The Writer’s Ego

Whenever I discuss my book deal with aspiring writers, it often seems as if they are parsing my words, carefully panning for the secret that allowed me to meet with such coveted good fortune. Their curiosity has got me to thinking about it myself, and the closest thing I can come up with for an explanation is ego.

I’ve always believed that it takes an enormous ego to succeed artistically or on any sort of grand scale. To believe that anyone wants to hear your song, view your painting, or read your story requires a sense of self-worth well beyond the typical person’s. On the flip side, it’s that same ego that fuels your disbelief when agent after agent fails to see the genius of your work, and each rejection is one of a thousand cuts torturing your ego to death, or at the very least, bleeding it of the resolve to keep writing, to continue seeking representation, and to dream of publication against all the reported odds and all of the evidence to the contrary.

I didn’t discover the immensity of my own ego until, after three novels and four years of consistent rejection, I found that I still had another story to tell, and with no reason to believe the results would be any different, I was determined to tell it and believed that there were those who would benefit from reading it. Unlike many, I have never been motivated by rejection. I didn’t save rejection notices nor did I question the competence of the agents who turned me down. Instead, to paraphrase the boys from Journey, I never stopped believing. My overinflated Teflon ego wouldn’t let me.

I also feel that an author’s ego lends him an air of authority that infuses the tone of his text, makes him believable, and enables his readers to trust him, take note, and listen. Perhaps it is this tone that leaps from between the lines of a well-written query and convinces a work-weary and reluctant agent to ask for one more partial from one more egomaniac.