Slowly Crumbling Dreams

It's one thing to listen to people tell you that you're a great writer, but when there's no evidence, how do you believe it?

My mother just spent the better part of a half-hour trying to persuade me to change my college plans from majoring in hospitality management, to majoring in journalism. According to her I can make people feel when I write. She asked me to just think about it. She asked me to just consider rearranging my college plans, and by extension my whole life. She doesn't understand how I can say I don't have confidence in my writing.

She doesn't know the failures I've had. I spend so long on a piece of writing, trying to perfect each and every word, obsessing over every slight grammatical error, balancing the delicate levels of sensory information and plot enhancement. I delve into my imagined situations trying to make them as realistic as possible, even in an unrealistic setting. I pry into my characters personalities; I focus on their faults and their gifts; I highlight their actions and their statements. And yet, it's not enough.

I go onto my Wattpad account and I read the tacky, terribly written cliches. I read the "fan fictions" that shame the term of fan fiction and the clueless love stories that star celebrities and stolen characters from published novels. I dive into poorly-written novellas and terribly-structured poems. Then I look at my writing, the fruits of my painful labor, the results of hours of dedicated work. Compare those two measly votes to the thousands for a novel that was written in three minutes and posted with no grammatical editing. Compare my four page chapters of substance and heart to the one page travesties that litter the libraries of Wattpad readers.

I've scraped together thirteen Wattpad fans since I joined the site last July, yet I see people who've accumulated thousands in a matter of weeks. It's heartbreaking, soul-crushing, and dream-wrecking.

How can I appeal to a growing public of internet users and readers, if I can't even attract their attention? How can I make people feel if they won't even open my stories? How can I compete with the writers who squeeze out a chapter a week just to reel in clueless readers?

I may be an excellent writer. I may have a talent that will make me famous one day. But how can I believe that when all the evidence just proves me wrong?