by Rosanne Bane
Kate knows she doesn’t dare let go of her writing again. “It doesn’t matter that I’m shoveling dreck. It doesn’t matter that I don’t know what’s what or who’s who. It doesn’t matter that I betrayed myself a thousand times. It doesn’t matter that my Saboteur sometimes says, ‘Who do you think you are? The world’s going to hell in a handbasket and you think you’re being “called” to write fiction?’”
What matters, Kate sees clearly now, is that she keeps showing up to scribble, poke holes in the page or answer questions. “I’m doing whatever I can to find a way into this novel. I’m letting myself love what I love.”
Public and Personal Success
How will you let yourself love what you love? What needs to happen for you to feel satisfied and gratified about your writing? What does writing success mean to you?
Some writing you do just for yourself: your journal or diary, morning pages (à la Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way), miscellaneous freewrites, the entries you make to track your writing progress and, of course, your grocery lists and to-do lists and so on. This writing almost certainly will never be published, and that’s just fine.
Some writing you prepare for an audience. It might be an audience of one person or a small group of people you know well. It might be for a larger audience you don’t know personally. Some of this writing may be published; some may not. There are more publishing options than ever before, and in some ways it’s easier than ever to be published. A quick look at the current Writer’s Market will prove that there is a print magazine, trade journal or online outlet for just about any audience you can imagine, from mass market to mothers of adopted children to miniature horse breeders. There is no need to be shy about your desire to publish your writing, and every reason to believe you will publish if you’re willing to put in the work necessary to make your writing worthy of publication and to find the audience looking for what you’re writing.
Writing is only half the communication cycle; someone else reading and understanding or feeling what you want them to is the other half. Completing the cycle is essential to achieve many of the goals you listed when you wrote about why you write: to educate, to entertain, to influence people, to change the world, to leave a legacy, to encourage, to enlighten, even to get revenge or get paid. Publishing is a satisfying way to complete the cycle, but what is traditionally thought of as publishing is not the only way to complete the communication cycle.
“I think the word ‘publication’ trips people up,” muses children’s author Stephanie Watson, “because they think it only means having a big publishing company in New York choose you, invest money in you and make this printed thing that people will then buy. Publication means so much more now. Writers have so much more control. You can be a published author online in five minutes with a blog. You can self-publish books, which still holds a little stigma, but not as much as it did fifteen years ago because even established, published authors are choosing self-publishing as a way to have creative control. My least favorite part of being an author with a big-time publisher is that there are so many people who feel they should have a say in what your finished work is. And it’s not necessarily in the best interests of the story or your writing style.”
Stephanie recommends writers have a diversified portfolio. “I will always have my private writing, and I will always want to have writing out there in the world. I will always want to have some books with traditional publishers, and I will probably self-publish some projects. Every form has its advantages and drawbacks, so if one project is disappointing, you have other projects you can turn to.”
You can post your writing on a blog or other social media. My sister-in-law gets great satisfaction from posting her poetry on Facebook and reading the responses her friends and readers give her. My cousin published a great blog about her adventures in refraining for a month from shopping or spending money she didn’t absolutely have to spend. You can self-publish by hiring a company that will help you edit, proofread, design and print a couple hundred copies of your book, or format your manuscript as an e-book. Or you can prepare a document in the publishing software that probably came with your computer and take it to a print center like Kinko’s, OfficeMax or Office Depot to print one, ten or a hundred copies to distribute to friends and family. If you’re so inclined, you can create book covers and interiors that are individual works of art. You can read at open mike night at your local coffee shop or literary center.
WRITER’S APPLICATION: EXPAND AND DIVERSIFY
To follow Stephanie Watson’s advice about diversifying your writing portfolio, you need to expand your thinking about how you can share your writing. Start by freewriting what you think public success means for writers. Then challenge yourself to write for at least ten minutes more about what else success could mean for you. List as many ways as you can imagine of how you could satisfactorily complete the communication cycle.
Start a list of who your potential audiences might be, both in general (e.g., single moms of multiracial kids) and specific outlets (e.g., Family Matters Parenting Magazine). Keep adding to this list whenever a new audience idea occurs to you. Or if you get ideas by topic (e.g., “Wouldn’t it be interesting to write about . . .”), make a list of topics and list multiple audiences for each topic. Ask yourself, “I’m interested in topic X; who else would be interested?”
When Audience Matters Too Much
Stephen King’s ritual is to open his office door when he’s revising as a way of inviting the world in and reminding himself to think about his readers. But when he’s drafting, the door is shut; it’s just him and the story. “The first draft—the All-Story Draft—should be written with no help (or interference) from anyone else,” King advises in On Writing.10
There are times to pay close attention to your audience; how else can you hope to hold up your half of the communication cycle with any effectiveness if you’re not thinking about your audience? And there are times to ignore what other people think so you can focus on your process.
Stephanie Watson observes, “It feels best when both those plates are spinning—when your process feels good and you’re having fun writing and when you’re getting some appreciation and validation from others. If you’re getting lots of accolades, but you can’t write new things because all that external stuff is clogging your brain, that feels awful. On the other hand, when my first book came out, I was so expectant and hopeful about the reviews, it was probably impossible for reality to line up exactly as I had envisioned. The disappointment interfered with my writing process because I felt that impending judgment about anything new I was writing.”
Stephanie has learned the value of equanimity around other people’s responses to her writing. “I decided to treat reviews of my second book a lot more lightly. I read them, but I purposefully didn’t put much stock in them, whether they were positive, negative or neutral. The funny thing is that I got more positive reviews with my second book than I had with my first book, but none of it elated me and none of it bothered me very much. As a result, I was better able to focus on my work.”
Choose Your First Audience Well
When you do open your office door to consider the needs and desires of your audience, you need to select your first readers carefully. You need allies you can count on to give you honest feedback when and how you’re ready to receive it and in ways you can use to improve the writing.
Be sure you tell your allies where you want them to focus their attention and what level of feedback you’re looking for. I firmly believe that all feedback should start with 1) appreciation and congratulations, then proceed through the following levels only when the writer is ready to receive that level of feedback for that piece of writing: 2) specifically what the reader found effective, 3) questions the reader might have, 4) where the reader thinks the writing could be more effective, and 5) suggestions for revising. How many of these levels of feedback you shoul
d ask for depends on how well developed the manuscript is. When the writing is fresh, level one and possibly level two are appropriate. The more mature the writing is, the more levels of feedback it can benefit from. Be sure your readers understand that all feedback should start with level one, proceed through the levels in order, and stop where you ask it to stop.
WRITER’S APPLICATION: WHO’S YOUR BUDDY?
A writing buddy will give you the kind of feedback you need and a whole lot more. Allies can give you encouragement, inspiration, ideas, suggestions, acknowledgment and validation. They can commiserate about the challenges of writing and celebrate the big milestones and all the little steps along the way. They can often spot your Saboteur’s interference before you can.
Perhaps the most valuable thing your writing allies can do is to help you hold yourself accountable. Accountability can come from sending your buddy a quick voice mail or email message like, “I’m starting Product Time now.” It might be a weekly check-in where you describe what you said you’d do for Process, Self-care and Product Time, what you actually did for the three practices, and how you feel about what you did.
The members of a Mastering the Writing Habit telecoaching class I taught are still emailing weekly check-ins to one another more than a year after the class finished. Their check-ins keep them on track and in touch as they congratulate and encourage each other. The Around the Writer’s Block accountability groups available on my Facebook page, www.Facebook.com/AWBWriters Groups, are designed to give you similar support as a member of an online writers’ community.
Can Your Partner Be Your Writing Buddy?
Be careful with what you expect from your spouse, life partner or other family member about how she/he supports you. Some partners are gracious enough to be great fans, energetic promoters, discerning readers and skilled editors all rolled into one, but that’s a tremendous burden to ask your partner to carry, even if she/he is qualified to do all those things. Consider what your partner can realistically give you.
From your perspective, writing is an important part of who you are that you may have doubts about from time to time, so a partner who reflects your doubts or expresses disbelief about your capabilities can wound you deeply. But as a writer, you have to be able to step into another person’s perspective; so do that with your partner. Does your partner see writing as a frivolous hobby that cuts into the time you could be spending with her/him? Is it an excuse to “get out of doing your share” of income generating or household chores? Is it a dangerous, misplaced pipe dream that will only end up disappointing you, so the kindest thing your partner can do is to keep reminding you not to get your hopes up too much? Is it a (either conscious or unconscious) painful reminder of your partner’s own unfulfilled creative dreams and the chances she/he regrets not taking?
Start by explaining how and why writing is important to you and how everyone will benefit from finding ways to balance your desire and need to write with the desires and needs of everyone else in your family. Ask your partner and other immediate family members how they perceive your writing. Consider how you want to be supported and how your family is willing and able to support you. Expecting someone to give you something she/he doesn’t have to give is a setup for disappointment and emotional turmoil.
Most important, make this a reciprocal, mutually beneficial and mutually agreed-to arrangement. That way you won’t feel small, dependent or indebted every time your partner gives you support and your partner won’t feel resentful or rejected every time you disappear into your writing.
You want to have reciprocal relationships with all your writing allies. Many writers hesitate to ask for support because we don’t want to feel dependent or less-than. Or we’re afraid to commit ourselves to some future, undefined obligation. This is why it is essential that we have reciprocal relationships with our allies and that we define those agreements in advance.
Whether you’re enlisting allies from fellow writers/artists or from friends and family, I recommend you make copies of the Ally Agreement Worksheet below and use them as a starting point in a discussion about how you can share support.
Ally Agreement Worksheet
I, __________ would like __________ to be my writing ally. In this role, I would like __________ to take the following action: __________.
I, __________, agree to be __________’s ally. I am willing to take the following action to support __________’s writing or other priorities: __________.
Starting Over
The final thing that matters is that you remain willing to start over when you need to. Everyone drifts from their commitments at times, and the Saboteur will try to take advantage of that. Sometimes you need to change things up a bit: shift what you do for Process or Self-care or change the focus of your Product Time to a new idea that intrigues you. The willingness to start over, to begin again and again and again, feeds the right wolf.
“What separates artists from ex-artists,” observe Bayles and Orland in Art & Fear, “is that those who challenge their fears, continue; those who don’t, quit.”11
Bayles and Orland distinguish between quitting and stopping, noting that stopping is a normal part of the creative process. You start a project, and you either complete it or you decide it’s not worth pursuing further and you stop working on that project. Every writer returns again and again to the search for her/his next project. Quitting, on the other hand, happens just once. “Quitting means not starting again—and art is all about starting again,” Bayles and Orland claim.12
Quitting is the decision to never try writing again. And as final as Bayles and Orland make that sound, you can unquit at any time. To start again, you have to be willing to be a beginner again. You have to be humble, which is to be teachable. You have to learn new ways to approach your writing without surrendering the momentum your habits and practices give you.
As I draft this chapter, the blizzard of February 2011 is smacking two-thirds of the United States, and my previously too-parochial Midwestern metaphor of winter driving now applies to enough of you to be worth sharing. Those of us who grow up in the Midwest (and the Northeast and the mountain states) learn how to drive in winter. We learn that after the plows go by and our cars are encased in snow, we dig out as much as we can, throw sand under the tires, get in, and rock our way out (and I don’t mean turn the stereo up as high as it will go). We put the car in reverse and go back as far as we can, then shift gears and move forward as far as we can. With experience, we can feel the moment before the wheels are going to spin, and pause at that optimal point. We keep rocking back and forward, gaining an inch or two in each direction, until we just know we can keep moving forward. We can tell the wheels are spinning a little because the speedometer says eight or nine, and we know we’re not going that fast, but we are moving forward, so we keep going because momentum is too precious to lose. And suddenly we’re out of the drift and onto the plowed road.
What we don’t do is sit in one place and spin the wheels. The friction from the tires melts the snow momentarily and then it freezes into ice. Spinning your wheels just digs a deeper, icy hole. This is where your Saboteur wants you—not writing and berating yourself for not writing, revving the emotional engine, but going nowhere. If you’re not writing and you realize you feel bad about that (and you will because you’re a writer), then do something. If that doesn’t work, shift gears and try something else. You might make the tiniest progress, but its progress, so keep rocking!
The other thing we don’t do in the Midwest is abandon our cars until spring. (I know; the planet would be better off if more of us did abandon our cars and use mass transit instead, but every metaphor has its limits.) We adapt. We apply new rules and tools. Giving up on your writing because you’ve hit a difficult patch is like running into a detour on your way home from work and deciding you’ll just have to live in your car because your usual route is closed. (Or if you’re a New Yorker,
it’s like deciding to live in a cab because it stalls out or the bridge is closed.) You don’t abandon your home because you hit a detour, and when you’re a writer, writing is your home.
It is so much harder to start over than it is to keep moving, so if you feel yourself slipping or notice your practices are not as consistent as you’d like them to be, shift gears and try something new before you quit. If you have quit and you’re not happy with that decision, change it. Unquit by committing to a small step and taking it. Rock your way back into motion.
Success Story: Hope in the Face of Disappointment
Stephanie Watson has had her share of setbacks, but she refuses to let them stop her. She’s learned how to keep driving.
“I feel so much hope working on something new,” she says. “Even though it’s never as perfect as you hope it will be, there is nothing like the high of playing around with a new idea that enchants you.”
Stephanie points out that even in the midst of disappointment, sometimes things turn out better than we hope. “In 2009, after doing National Novel Writing Month and feeling burned out, I decided to write a picture book every day for a month. One of the ones I just tossed off ended up being picked up by Disney Hyperion by an editor I’d met at Scholastic. She liked the book and said she didn’t want to change anything. And wasn’t that nice to hear!”
When Stephanie’s editor asked her who she’d like for an illustrator, Stephanie suggested a few illustrators early in their careers. When none of them panned out, her editor said, “I wonder if we should just ask Mary GrandPré.” Mary GrandPré illustrated the American editions of the Harry Potter books, as well as many other children’s books. “I’ve always been a huge fan of her work,” Stephanie recalls, “so of course I wanted her to illustrate my book. But she’s such a superstar that I assumed that signing her was really unlikely.