long time, I thought the life I wanted belonged to other people. It didn’t. It just took me a while to figure that out. So yes. Getting something published is realistic. It might not be easy. It might not happen the way you originally imagined. It might take longer than you expect. You might have to find a completely different route than the one you thought you would take. But if you still want to be an author? You can start. And maybe that’s the most important thing any of us can do when we’ve spent years believing that a particular dream wasn’t meant for people like us.

This column is part of an ongoing Ask the Author series, where I answer questions from writers and readers about reading, writing, storytelling, and the creative process. If you have a question you’d like me to tackle in a future post, you can submit it through my contact page.

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