Where Am I Headed?

For the past couple of months, since I finished the second novel in my detective series, I’ve felt lost. I don’t know where I’m headed.

Part of me wonders if I should put my fiction writing on the back burner and focus on my lucrative commercial/business writing. Another part of me thinks I should just dump writing altogether and get a full-time job in technology again. I’d be making a lot more money, but I know I’d be miserable.

I started a children’s book, got about halfway through, and stalled. I’ll go back to it, but lately I’ve thought, “Why bother?” This attitude of “why bother” also reared up when I got two ideas for screenplays.

A photo I found online that depicts how I feel. Here is the full-size version. Warning: It’s a HUGE file, so it could take a while. 

I know I’m at a point of decision in my life. I’ve been headed in a certain direction for a long time, and now I need to decide if I want to continue going in that direction. The view down the tracks is intriguing; it looks like there may be fun and adventure ahead. Then again, it could lead to a bridge over a crevasse, and said bridge was wrecked by an earthquake.

If I’m going to continue writing, I somehow have to get past the idea that it’s only worth doing if I’m going to see a result—a publisher or studio buys the thing. For a long time, I was content to write for its own sake, but something happened in the long, disheartening process of looking for an agent and, for the past year, a publisher. Sadly, I’m a lot more cynical about the whole industry and have very little desire to write something, to put potentially years of my life into a piece of work, only for the powers-that-be to react to it with indifference.

There are probably many answers to this quandary of mine, but the only one I can think of is to write something so important to me that I don’t care if it gets published. Write something that I just want to get written down for my own sense of satisfaction.

At moments like these, there are two quotes I think about. One, which I’ll paraphrase, asks the question, “What would you write if you only had six months to live? What could you say to another terminally ill person that would matter, that wouldn’t offend by its triviality?” The second quote is by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said, “You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you have something to say.”

So what do I want to say? A question much more easily asked than answered.