We went to New York City last week and, as per usual, it was an amazing trip! I love NYC, it’s no secret, it’s my favorite place to go. There’s always something to see, always something new going on, and huge landmarks that I haven’t been to yet.
While we were there, we talked about the trip I took by myself in 2014. I’ll throw some pictures in here from that trip…
I spent most of that trip aimlessly wandering around Manhattan, taking tons of photos, and people watching. I wrote an entire book while I was there, most of it was written while I sat in Central Park. I mentioned this to my family while we were walking around and my mom said, “Well I’ve never seen it.” She hadn’t seen the book.
And I shrugged and said, “Well yeah, no one has seen it. I don’t know if anyone will ever see it.” The only person who has read the book is my best friend, Elsa, because she reads pretty much anything and everything I write.
My mom wanted to know why no one would ever read this book I’ve written. I explained that I’m happy with just having the story completed and formatted and whatnot. That I feel like my journey with a book is finished once I’ve written it, because that’s how I define success. Maybe if I defined success as “have a five book, traditional publishing, contract” then I would be querying publishing houses and actively trying to find an agent and marketing myself and my books. But I’m not. I define success simply by completing a story, by being happy with the words I’ve written.
I feel that when you embark on a creative endeavor, your goal should be to enjoy what you’ve created. I don’t write to sell books, I don’t write to earn income, I write because I can’t live without it. And because of that, my books are not written for other people to read, they’re written for me to read. My books aren’t exactly traditional story lines and while they obviously fall into some tropes and my characters embody some archetypes, I don’t write to appease the masses of literary consumers there are in the world.
There isn’t exactly a point to this blog post except for me to kind of rant about how just because your definition of success is different from someone else’s definition of success that doesn’t make you any less successful. It’s cool that my mom thinks I could get published, and it’s fun to entertain that idea, but it’s not a goal I have and I wouldn’t consider myself any more successful if I had an agent and a publisher and whatnot.
Also, I want to create more content about writing and I’m thinking about doing that in video format, I really enjoy watching author-tube type videos. I’m not sure how entertaining writing about the writing process would be…
I don’t know, my brain is all over the place. How do you define success? I’m so interested in knowing how other people define personal success.
Anyways, that’s all I have for today. I’m going to share photos, maybe a video if I can get around to it, from our trip to Manhattan (hopefully I’ll be able to do that this weekend). And then we’ll have a goals follow-up, and also a mini-discussion about being afraid of life.
Until next time – Xx.
Team Santana 