We recently connected with Joe Siple and have shared our conversation below.
Joe , we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
In my writing career, resilience has been everything. I started writing fiction in 2001 but my first novel wasn’t published until seventeen years later. My work was rejected by agents and acquisitions editors about a thousand times!
Remaining resilient through that kind of failure is no small task. But in my case, I was well prepared to deal with failure because of the 25 years I spent playing baseball. Baseball, they say, is “a game of failure”. While I’m not sure I 100% agree with that, I do recognize where the saying comes from. As a hitter, if you fail seven times out of ten, you’re an All-Star. And really, there’s not that much difference between seven out of ten and ten out of ten.
So every time I received a rejection letter, I had the ability to deal with it, to see it for what it was and not make it into something more. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we make an out. But we can always learn from it. We can always use the failure to fuel our improvement. And there’s always another chance tomorrow.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I think my job isn’t just to write books, but to write books that give readers an emotional experience. Why do people like books that make them cry? Because we’re all human, and on some level we all long to experience the full range of human emotions. Fiction gives us a way to do that safely.
That’s the most exciting part for me. Because I get to experience those emotions too, when I’m writing the stories. If I laugh or cry while writing, I know I’ve got something worthwhile. That has happened most often with the “Murray McBride books” (The Five Wishes of Mr. Murray McBride and The Final Wish of Mr. Murray McBride). And the final book in that series, The First Wish of Mr. Murray McBride, is set to be released this coming March.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
The three most necessary qualities for an aspiring author are resilience, thick skin, and passion.
Even the most successful writers experience rejection at some point. Authors need the resilience to be able to learn from it and move on. You can’t let failure make you quit.
Thick skin is required because writing is a lifelong learning process. No one does it perfectly. We all get help–from our writer’s group, an agent, an editor, etc. In order to improve, we need to know what we’re doing poorly. But that can be very difficult for writers because the things we create are so personal. When someone tells us something we wrote isn’t very good, it can be easy to interpret that as WE aren’t very good. Writers need to develop thick skin so they can receive criticism and use it to improve their work, rather than allowing it to discourage them.
And writers need passion because there needs to be something to motivate us to write. A lot of people want to “have written” but true writers love to write. You can force yourself into your writing chair through discipline and sheer will–and writers need to get in the writing chair because that’s the only way words get written. But it’s a whole lot easier to do it if you feel passion for what you’re writing.
Alright, so before we go we want to ask you to take a moment to reflect and share what you think you would do if you somehow knew you only had a decade of life left?
My biggest challenge right now is to live in the moment. After seventeen years of failure and five years of moderate success, the last year has opened the floodgates a bit. Obviously, that’s a wonderful thing. But I’ve found that it’s easy to let the moments slip away. Yes, we need to work hard. Yes, we need to have dreams and goals and have the discipline and resilience to give ourselves a chance to achieve them. But we also need to live. We need to appreciate what we have at each stage. We need to actually spend some time living in the moment that’s right in front of us. That’s the challenge I’m trying to meet.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.joesiplebooks.com
- Other: For a variety of reasons–and against the advice of pretty much everyone–I’ve made the decision not to engage in social media.
Image Credits
Author Photo: Sunshower Media
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