From Fan Fiction Writer to Bestselling Author
Two things are always true about childhood: 1. You constantly feel trapped, and 2. You look for escapes wherever you can find them.
Little Sara Wolf was no exception to these unmalleable rules of the universe. My options in the wilderness outside were limited—one can only make ‘witch potions’ out of rotting guava pulp and mud so many times. Winning an original PlayStation lottery during a school pizza fundraiser sealed my fate; video games became worlds onto themselves for me. Just like the books I’d hid under the covers to read at 2am, video games painted worlds for my developing brain and expanded my imagination beyond the sole limits of the written word.
(What Is Fan Fiction in Writing?)
At the tender age of 11, I began to peruse an internet that was exploding in popularity and widespread use. Originally, I’d planned to just look up cheat codes and secrets for these video games I loved so much, but I quickly fell into the fluctuating rabbit hole of social groups built around shared interests—or as they’re referred to in the history documents, forums. The fan fiction forum caught my eye the most, obviously, as the perfect locus of both literature and video games.
It took me exactly two pages of reading someone else’s fanfic to start drafting my own.
From the time I was 11 to the age of 17, I wrote a fanfic on this forum. Six years, 1.4 million words. Critiques, praises, and hate groups formed around me. Ignorant of the latter but happy to see a few new comments on every chapter, I powered through a story that became a stage for my growth from a pre-pubescent child to a full teenager. I explored all the complicated feelings inside me through fan fiction, and the world responded, and my love for writing books bloomed then and there.
By the time I was 18, I was in community college for remedial math so I could transfer to a “real” college and earn an English teaching degree, but in secret I was writing manuscripts. Like all fresh adults, I tried to be more mature than I really was—tried to reach for literary supremacy through purple prose and abstract concepts—and it took me four years on writing forums like Absolute Write to understand that a successful writing career relied less on personal ego and expression and more about crafting a story with a beginning, middle, and end.
The biggest lesson I learned then was that writing is an industry of trial and error. The instant-success story is an anomaly, not the norm, but the sheer amount of attention such stories get make them seem ubiquitous. In reality, everything you need to succeed can be learned by trying and failing over and over again, and using the attention you receive from cold-querying agents as a metric of whether or not you’re on the right track is the most valuable compass if you’re looking to make writing into a full-time, sustainable profession.
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Two responses are better than none, and should goad you into pursuing the two-response manuscript on a deeper, more intense level. What worked in that manuscript? What didn’t? Take those elements moving forward, create a different manuscript, and query again. Rinse and repeat ad nauseam, or ad victoriam.
By some small stroke of luck and one giant case of persistence, I managed to write a manuscript that caught the attention of agents, and eventually landed me my first agent. Seven years later I’d write the Lovely Vicious series, which became a NYT bestseller. My sci-fi giant robot revenge book Heavenbreaker releases soon with Red Tower books, the publisher of Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing. My foot in the door was only the beginning of my career and my struggles to learn how to write. I’ve learned to never stop learning or pushing the boundaries of my art and my writing—even if the manuscript doesn’t sell, you learn something from every failure.
In that sense, I, Sara Wolf, stand as a case study of a cascade of failures so multitudinous they collapsed in on each other and became a success—a black hole of a writer.
Every literary journey is different, and I wish you the best of luck on yours. Perhaps you will be born a star.
Check out Sara Wolf’s Heavenbreaker here:
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