Not-Floundering Fridays, #1
Cold Truths, Survival Tactics, and Warm Blankets for Surviving (and Loving) the Writing Life
As I’ve long told my students— and reminded myself— writing may be the world’s best work, and worst profession. Every day, it brings challenges, terrors, disappointments, revelations, surprises, joys you can keep, joys you can share.
It’s space and compassion for yourself that— done well, used properly—creates space and compassion for others. And in others.
It’s a gift you get and give at the same time.
It’s a thing you can leave behind, and imagine being found.
It’s a way of knowing you’re here right now.
And only you can create it.
These Fridays are devoted to helping you keep going. And helping you want to.
Today’s episode: When to Love—and Fight— Feeling Small:
The entire experience of being a writer seems calibrated to humble you. Sometimes, that’s a great and humanizing thing. Sometimes, it’s a demon. Here’s when I’ve found it useful, and when I’ve found it harmful, and some suggestions about how to embrace the former and resist the latter:
The Work-Small: This is is the good kind. Sometimes, writing advice, like most advice, just states the obvious, but in case you thought it was just you: this work is hard. It demands every word you’ve ever learned, every experience you’ve had, every experience you’ve imagined, every insight you’ve gleaned, and a whole lot of openness to a process that sometimes seems to operate from outside and beyond you.
In other words, it’s the most engaging work I can imagine. Stay humble before it. Call it inspiration, call it God, call it talent if that keeps you believing. But know that it’s also luck. A perk of knowing you’re alive. A way of actually feeling that.
Believe— know— that you’ll never quite get it right. Not once. Not ever. Then dedicate the rest of your days to trying.
The Business-Small: Meet the demon.
Everything about the professional writing life— intentionally and otherwise— is designed to make you, the writer, feel powerless. From submitting a piece— I mean, look at that verb— to hunting agents to asking for blurbs to accepting conditions to negotiating rights to getting noticed to just getting read, the list is literally endless; the whole machinery is set up to convince you that you’re at its mercy.
This doesn’t mean no one’s trying to help. It doesn’t mean no editors or agents or publishers or readers or other writers are interested in you.
But you’re going to feel that way. And I mean, not just until you get published, but every day, forever.
The only way I’ve found to fight that feeling is to develop a mindset based on a fundamental truth, which is this:
The reality is the reverse. The power— all of it— is yours. They literally cannot do it without you.
In fact, there is no ‘it’ without you.
Remember that. Believe it. Approach your business with that in mind.
Like you’re bringing them a present.
Because that’s what you’re doing.