One Year In – Expectations vs. Reality

If there’s any theme to my first year of trying to become a writer, it’s that reality wildly deviated from my expectations. And that’s a good thing. When I started writing, I thought I would hole up by myself, maybe spend a year laser-focused on writing a sci-fi novel. Instead, I feel like every couple of months, I get excited when chatting with other writers, try new things, and expand my horizons.

A magazine open to a story "City of Androids" by Ian Li, with a long-haired cat curled up in the background
My first physical copy of anything I’ve written. Strangely, my cat is not that excited about it.

Community

Expectation: I thought writing would be be a solitary activity, translating concepts in my head to words on paper. And I’ve always liked living in my own head, so I was comfortable with that idea.

Reality: The speculative writing community has been more friendly, supportive, diverse, progressive, and awesome than I could have ever expected. As someone who had never met another writer until months after I started writing, I deeply appreciate being welcomed into the community—the talented and successful writers that generously offer their time and wisdom to newer writers like me, the editors that pour time into crafting wonderful publications with very little reward, the volunteers that set up spaces for us to build community, the friends I’ve made on this difficult but often rewarding journey. In a world where it feels harder and harder to make meaningful connections, all of this feels very special.

In some ways, my misconception also manifested itself in my writing. My early pieces focused on ideas and concepts, and I couldn’t understand why characters were important to a story. As I started to figure out what worked and didn’t work, I discovered that writing is not just about words on a page, it’s about people and relationships and experiences—and that’s proving to be true both in stories themselves and in my writing journey.

What I Write

Expectation: I originally set my sights on exclusively writing sci-fi novels.

Reality: Instead, I’ve been writing only short stories, and mainly flash fiction. Short form just makes it easier for me to iterate, get feedback, and improve quickly.

I branched out into fantasy, horror, and literary fiction, just to figure out what I might enjoy or might be good at. I’ve slowly settled into a mix of sci-fi and fantasy, which is a good reflection of what I like to read. And I still plan to continue with horror and literary when ideas in those spaces come to me.

To my delight, I also stumbled into poetry, and found I love writing it. I’ve written over 50 poems in just the last 6 months. And I’ve already had more success in getting my poetry published than my fiction.

I haven’t even started on a novel yet. Now that I have some solid publications and a better sense of what kind of writer I am, I think I might be ready to give it a shot again.

Success

Expectation: I’d be lying if I claimed success in publishing didn’t drive me and doesn’t continue to drive me. But I came in with no experience or aptitude in writing and no expectations—I wasn’t sure I would be able to write well enough to ever get published, to be honest.

Reality: It’s been incredibly encouraging that magazines that I admire have published dozens of my short stories and poems in my first year of writing anything of any kind.

And I don’t plan to stop here. I want to get nominated for awards, I want to publish short story collections and poetry collections and novels, I want to push myself as a writer as far as I can, in ways that I might not have even thought of yet.

Expectation: I thought that when your wrote a story good enough, you send it off and claim an acceptance somewhere. I didn’t expect so much rejection, especially on stories you consider your best work.

Reality: It turns out that a good story told well isn’t always good enough. The more competitive magazines and journals have acceptance rates of < 2%, so I wake up almost every day to a rejection.

I knew I had to work hard at writing and at writing better, but I never expected to spend so much time composing cover letters, figuring out which pieces are best-suited for which markets, formatting manuscripts to the preferences of editors, and monitoring and following up on submissions. That’s okay, because I never expected this to be easy after all.

Looking Forward

I’ve been trying to write as much as I can, to iterate and get better, but also so that I can send out work widely to as many open calls as possible. Now, I’d like to slow down and focus more on craft, on quality, on longer form, on writing something I’ll truly be proud of. Excited to see where the next year takes me.

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