Two quick, great things

An unplanned addendum to yesterday's post

So, I know you don’t need posts from me two days in a row. However, since I posted yesterday about burnout and a quiet season, I’ve come across two things that I definitely would’ve included in that post, and I feel compelled to share them because they’re just so great.

First, I was reading Writers on Writing last night and, no lie, I opened to a random essay and landed on this one from 1999: “Goofing Off While the Muse Recharges” by author Richard Ford. It was so exactly what I needed to hear and reinforced my need for a quiet season.

A few quotes but I really suggest you read the whole thing…

“But I never imagined I was in this business to break the writers' land speed record, or to put up big numbers (except, I've hoped, big numbers of readers). In any case, if I had written more and stopped less, not only would I have driven myself completely crazy, but almost certainly I would have proved even less good at writing stories than I am. Anyway, it's my business what I do. There are finally some things about ourselves that we know best.

Most writers write too much. Some writers write way too much, gauged by the quality of their accumulated oeuvre.”

“For me the benefits of taking time off between big writing projects -- novels, let's say -- seem both manifest and manifold. For one thing, you get to put lived life first…Art after all (even writing) is always subordinate to life, always following it along. And life -- that multifarious, multidimensional, collisional freight train of thoughts and sensations you experience away from your desk, when you walk down 56th Street or drive to Memphis -- can be quite bracing (if you can just stand it) as well as useful for filling up the "well of unconscious cerebration" that Henry James thought contributed to the writer's ability actually to connect bliss and bale.”

I love the notion of lived life comes first. I think we forget that sometimes.

Then, after that article, I ran across this post. Seems I wasn’t the only one thinking about the concept of “be so good they can’t ignore you.” This post by Shawn Smucker is talking about focusing on craft instead of platform. Be sure to watch the clips of Steve Martin and Matt Damon that he includes.

That Thing I Never Should Have Done

A quote from the post that gave me an oof feeling:

“One of the biggest problems with platform building is that we keep building platforms even when the work for building platforms interferes with our time to create what we’re here to create in the first place. We’ve encouraged an entire generation of writers to care more about how many followers they have than about how to tell a good story, or create a character, or be specific, or escalate the story, or recognize what’s working in their manuscript and what’s not.

If many of us writers were honest, we’d look back on the last ten years of our lives and wonder what we were doing. Why did we spend so much time chasing a platform and so little time learning, practicing, failing, and trying again?”

Sometimes, when I’m trying these things that I talk about here—taking time off, refocusing on craft, ignoring my social media and marketing—I have these moments where I feel like I’m on an island doing weird shit that’s going to get me in trouble, lol. So, it feels really nice when I come across other writers who are out there saying—hey, this is how it works for me too or this is how I feel too.

We can all be weird together! :)

Okay, that is all for now. Have a great holiday weekend!

Roni

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