It's totally okay that I'm good at what I do.
I do a lot of things, and I'm good at some of them, and that's really awesome.
Welcome back to the Writers Secret Weapon, the newsletter about creativity and writing for creatives and writers where no one is offering you any bullshit courses or tired rehashed advice you’ve seen a million times before.
I’m John, and I want to help you write better. I also want to get you thinking and feeling and creating and motivated to try, which is why the Secret Weapon and everything else I make (the Patreon, the podcast, the Chats) exist.
You can support anything and everything I do by either subscribing below or by buying me a root beer.
Normally I use this space to meld my personal observations with writing and publishing advice. My goal is to provide something I’m not seeing in a lot of spaces: practical advice and a not-brand-first conversation between you, a creative looking for support and me, someone who loves to support creatives.
This is not exactly a replacement for my old blog nor is this some New Yorker magazine long-form essay space where I’m trying to sound like I’ve got any kind of high ground or superiority. This is just where we meet up once a week and I share some stuff, and if I’m lucky you share some stuff too and like two friends intersecting for a few minutes, we both walk away better for our meeting.
I’ve always been the sort of person who looks at the more serious, less casual essayists that litter this site with equal parts admiration and contempt. It’s lovely that they have such tremendous audiences, it’s intimidating to think about how what we write goes toe-to-toe with theirs thanks to an algorithm, and I think a lot of them wouldn’t know authenticity if they fell over it. So I sound like this, and I talk to you like you’ve got a brain in your head and I usually don’t have anything to prove. But more on that later.
With my 2023 business year coming to a close this week, this is the final Secret Weapon of the year (the Secret Weapon returns January 4 2024) and today I want to talk about something that recently happened that had a tremendous impact on me. I’m hopeful you’ll indulge me enough to hear me share some things and say some things that could maybe also put a few light bulbs on for you too.
This is a story about how I realized what I do is good and that I am good at it. It starts with baseball cards.
Duke Snider and Darryl Strawberry
Sitting in my office closet there are 11 old sealed plastic totes designed to hold sweaters. They’re holding all the baseball cards I collected as a child. I would walk into town and spend a few dollars on packs of cards once a month or I’d receive the full year’s worth of cards for a christmas present from any family member who didn’t know what else to get me (my family famously disregards what I ask for as being impractical or unrealistic - one year I got a waste paper basket instead of a video game because it was a hint that I let my room get too messy). My collection starts with 1978 and extends to about 2000, when cards became much harder to collect.
My collection is also dotted with a few older cards that I picked up at yard sales or through friends, so there are some cards from the late 50s or early 70s in there, particularly if the players had interesting names or facial hair.
When I was a little boy, the New York Mets made it to the World Series and every kid I hung out with went all in for their motley crew of hitters and pitchers. And after school I’d go to a friend’s house and we’d sit and look the cards in their protective sleeves and talk about how great it was that Mookie Wilson hit a double last night or how Doc Gooden did amazing in the fifth inning. We cheered Darryl Strawberry and for reasons I can’t remember, hoped that Howard Johnson hit a home run once a week.
With the discussion of the Mets out of the way, so began the ritual of card swapping. I do not exactly remember the exchange rate, but I remember clearly the feeling of pained loss when I had to part with a card even if I didn’t know anything about the player or didn’t like the picture on it. It was something I owned, and due to whatever arcane economy, I had to give up a Milt Thompson for a Pat Sheridan. I always felt like my friend Adam and my friend Chris knew something more than me, knew some secret knowledge, or otherwise conspired against me to take the things I bought and give me junk they didn’t want.
I would go along with it, of course, because I didn’t want to be a bad friend, and I didn’t want them to stop liking me. But this is how I’ve always felt - that other people are, by just being them and having their lives, better people. They knew how to do things, they understood things, they were aware of things that I never could be, so me giving up Milt Thompson for Pat Sheridan was just the thing to do. I felt that way because I lacked support. I lacked someone in my corner telling me I was doing okay and that yeah things were hard now and might be hard later, but I could get through them if I do this or that or make choices and try.
Somehow some way through this strange transaction circus, I came to own a few special cards: a Duke Snider card and several Darryl Strawberry cards. I’m not sure how exactly these came into my possession, I know I didn’t steal them, and I know they weren’t just handed to me, but there now exists in a plastic bin in my closet, a Duke Snider card from 1953 and I think 2 Darryl Strawberry rookie cards. They stand out to me because a) they’re in hard sleeves that I always thought looked cool and b) I think “Duke” is a cool name for a baseball player. Also, I’ve never heard of another person with the last name Strawberry.
The internet tells me these cards are worth something, a few hundred dollars at least at the time I’m writing this. And while I’m someone who frequently runs cash-poor and struggles with food security, it never occurred to me sell them. Those are my things, those are my small pieces of happiness from childhood, let’s let the kid have his happiness.
I’m also informed those cards are rare. I don’t remember if I was told at the time they were rare, but looking back at it now, it’s quite the coup to have them just hanging out in my closet. Luck maybe. Unintentional good fortune. I got them somehow and although the particulars don’t matter, I don’t think I did anything special, I just do what I do.
I do what I do, what is everyone else doing?
When I started this job in the late 90s, I had been kicked out of traditional publishing and disillusioned by the industry as a whole. It wasn’t kind, it didn’t want to help, and somehow it just sort of expected people to know what it wanted without being clear about what it wanted. It felt like going to a pizzeria and saying “You know what I want” when you get up to the counter. To this day I’ve never understood why people aren’t crystal clear about what they want so they can get exactly what they want. Making people jump through hoops and guess their desires is what bad relationships, bullies, and assholes do. Yet time and again, so many people eagerly run for their chance to be the next person mistreated by a system that promises it will really like them in the some breath it fails to treat the author like a whole-bodied person and not a cog in a machine.
So when given a chance to help writers one-on-one, it felt like I was doing what traditional publishing was supposed to be doing. It’s nice and all to want “good books” but if you don’t give people the tools and encouragement (because rejection isn’t encouraging by design), you’re going to have a hard getting those books.
But at no point was it hard for me to explain what I do. I help writers. They have questions, and I answer them. It sounds very simple because sometimes it is that simple. You ask about X, I help you with X. X might not be the easiest thing in the world for you to do, but I’ll give you tools and metaphors and as much help as I can to make X easier for you. I can’t promise perfection, nobody can, but I can promise improvement, if you’re willing to show up and do the work.
Sometimes I do this job on the phone, pacing around my house with my earbuds in, gesturing into the empty rooms like the person is sitting there on my couch. Sometimes I do this job at the desk, through Zoom or Skype, sometimes with a camera on and sometimes not. I try to make the camera a rare thing, because for every 30-45 minutes on camera, it’s about 3 hours of anxiety about how I don’t recognize my face or feel like I’m worth looking at. (Dysmorphia is horrible, wouldn’t wish it on anyone). I’m happier with the camera off, because it also means I can wear a Metallica t-shirt, a pair of gym shorts, and my bathrobe. Stylish, sure. But mostly I like being comfortable. I think everyone’s path to their best art requires a level of comfort because so much of the creative process asks us to be uncomfortable and vulnerable on purpose.
Sometimes this job has me working line by line in Microsoft Word, editing a chapter for a client. Sometimes it’s working on a marketing campaign. Sometimes it’s talking about book cover design. Sometimes it’s a motivational speech. It can be all of those things, any of those things, any time anyone makes an appointment. That’s what I love about it. It’s not death in a cubicle, it’s not a thousand cells on a spreadsheet, it’s not a boss telling me to hit quotas and be part of some capitalist family fantasy - it’s me and the writer, in the trenches, fighting through resistance and time and space to make the best art possible so it can be shared with the world.
It’s called coaching, I call it coaching, but it’s also editing (developmental mostly, but there’s some line editing that happens too), and it’s marketing and it’s publishing advice. And it’s giving a shit about people as they grow and change and become the better people I know they can be. It isn’t entirely transactional, though sometimes it is.
Apparently, I’m something of a rarity when it comes to doing this. Editors edit. Marketing people write emails about marketing. Coaches talk. And I’m somewhere in the Venn diagram’s center.
I don’t mind being the guy doing something that other people aren’t entirely doing, that’s kind of been my thing for my whole life. But too often that singularity can make me feel like I’m the only one doing what I’m doing because I’m doing it all wrong.
Marketing remains my great white whale. I chase it. I want to do it better. it scares the hell out of me. I want to stab at it from hell’s heart.
Other people do the individual things I do. I see the people here on Substack marketing their Zoom meetings and their grifts. I see people streaming writing sessions and I watch YouTube videos of people talking about good writing and bad writing in shows and movies. I see people editing. I see people coaching.
I don’t see anyone putting them together. Or if they are putting them together, I don’t see them talking about it.
I’m good at my job, but not good at all the parts of my job. Here’s how I came to know that.
What do you mean that’s all they did?
Every once in a while I get a client because they went to someone else and they didn’t get the best help or advice or support. They maybe wasted time and money, though maybe they don’t always see it that way. I can’t do everything - I’m not a copyeditor or a cover designer or a layout person for a reason - but what I do, I think I do well.
I judge that by the number of books my clients start, finish, and publish. I judge that by seeing them go on to win awards, become best sellers, and be happy. I judge that by sometimes being fortunate enough to see or hear what other people said and did and compare it what I do.
When you get a manuscript back from an editor, it should be a mess. You should want it to be a mess. You want it packed with lengthy comments that contain explanations and details and something more than emoji or pats on the head. You turn over your work and you should get back something that helps you do your work better, even if that means everything you wrote gets taken apart and questioned or poked with a stick.
It’s hard to express how much you should want this. Not as a sign that you’re suck at stuff (blame school for associating red pens and notes in the margin with failure), but as a sign that you’re one step closer to getting where you want to go. How you reach your publishing destination is individual and bespoke, so your route through the comments and marks and notes won’t look like anyone else’s, but it also shouldn’t be a walk through bare pages with a scant note here and there.
Weak notes and coddling vagaries will make you a worse writer. So will harsh notes without context. But there’s a difference between “harsh” and “necessary” - sometimes yes, you do need to hear that your plot doesn’t work or that you use “Actually” too many times and that might upset you, but art isn’t a process where you’re left unbruised and unaffected. Art transforms and reveals, so let it. And the notes you get back, the meetings, the shit you pay for it, it should help you do that.
When a client brings me notes from somewhere or someone else, and I see the lack of support, the lack of notes and explanations, the lack of “here’s why this thing isn’t working, here are some options and tools for making it work,” I feel … bad. I feel like the client deserved better and that the other person did a shitty job and should feel bad about it.
You have to support the writer as much as you wield your sharp knives and tools and strategies. You have to remind them and empower them and educate them and challenge them and actually fucking listen to them and help them more than just cashing their check or droning on and one with the same canned shitbox advice they can get anywhere. You have to do more than a mediocre job because ideally they’re doing more than mediocre job. Not everyone’s going to end up published, but everyone deserves a chance to make some art. Give a shit about them. Please.
As a younger man, I used to get angry at this other people, that they were doing a bad job and taking money for it. But part of that was jealousy, that they were out there getting clients and I was holding myself back out of fear that nobody would like me or pick me. Part of that though was actual upset at their bullshit, at their misunderstanding of why you can’t hatchet through that scene and suggest something else because that scene builds character voice and if you strip that out because it gets passive or a wonky paragraph you’re missing the forest for the trees.
I was once told that my anger about helping people do a better job was futile, that it would kill me, that there would always be people I couldn’t help or that didn’t want to be helped, or that even with all the things I knew, I wouldn’t always know how to help them. In part, that is true. A lot of people say they want help right up until the part where the work has to happen or when it becomes a commitment to each other that they’ll show up and we’ll both work as hard as we can to help us both achieve our goals. (For the record my goal is to get more books out into the world and the part where I have money is secondary)
This job should be about more than trimming commas and nagging about the tired chestnuts of passive voice or show/tell. The goal should be to help writers write better, and that’s what I do. That’s what I will continue to do.
Because the world needs more art. And the world needs your art. And the world is better because you and your art are in it.
See you in 2024. Don’t let the fuckers get you down. Let’s tell your story.
Love you. Talk soon.