Sticking with it

Loving your work long enough to see it through

On my bulletin board: a calendar for something small, every day; a note to my son from his fourth grade teacher; and a notecard he hand-lettered for the Keep Going trailer when he was six

“I always thought that an artist’s was the hardest life of all. Its rigor—not always apparent to an outside observer—is that an artist has to navigate forward into the unknown guided only by an internal sense of direction, keep up a set of standards which are imposed entirely from within, meanwhile maintaining faith that the task he has set himself to is worth struggling constantly to achieve. This is all contrary to the notion of bohemian disorder.”
—Lucian Freud

Hey y’all,

I’m deep into writing the proposal for my next book and I’ve been thinking a lot this time around about what it takes to bring a book into the world.

One of the best ways I’ve heard it put was by Robert Greene:

“You have to really love your idea. It has to be something from deep within. It has to be personal. It has to excite you on a deep level. Because you’re going to have to persevere for several years. There are going to be a lot of critics, a lot of mean-spirited people are gonna say, ‘You can never do that!’

When you create anything, the spirit you create it with, the energy, the excitement, is translated into the product itself. So when somebody writes a book just for money, you can kind of smell it. When you read the book, it kind of reeks. We can sense that. But when the writer is excited, it excites the reader. So the love and the desire you put into your project will translate.”

It’s not just the critics and mean-spirited people you have to look out for! You can ignore mean-spirited people pretty easily, but the well-intentioned can actually do much more damage to your ideas, because you really care what they have to say. This includes agents, editors, friends, colleagues, loved ones, etc.

And not only will you have to persevere for many years, but if your wildest dreams come true and your project is a huge hit, you have to be ready to talk for years — if not decades! — about it. So at the very least, the book better be something you were passionate about at the time of its making. It has to be something you can live with for a while. Something you can stay excited about.

I have torpedoed 3 different book proposals over the past four years because I just couldn’t maintain my excitement about them. Part of the problem is that I’m what Katherine Morgan Schafler would call a “messy perfectionist.” I love coming up with ideas and I’m great at working in quick bursts under short deadlines. But I’m interested in so many things — it’s hard to stay interested in just one thing!

3 items on my desk to keep me writing: A sage stick Meg bought me at the witch store that I like to sniff, a cube timer I use to get my hour of writing in, and my beloved cigarette pencil (I buy them at Toy Joy)

This week I enjoyed the writer Michael Cunningham’s interview in The Work of Art: