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If you’re a writer trying to decide whether to self-publish or pursue traditional publishing (or go for both), I’m participating in an online panel event this week you might find interesting. “MONEY in Self-Publishing and Traditional Publishing” is presented by The Word. It’s Wednesday, January 24, 2024 at 12:30pm ET and you can register to attend here.
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📝 Going Slow
Two different posts about the value of slowness came through my inboxes this week and got me thinking.
“How to Feel Good About Going Slow,” over at the excellent
newsletter uses baking to illustrate why it’s important to go slow in your creative endeavors and to underscore that things just take as long as they take, regardless of the recipe.Even if I’ve made a recipe 10 or 20 times, I need to pay attention each time I make it because a recipe isn’t an algorithm; it’s a system. It’s a system that connects to the humidity in the air, the temperature of the kitchen, and the force I knead with.
After writing over a dozen books, I know that I have a process, but it also is a system that depends on so many things in my life, like my emotions, my health, my environment, and more.
I went gluten-free a couple of years ago (which improved my life tremendously) and since I have an allergy to rice flour—unfortunately included virtually all gluten-free baked goods—I’ve missed out on some of my favorite treats. However, I received a bread machine this Christmas and that, plus the discovery of an excellent gluten and rice-free flour, has put me back in business with baking. Though I grew up baking a lot—cakes and biscuits mostly—I’d never attempted any sort of yeast bread before, but now I’m trying all sorts of recipes.
I’m also starting to plot a new book (well, two) and stated one morning in my writing co-working session that it would take a few weeks or months to get the plot down. My friend (and fast writer)
looked at me like I was crazy. But I’ve been getting that look from her for almost thirty years, so I’m used to it.To someone who can plot a novella in an afternoon, it sounds odd, but I know that stories come out of me only with time and patience. When I try to rush it, things go wrong. Kind of like that time when I was rushing to put everything into the bread machine before heading to a meeting, and dumped in the last ingredient, the yeast, only to discover I’d forgotten to put the paddle in the bottom.
That tiny little part is the thing that literally makes the machine function. So while laugh-crying, I scooped out everything as best I could, inserted the paddle, and then put the ingredients back in. Bread was made, but it was… special.
Anyway, trying to rush a book feels absolutely awful. Deadlines are real and I find them valuable, but not at the early idea generation stage. Not when the idea is not even formed enough to become dough, it’s still the seed from which the wheat (or teff and oats in my case) will grow to become the flour that will make the dough.
“In Pursuit of A Masterpiece” by
comes at the topic from another angle. As the title indicates, she’s set her goals extremely high.…the artists who have shut everything else off and learned to follow their own voice create something truly unique, something that might be called a masterpiece. Oh art will always imitate art, but I think a masterpiece imitates something of ourselves first.
As an author, I sit at the intersection of extremely different precincts of the publishing industry. I’m hybrid, so I publish independently and with traditional Big 5 publishers. I started my career completely indie, so I have deep roots in that space even though the majority of my writing income comes from trad.
Being a part of conversations with authors who have had incredible success in both spheres of publishing gives me a unique perspective. One group is all about strategies and tactics. Marketing and email list-building. Ads, discounts, box sets, selling direct, and a hundred other topics.
The other group is concerned with agents and editors, advances and royalties, bestseller lists, awards, bookstore and librarian outreach, print runs, festivals and conventions, etc.
And even within each of those sub-industries, there are ways to drill down further. KU vs. wide. Literary fiction vs. commercial. Hardcover vs. trade paperback. The list goes on and on.
I think there’s yet another way to categorize writers—those who want to write to entertain and those who want to write masterpieces. As Griffin writes:
When I’ve completed Oblivion, I want to feel like I’ve created a Magnum Opus, my glistening theory of utopia.
I’ll admit, I don’t personally know many writers who would admit to trying to create a masterpiece, at least not out loud within the hearing of other people. Is it a desire most keep locked inside their hearts? Perhaps.
Ines Johnson likes to say she writes “crack.” I take that to mean short, consumable stories that scratch a very specific itch and make the reader crave more. Reading Griffin’s piece, it seems like she’s aiming to write… I don’t know, ayahuasca, maybe. (This metaphor needs a fancy, non-addictive drug that people would be okay taking only once. I’ve been completely straight-edge my whole life, so my knowledge of drugs is limited.) How about we switch to a somewhat more relatable comparison—MacDonald’s french fries (which are basically crack) vs. say, fondant potatoes from a Michelin star restaurant?
I think we should be able to talk openly about these very different desires without judgment. Both can lead to both personal and professional success and fulfillment, but they’re coming from very different places.
The pursuit of a masterpiece puts you on a disparate trajectory to the writers who publish a book every month to take advantage of the Amazon algorithm. These two creators are not playing in the same ballpark, and I wonder if they’re even in the same sport.
The division of goals is echoed by McMullin:
The philosopher Kieran Setiya divides our activities into two categories: telic and atelic. Telic activities are those that we do for their end product. The purpose of telic activities is to get to the end. But atelic activities are those we do to do them. The purpose of atelic activities is that the process of doing them has value.
Griffin bears this out:
I love having a slower thing, the carefully perfected art I spend my life meandering through, the thing that could become a masterpiece.
When it’s the process of writing that you enjoy, divorced from the final product, your motivation, methods, and expectations are different. Which is not to say that the end product doesn’t matter, it just matters somewhat less than how you get there.1
As a reader, I consume books of various kinds. I also write books of various kinds, in multiple sub-genres, with wide-ranging motivations and inspirations behind them. We all contain multitudes, right?
Both of these posts accurately highlight the fact that going fast is not for everyone. There’s a lot of pressure in our current world to produce with more speed, but creativity is delicate. For some, sprinting is easy, while for others it will just result in lumpy, lopsided bread.
Just some food for thought.
💡Upcoming Live Workshop
The Second Draft and Beyond: How to Revise Your Novel
Have a rough first draft but stuck on the revisions? Learn how to analyze your own work, identify issues, and make an organized plan to take your novel from draft to finished in this live workshop on Monday, Jan. 29, 7pm ET for premium subscribers.
“Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
—Howard Thurman
🎙️ Ink & Magic podcast: Ep 10 - Marriage of Convenience
Join bestselling authors (and former college roommates) Ines Johnson and L. Penelope as they read and discuss the writing craft, worldbuilding, and romance of paranormal and fantasy novels.
This week, we breakdown Ines’s favorite trope to write: the Marriage of Convenience story (MoC), where characters marry for reasons other than love, such as financial gain or social necessity.
Forget something borrowed or blue, Ines presents her Seven Must-Haves to Successfully Pull Off a MoC as she and Leslye explore this compelling romantic trope, its enduring appeal, and its reflection of changing societal views on relationships.
Thanks for reading! You can also:
After all, even before AI became an existential threat to writers, some people were outsourcing their book creation to ghost writers, or content farms in other countries, or simply plagiarizing (or some combination of these things) so they could publish more, faster.