What's the point?

 One of the workshops I led for Eastercon last week was titled Weathering the Submission Storm.  I talked a bit about practical craft issues, and about submission systems, but the bulk of my talk was about the psychology of submitting.

I've spent far too long over the twenty years I've been submitting taking large chunks of time off from the query trenches because it's just too hard, and that's what I wanted to talk about in that workshop.

Like everyone else, I've suffered from Imposter Syndrome regularly.  I'm an unknown writer, I don't have anything new to say, so why would anyone buy my stories?

Then there are the reasons we invent to self-reject our stories.  We tell ourselves that our story doesn't quite fit the theme of that upcoming anthology, or that nobody is going to buy this feminist story,  We second-guess what we think an editor wants - and end up talking ourselves out of submitting our work.

All these tricks are variations on the theme of asking ourselves 'What's the point.'. Why would anyone be interested in hearing what we have to say?

One of my favourite antidotes to this feeling comes from Gareth L Powell's book About Writing.  It's a unique book, packed with writing tips, but also lots of philosophical essays.  The one I picked out to read at Eastercon is titled How to keep being creative in a crisis.

The book was published in 2019, just before coronavirus suspended our lives in a way most of us have never experienced before.  And reading this essay through again it has extra poignancy given the recent events in Ukraine.

For me this essay is one of the most eloquent answers I've come across to the question of 'Why bother.'  In a nutshell, we bother because it matters.  To us, and to our wider civilisation.

As Gareth says: 'Poets wrote in the trenches of WW1.'  But the line that really hit home was this: 'Art doesn't stop for history.  In some ways, art is history.'. He goes on to say that the language we use determines our civilisation.  Whether we speak racist or sexist of homophobic words, or their opposites, matters.

'Every line of prose you make is a blow against entropy and ignorance' he says.  That's true, and it's also fabulous prose.

To me, this essay powerfully answers the question of 'Why bother?'  We bother because we have something we feel is important to say to the world.  We bother because the world needs to hear our words.