Your expectations are a problem.
What you think about what you're supposed to be doing is worth talking about
Welcome back to the Writers Secret Weapon, the newsletter for writers looking for more than repeated advice. I’m John and it’s my pleasure and passion to help you write better. After 20+ years working in publishing and with writers, I’m excited to share with you what I’ve learned to help you reach your creative goals.
Just like all the podcasts, streams, videos, Patreon, and newsletters, The Writers Secret Weapon is entirely audience supported. If this newsletter is something you’d like to support, please feel free to buy me a root beer and I’ll keep making material to help people to write better.
This week I’ve got some text and I’ve got some audio for you as well, because there wasn’t one easy way for me to express to you that you’re making creativity, which is already hard, even harder by setting yourself up against a number of metrics, assumptions about how you’re supposed to be doing whatever you’re doing, and how whatever you’re making should be in terms of its qualities, identities, and size.
And maybe worse than all those things, you might not even be sure why you’re doing it.
how this started
In a recent Chat, as well as in a significant number of appointments with people in the last week or so, I had to talk about why writing was taking “so long” or why it wasn’t “better” at a faster rate. Time is frequently a problem for writers, either in finding time in a schedule to write or holding themselves to some schedule or calendar not their own.
This isn’t a great way of seeing time as a concept when we’re trying to make something. It’s flexible enough so that 15, 20 or even 60 minutes can be carved out of an already busy day but somehow simultaneously rigid and inflexible enough that it’s supposed to take a certain amount of time to write a book or make an album or paint canvas.
So my response to this, when it came up time and again, was to ask the person from where they picked up or from what they shaped their thinking. How did they get to where they’re at?
Most of them time the answers were vague - people weren’t sure or they just “felt it” or they heard about it from “somewhere” and then adopted it as their own.
There’s always room for more exploration when it comes to how you structure your thinking, especially with something as fundamental as what you expect of yourself and your work. Really take time to see not only what you believe but how you got those ideas in your head. This is particularly true if those thoughts are frequent and your complaints or frustrations about who you are and how you are and what you’re doing are numerous and loud.
Let’s start with some foundational things I’m hoping you agree with.
points to consider
Everyone making something is going to make something in a way that doesn’t necessarily look like someone else’s way to make something. Creativity is not uniform. It’s not factory mass production, it’s not churned out according to templates and programming. How I make a thing is not how you make a thing, and it’s not supposed to be the same way.
Everyone has different routes to their goals, and no one way is more deserving of reward or success than another. People can publish books through traditional channels, or they can pursue self-publishing. They can use Amazon, or they can sell without Amazon. Whatever someone chooses, from Fansly to Onlyfans to Etsy to Payhip to Gumroad to WooCommerce and everything in between, is a valid mode of production, even if it’s different from the avenue or platform you’d choose for yourself. My choice for me does not make your choice for you automatically worse or wrong.
Everyone has different specific goals even if the general goals are similar. People want to be “published” for instance, but there are a number of ways to do that, and a number of platforms to distribute their work for sale. The diversity of goals is a good thing, because it means we all have options and opportunities and aren’t all herded into cattle chutes of one giant river-named corporation.
a nice bit of audio
I thought it was easier to put together a few more thoughts in audio. Transcript below.
Our expectations are killing us. Our expectations about how things have to be, or should be, or need to be in order for something else to exist, or be true, or be right, or good, or something. It's, it's killing us. When we talk about being a writer, there's no other expectation that should matter beyond whether or not you're writing.
Not about making a certain quality of writing, not about writing a certain quantity of writing, but just the fact that writing exists where previously there wasn't any writing. That's, that's the expectation we should have in a world that is divorced from its frustrations and separated from its competition or its capitalism or its commodification or anything like that.
We should be focusing just on, hey writer, are you making a thing? And worry about the adjectives we tie to it or it's alleged needs or it's output quality or anything like that. Far second or third past just the fact that you should be just free and clear and comfortable to make something. And I understand the world is so far from a utopia.
I understand the world is so far from that place where Art is supported and artists are encouraged and we get to work on what we love as opposed to somehow working to survive. I hate that concept. I hate that talk. I hate that message we give people that your art, this thing for a lot of us that brings joy.
In a world that is so often joyless or of reduced joy for us that our joy making and our contentment and our exploration of ourselves and our understanding of connection with others has to be secondary to some other force, usually something making money, and we're supposed to be okay with that. And we should just expect to somehow be able to Make it all work that we should be able to work an increasingly Unrewarding job at an unyielding schedule at an unreasonable pace And then all of a sudden also have just somehow some kind of reboot I guess on the commute back to the house Where we will suddenly be graced with energy as though we just sprang out of the most restful sleep ever and then go have a productive chunk of time spent on work and then You know, creating for ourselves, then going back to sleep and going to a day job.
I hate that one of the reasons why I do what I do. One of the reasons why I work the way I do to the degree I do is because it's my maybe childish, maybe fruitless, maybe harmful way of pushing back against that expectation. Because I believe it is possible for a number of people, not just one in a blue moon or one needle in a haystack, but a number of people to seize control, not only of the means of production, but seize control of the engine by which they produce joy.
And when I talk to more and more writers, and I see more and more people getting progressively frustrated and disappointed in themselves, and I ask them, what's making them unhappy? What's the source of your displeasure? Why are you letting this just wreck you as hard and as quickly as you do? There is almost Always some kind of expectation, an expectation in time, things should be going faster, an expectation in quality.
I shouldn't be making this many mistakes and expectation in output. I should be done by now and expectation in reward. I have to do it this way in order to get the thing I want and expectation in overall skill. You know, everybody told me I was gifted and talented as a kid and now here I am. Why am I getting rejected as a, as a writer?
You know, there are a thousand expectations about how people should react and respond to what we do. Why are they rejecting me so much? What are they not understanding? What's wrong with me that they're not liking my query letter? There, there's a, there's so many expectations and we've birthed them out of assumptions.
And of course we've birthed those assumptions out of the things we've absorbed or learned from our environment. And I think addressing at least the assumption part is hard because it means taking a look at yourself taking a look at how you define things, taking a look at the atmosphere and the stew that from which you evolved the people, the input, what you took is serious and what you took is as lighthearted, what you took is true and what you took is false, measuring that and mixing that together in such a way as to produce You, as you are.
I have met in my life, hundreds if not thousands of writers by this point. I've never really stopped to count, but I know it's a lot. I've met a lot of writers. Some who are best sellers, some who are very famous, some who have just started today, some who have been going for a few years, and everybody in between.
Met a lot of writers. Every single one of them has had some kind of expectation that they have tried to, at the very least, reach, but ideally exceed. And I've never understood why. I've never understood why they use this as evidence that they're motivated. Evidence that... They're working hard as if just an increasing word count Wasn't enough you went from a hundred words to 300 words.
You added 200 words. That's that's evidence that you worked Why do you have to show me how out of breath and exhausted you are? You're not wrong for being out of breath and exhausted, but why did you have to work to that degree? Why did you have to turn it almost into a performance? For some of these people to demonstrate that you're working hard.
Did you think you would not be believed? Did you think you would not be accepted unless you were, you know, near exhaustion? Who taught you that? Why do we not talk about this more? Why do we not think about this more? Why do we not truly question what we expect? Is it because we're afraid we don't know the answers or we're afraid we won't find the answers or afraid we'll be dissatisfied with the answers?
I think I'm afraid to look at it because I would have to change something I believe in myself. I tend to think of myself as being woefully inadequate. If you start naming ways in which a guy, a male identifying person, can perceive himself to be inadequate, I will start telling you that I have had those concerns.
Whether we're talking about physical dimensions and size and musculature and body parts or whether we're talking about intelligence or, uh, academic erudition or tone or kindness or compassion or something, you name it. I have either had that issue and that expectation of things needing to be a certain way, or I am currently having it now.
And chances are, honestly. I'm, I'm currently having it now and it's left me in a position now at 45 years old where I routinely think I'm not good enough, I'm not good enough, I don't quite know how to get better. Everyone, the majority of people, are disappointed by me. And trying... Like, going out of my way to try harder to fix that will only make it worse.
That is my default thinking. That's what happens in relationships with me. That is what happens in interactions with me. That is what happens family wise and sometimes in work if I'm not careful. Like, that's just how shit is. And I'm afraid so often to take a look at my expectations and take a look at the assumptions that bred those expectations because I think I'm afraid that I would have to change that baseline definition of myself.
One of the hardest things in the world I had to deal with was grappling with the idea that I'm actually nice. And I know that sounds ridiculous, but I cultivated for 20 years a persona online as a way of protecting myself from Emotion that I wasn't nice that I was mean that I was an asshole that I was a jerk and When that became too exhausting to bear when that started closing more doors instead of opening them I had to let it go and that left me feeling very underprepared very inept very much like a newborn Uh, I don't know, hooved animal who's trying to figure out where their legs are.
didn't quite know how to walk, move, and manipulate within the world. And, uh, it, it left me feeling out of place. I have only, I would say in the last three to five years, really gotten a sense of like, how to... Move, if we're carrying my metaphor along, I think expectations do that. I think expectations have this way of becoming a definition for somebody without ever really sitting down and being explicit.
If you start looking at your expectations, you might find that they're not explicit. You might find that they're sort of implied. They're kind of beat around the bush. They're a little bit vague. It should just be better. Something should just be better. I should be done. It should be faster. And there's no, there's no more words in the sentence.
It just stops there. And the open-endedness of that sentence is part of the problem. Because so long as that idea stays less specified, as long as that sentence stays open ended, I don't have to be satisfied. I don't have to be happy. I don't have to accept things. I can always... Just keep kicking my own ass and feeling bad.
I can keep drowning under the weight of my expectation if I never get specific. And I'm scared to get specific because I'll have to confront this idea I hold and maybe I'll find out it's bullshit, that it doesn't hold water. That's a lot to grapple with. That can change the whole tenor and complexion of how someone is creative, let alone what they're creative about.
If I suddenly started admitting I was good enough at stuff, well, I'd feel really weird when I sat down and kept telling myself, I wasn't because the feeling I have and the thing I'd say would be at odds with each other. I don't know how I would handle that. So, better not to examine it. Better to skip it.
Better to just keep the expectation. And keep feeling awkward. Keep feeling out of place. Right? That's what we do. That's what we tell ourselves. We maintain these expectations. We don't question them. We don't look at them. We don't, we don't stare them down and try to break them down and figure them out.
We just say they're there and we don't really make a lot of strong eye contact with it. We just keep living like it's a thing. And that it's as real and valid as the way it makes us feel. But expectations can be changed. It takes a little bit of work. It takes a little bit of effort. You gotta, you know, try.
It's scary. You might find some things are true that you thought were untrue or find some things that were untrue that you believed were true and that might tip your apple cart. That might upset some things. You might feel uncomfortable. And the size of that uncomfort discomfort, the size and scope of that feeling might be hard to grapple with in the course of like an afternoon with, you know, a cup of tea and a cookie, you might, you might have to, you know, do a little bit of work and do a little bit of seeking and do a little bit of thinking.
You might need to seek professional help. You might need to go talk to someone who has training. You might have to go admit that you need help. You might have to shake loose things that you have held on to for 40 plus years. I don't know. I don't know if you're going to definitely have to do that or not.
I don't know if we should be doing this or talking about this for literally every expectation. Sometimes I think so. And sometimes I think that's ridiculous, because if I'm going to question literally every expectation I have, I'm going to get stuck questioning whether or not a light switch works, because I throw it, and I expect the light to go on.
Or if I'm only talking about these specific expectations. You get to question and design every part of your creative life. You get to question and design and figure out, not only how you want to do what you want to do, but if you even want to do it. But know this, and understand this. Once you start that questioning and interrogatory process, it's important that you keep asking questions and pushing and probing until you get answers.
But that doesn't mean keep doing it until you get answers that are all universally happy. And that you get everything you want. This isn't a slot machine where we can afford to keep playing until we always and only win jackpots. This is a slot machine and sometimes we pull the lever and we end up with a jackpot, but it's smaller than we thought.
Or we end up losing out. But that's, that's the reality of things. We have to face that reality. I think too often writers take that sense of reality and turn it into some kind of like strange, toxic, uh, I'm going to call it Midwest pragmatism that they're just being realistic. They don't want to take a compliment.
They don't want to accept that they're okay with something because it's, while it is okay, it's not this massively glowing super endorsement that matches their expectation. I, I don't know how to wrestle with that. I'm still working on that. Maybe we'll do another newsletter about that kind of thinking because I don't have any writing based examples.
I just have the example of talking to somebody and complimenting them on something and then having them downplay that compliment and being told that they're just being realistic because I guess the compliment made them feel uncomfortable. Maybe they thought it was too hyperbolic. I don't know. I'm still working through that thought.
The point is, to bring us back to where we're supposed to be, the point is that we get to design and construct how we engage with our creativity. And the reasons behind it... And the reasons how we continue to do it and the skills we employ and the choices we make and what our end goals are and how they are to be realized and we get to set where the goalposts are and we figure out how we're going to reach them.
We're in charge of that, not other people, even though it's a real tempting to look out the window and see what everybody else is doing and then just try to ape that because they appear to be happy or they appear to be successful and we. In that moment of comparison, feel less than happy and less successful than them because we don't immediately have their tangible reward.
I get it. I really do. But the, the point is that we get to design all of this stuff, but we can't do that designing without some kind of. Awareness that we have expectations in the first place, and there exists an equal possibility of those expectations not being entirely positive. They can be good expectations, turn on the light switch, get the light to turn on, but there can also equally be unhealthy expectation that we are pushing too hard to chase down, even though they are impractical or unhealthy to do, like A good writer, I'm making air quotes, a good writer writes at a certain pace and writes at a certain schedule.
Maybe that's true, but it's not universally and always true. Some days you need to, you know, what do you do if they break their hand? What do they do if, you know, they have to take both their kids somewhere in a single day and they're just really busy? Are they suddenly no longer a good writer? Do you, do you have to build up like a bank of credit?
You know, you've got 30 days of good writing. So if today's the day, like your kids both get sick and you can't write, does that, does that offset one of those good days of writing? What are the rules for your expectations and what is it going to take for you to really start thinking and seeing and perceiving that your expectations maybe possibly are kind of bullshit.
What's that going to take? You are innately good enough. You are good enough to, at the very least, make the effort. Ideally, you are good enough to succeed on some level for some period of time. And the amount of success and the momentum of that success is relative not to some kind of predetermined set of conditions, but It's relative to the amount of effort you put in in the face of predetermined conditions.
Things like systemic procedural disparities and rules that operate outside our control create a sense of friction between you and your momentum and it's how we navigate them that allows us to kind of slip past them or carve out our success in the face of them. Those things matter, those things are realistic and part of this whole process.
But at the very least, you need to recognize that you are good enough to operate your creative engines and perform your creative tasks without, without being driven or defined by your expectation. You are not automatically bad and wrong for having the expectation. I don't think you should be shunned. I don't think you should be, you know, booted out into the wilderness just because you expect a certain thing.
But I think you are setting yourself up for far more disappointment and frustration when you let that expectation be bigger. When you let that expectation overshadow the effort. You put in and the pride you feel from that effort. I don't know many writers who take a great deal of pride in the small steps towards their goal.
I know a lot of writers who see their small steps and see the poverty in them, the weakness in them, the lack of good in them. Because they're still, they're, they're so fixed on the enormity and distance away from the goal. And that's frankly the wrong way to think about things. And I think the reason why they are willing to adopt that thinking is because they have an expectation, but you don't have to have one.
You can let it go slowly bit by bit. I'm not saying it's something as simple as just poof and it goes away. I think this is more a matter of really sitting down. And figuring out what it is you expect and whether or not that's reasonable. Too often when we, when we assign somebody an exercise, like you go to therapy or you go see a coach of some kind, they give you an exercise to do.
And I think too often in those circumstances, we tailor our answers in the moment. We maybe don't always give them exactly what they want to hear to get them off our back, but. On the spot, I don't think we are as necessarily as honest or vulnerable as we need to be because if we're uncomfortable at all, we want it to stop.
So what's going to make it stop? Let's give it some kind of massaged procedural manufactured answer. And my challenge to you in this moment is to do better than that, which is why I'm shifting to audio. It's a lot easier for me to be. Vulnerable and more open if you're willing to endure a few pauses as I collect my thoughts, you'll you'll get a less of polished answer as I sit here and talk about expectation and how we all need you, me, the person next to you, the person over there, three other people you're thinking of off the top of your head.
We all need to do some very intense work at times, jettisoning and just getting rid of shedding our expectations and rebuilding a set of new rules where what we expect of ourselves is not guided by some distant goalpost, but a new set of. Precepts to operate by based and rooted entirely in what we want to accomplish and how we can do that with our best skills and intentions and selves put front and center, not our lack, not our deficiencies, not our perceived weaknesses, not our failings, not all the ways we swear up and down every day that we're not good enough.
I think that's something really worth thinking about and I hope in the last. 20 minutes of this. I've given you something to think about. I love you. I'll talk to you next week.
Love you. Talk soon.