Secret Weapon Volume 9 - 5 things I wish I believed or heard earlier
It's time for a little advice.
Welcome back to The Writer’s Secret Weapon. This is volume 9, meaning that starting NEXT WEEK in addition to Volume 10, paying subscribers will begin receiving additional material throughout the week. A complete marketing strategy guide will be first, so if you’re looking for that, click the button.
If you don’t know who I am, I’m John, and I’m about to tell you 5 pieces of advice I wish I believed or heard earlier than I did in the 20+ years I’ve worked in and around writing and publishing.
Entirely that’s my fault. I was young and thought I knew everything. I prized stubbornness over satisfaction and too often put myself in situations where I wasn’t really getting the best results, the best experiences, the best reactions or the best indicators of future success. Now maybe that’s because I was a young white guy deeply holding onto the patriarchal supremacy afforded to me by society. Maybe it’s just that I was snotty young guy who you couldn’t tell shit to. I think it’s a combo platter of them both.
Throughout my life there have been plenty of amazing people I was incredibly slow to acknowledge as right let alone acknowledge them as influential until their passing or whatever else caused us to lose touch (which was entirely my fault, I didn’t learn to value people and relationships in my life until I was in my 30s).
Here now are some of the best pieces of advice I ever received about writing, creating, and publishing. All of them are things I wish I learned earlier in my journey as a creator and coach to other creators.
“It’s not about who works harder, it’s about who works consistently.”
You’ve probably encountered loads of people who want to tell you how hard they work. How many hours and how many drafts. How many times they’ve stalled out or been interrupted by some non-writing thing. They love to talk about the effort required to do a thing and seem a little hesitant to talk about the thing they’re doing.
Likely this is because they don’t have a lot of confidence in whatever they’re making, but they know if they keep talking about how difficult things are, they’ll get some attention and support, which feels good while also deflecting from the lack of confidence on progress they’re making on whatever they’re creating.
It’s not that it’s bad or wrong to talk about how hard creating is, it’s good to talk about and to normalize the struggle. But when you focus more on the struggle than the goal or the production you start shifting your focus towards more and more negative things, requiring more and more support for diminishing returns. Yes, it’s nice when three people tell you once you can do it, but twenty times in twenty-two days, you’re just as capable as you were on day one, but now you’ve taxed your support system without giving them a chance to recover.
Don’t bog yourself down in how bad things are. Don’t throw yourself to the fainting couch or gnash your teeth and rend your garments. Instead bring some positivity and accomplishment into the conversation. It doesn’t matter if it’s whole giant heaps of progress or a smidge of progress, it’s still progress, and progress begets more progress. Consistent effort gets you where you want to go way more than talking about how hard it is to get there.
“It’s completely normal and okay to feel like you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing.”
Let’s be clear: I feel like this daily. Multiple times per day, depending on what’s going on. And it doesn’t totally matter what arena we’re talking about. I feel just as lost in talking to people socially as I do in figuring out how to help an author try and grow their audience when they’re unwilling to talk about themselves. A lot of everything is guess work, and I think people are way too loathe to admit that. We’re guessing, we’re making it up as we go, we’re trying loads of things and we’re hoping it works.
When it works, great, we take note and look to repeat it again later. When it doesn’t, after we’re done assuming the worst (thank social media for conditioning that into us), we grab our frustrations and try again. Maybe we do the same thing over, maybe we try something different, but in either case we eventually try.
But trying over and over, failing plenty of times along the way is only part of what will eventually make us experientially rich and an expert in the practical side of whatever we’re doing. Ultimately we want to synthesize the theory, the thinking, the abstract side of things and fuse them to our efforts, so that our attempts progressively feel less and less like we’re flailing and hoping more like we’re relying on experience and ability to guide us forward.
A lot of expertise and confidence stems from knowing many of the things and the ways that don’t work. I built this business on the back of many rejections, many failed workshops and meetings where nobody showed up, and many hours feeling like I had plenty to say and no idea what to do with it.
For a lot of us that feeling of “I have no idea what I’m doing” seems indistinguishable from failure because of the pressures we adopted from our parents and how we were raised - that you either had to know what to do (and do it flawlessly) or you shouldn’t do it at all. But trying something and not knowing entirely what you’re doing isn’t failure because you’re at least trying. It’s the lack of trying that leads to failure. And while you’re trying, nobody is expecting you to know everything and get it right 100000% of the time, that’s why you’re trying in the first place.
Everything is a try. Even if some people make their trying seem like it’s exactly supposed to be how it is. Think about trying.
”If you let anyone and everyone else tell you what your successes are or should be, you’ll never be happy with succeeding.”
I was talking to someone last week who said they were sitting in a meeting where someone paid $500 to have the meeting. Five hundred dollars is to me a life-changing amount of money. But to a lot of people in my field, it’s a pretty typical work experience - not only do they invoice several thousand dollars a month to clients, the clients pay.
I have a hard time getting my head around that, because it seems so foreign to me to say that an hour with me is equal in price to one and a third KitchenAid stand mixers. To make this worse, I’ve had people tell me I should charge more than that for 90 minutes of my time.
Yes, I’d love that. I’d love never having to worry about buying food or medication. I’d love being able to buy new underwear or get the cats some new toys. But I just can’t figure out how to get myself to a point where it’s okay to pursue my worth and/or find people who can afford to pay that.
That’s my fault. Long ago I read a Daredevil comic that said something to the affect of “everyone needs help, no matter if they can pay or not” and carved that onto my soul. I didn’t like seeing so many people who needed help get stopped from publishing or even writing at all because they couldn’t afford the help. Their stories are just as valid and worth shelf-space (or Kindle-space, you know what I mean) as the stories written by people with oodles of disposable income, but nobody’s rolling up their sleeves and serving that population of creatives. So I decided I would.
It meant that I’d probably never afford a summer house at the beach. It meant I’d never stay up to date on the lastest phone or gear. It meant I’d miss out on a lot of opportunities. I didn’t know it would also mean I’d get really good at stealing from grocery stores and teaching myself things because I couldn’t afford stuff.
It also means that I watch my contemporaries succeed and excel and be taken seriously while I’m over here questioning my life choices about why I didn’t realize that Carol in Religious Studies was never going to sleep with me so why didn’t I maybe pay slightly more attention in class so I could have maybe gone to law school and then I wouldn’t be sitting here waiting writing this at 3 in the morning before I get up and wait in line at a food bank that might have some household goods this week.
But if I stop and judge what I do based on their rules for success, of course my life won’t read as successful. I don’t have two kids, a farm upstate, the beach house, a multi-camera recording studio, or the bankruptcy of ethics to exploit three personal assistants while selling vapid material as I manufacture an everything-is-great persona online where I splash newsletters with gifs.
That’s them. That’s what they’re doing. I don’t measure on that scale because I don’t have those things. I don’t want most of those things (would not say no to that beach house though). Their successes are theirs. Mine is mine.
It’s not that I have to “be okay” with mine like I have to settle for the scraps off someone else’s plate. It’s that I have to be okay with saying success is success and if I want to change the scale of my success that’s on me and what I’m doing, not them and their bullshit.
500 dollars for a meeting is still ridiculous though.
“About 60% of the people you’ll work with won’t ever let themselves get where they say they want to go and about half of them aren’t really serious about the work in the first place.”
Boy have I struggled with this one. I first heard this in about 2002-2003 and thought it was said just to scare me. It did, it also really upset me. It made me think that the lady who said it to me was just old and bitter and cynical (she was) and that if I was just really good at what I do, I could somehow make them care and do whatever it takes to succeed.
What this ended up doing was putting me in a position to do a ton more than was ever asked of me and end up grossly under-appreciated when I did it. My therapist still argues that I’m doing this with people now, since about three-quarters of the work I do is entirely free and I barely get thanked for most of it.
Maybe I am trying to inspire people, to transform them into people who deeply care about art and its creation the way I do. Maybe I am asking too much because I don’t want to be the odd man out who feels too passionately or too strongly while so many other people are less affected by beauty in things. (Example: This commercial made me cry)
I used to think that everyone, anyone, was one good motivational speech away from charging off and creating their best art, and when they didn’t go dashing off to create things, that it was my fault, that my speech wasn’t rah-rah enough. I refused to believe that people would go to all the trouble of signing up for newsletters and joining communities and then just not follow up and participate or ask questions or even give enough of a shit to try. I’m not entirely sure I understand it now.
If you say you’re wanting to do something, especially if you say you’re really passionate about it or you want to do it sooner rather than later, why not jump at every single chance to get help? I stream weekly, I answer questions literally whenever someone asks, all for free, and why not take advantage of that?
I can remember driving for 3 hours to hear a writing professor speak for 45 minutes because I knew there was a chance he’d answer questions at the end. It mattered to me that I know more about how to do what I wanted to do so I took advantage of every chance I got.
But every week I see people in communities not asking questions. I see people just kinda sitting there.
It’s not even about me answering the question. It’s not that I have to be the sole dispensary for all writing information and I’m the bestest. It’s that there’s a resource out there and it’s barely getting used. I don’t understand.
There are loads of people trying to get published. There are loads of people querying. Loads of people publishing and trying to sell. They feel alone, lost, overwhelmed. They don’t know how to make progress or get better results. It takes so little, comparatively, to get help but it’s easier to avoid all the emotional or mental mess and stay just short of their goal.
I don’t understand.
”You have to learn when to move forward.”
I have trouble letting things go. Whether it’s the way someone says “Oh” in a conversation or something stupid I said at 1 in the morning on a random September night. It all sort of sticks in my head only to bubble up at some inopportune moment.
I also have trouble knowing when it’s time to move to the next step in a thing. I don’t mean like when it’s time to go to step 4 in a recipe, I mean like when I’ve done enough of something and there’s not much more I can do to it so I should move onto the next thing.
For a long time, this was perfectionism. I thought I could make my Dad proud if I did the right thing flawlessly and I’d do all my trial and error in secret until I could only show him the best results and then he’d love me. That didn’t work because even when I got things right he didn’t care and when it took forever to get things right I felt like a failure because “everyone” was counting on me to do it perfectly.
The truth is that he was never going to communicate that he loved me or was proud of me (sincerely, not in that someone-could-hear-so-I-have-to-keep-up-appearances way of his) and that I never needed what I did or who I was to be perfect because perfect isn’t a thing.
You can’t say “I did my best” if you’re not willing to accept that the “best” is as close to perfect as you’re going to get. Conceptually, best is still damn good, and absolutely worth praise and support, even if best isn’t one thousand million percent without flaws.
Perfect is conditional, not absolute. Things are perfect for a point in time and a situation. Change any element of that moment and things may not be perfect. The witty one-liner that charms a person might fall flat if you overthink it. The steak will overcook if you leave it on the fire another minute. Perfect is highly subjective and finite, even when we blow it up to hugely permanent and objective degrees.
What you’re writing doesn’t have to be perfect before you move on to the next thing. Not at a sentence level, not at a chapter level. Not even at a book level. If you spend all your time and effort trying to make each thing perfect before you move forward, you’ll slow and eventually kill your progress as you paralyze yourself trying to figure out how something subjective like situational perfection needs to transmogrify into something permanent.
This gets even more absurd if we’re talking about first drafts. Of course the first draft isn’t going to be and doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s the first draft, it’s expected to change. No one wants it to be perfect. No one needs it to be perfect.
Learning when a thing is “good enough” doesn’t mean that it’s barely tolerable enough to scrape by like me in a math class. It’s good, and that’s enough. Onto the next thing. You can always go back and try again with more experience and a new situation and a new moment.
Developing that education isn’t about gaining something (maybe you can say you’re gaining a sense of trust) as it is about losing a degree of assumed imperfection - you’re less bad at a thing than you were before, so you don’t have to try and re-try and re-re-re-re-re-re-re-try to make it better.
I wish I learned that sooner. I think I’d be more content with all the things I’m producing.
We can debate why I was slow to learn these things or why I’m only getting some of them now. We can hash out what if any of them are relevant to you and if some things are more critical to you now versus yesterday.
My point is this, as it is so often with what I say and write is to say it as much to myself as to you, that we can all learn and grow and get better at making the things we make with fewer obstacles and less self-doubt.
Tell me what you think. What piece of advice stuck out to you? What are you struggling with? And what do you think you need to take that next step forward?
Love you. Talk soon.
Nicely phrased. So many of us have been trained to strive for perfection, a subjective goal that everyone perceives differently but we assume is objective. Thank you for pointing that out so clearly. Be well!