Are you feeling pressure to publish your book? A sense that you’re not a ‘real’ author unless you publish? I recently wrote a post about shipping your book and then leaving it at sea. I reference Steve Jobs, who told his staff at Apple, ‘You must ship.’
Actually, these are the exact words he said, in a 1983 speech to the Apple Macintosh development team: ‘Real artists ship.’ Of course, Steve was trying to inspire his team to share the products they were developing. Was he making a statement about all creatives in all artistic fields? Probably not. But that neat little aphorism has gone on to haunt some writers (and artists and composers etc., I imagine). If you don’t publish your book, does that mean you’re not a real author? Actually, no. If you look up the word ‘author’ in most dictionaries, you’ll see that publishing the book isn’t integral to the definition. Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of ‘author’: ‘The writer of a book or other work.’ And if we look at the etymology of ‘author’, we see that it’s derived from Latin and Old French words meaning ‘creator, one who brings about, one who makes or creates’. If you write a book, you’re an author. A real artist. ‘I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.’ – E.B. White Writing is hard sometimes. I know this, because I’m a writer too. Some days the words flow; some days I get in my own way. I wrote the following piece years ago, after working with an author who was having a really hard time. You write, though you haven’t the time. You write, though you haven’t the energy. You write, though you haven’t the confidence. You write, though you haven’t a chance (you fear). You write, though others don’t see your vision. You write, though you can’t be Hemingway. You write, though you open yourself to criticism. You write, though you may not reach The End. You write, though the words fight back. You write, though the muse is elusive. You write, though you itch to censor. You write, though your last book bombed. You write, though it exhausts you. You write, though it haunts you. You write, though it terrifies you. You write, though you bleed. You write Because it’s all you can do With a head that thinks prose And a heart that beats poetry; You write, because no matter the struggle You are a writer. Be kind to yourself, fellow writer, and kind to other writers too. We’re all sitting at typewriters and bleeding.* With my best wishes, * ‘It is easy to write. Just sit in front of your typewriter and bleed.’ – Ernest Hemingway
PS: I don’t like the second stanza of this poem. I nearly rewrote it. Then I remembered: once you've shipped your work, leave it at sea. Going back and rewriting something you wrote years ago isn’t a) productive or b) kind. On resisting the urge to re-edit your published book... Steve Jobs famously told Apple employees, ‘You must ship’, meaning that delivery is essential. Creatives can easily get lost in their art and fail to ship it, usually due to an inability to accept the endeavour as complete and ready to share with the world.
Shipping requires courage and self-discipline, and it requires staying power. That means leaving the book as it is once you’ve published it. Not re-editing it. Of course, it’s fine to publish a new edition in which you’ve corrected a typo that slipped through the proofreading net. But fiddling and tinkering and reworking... ask yourself: is this really helping me in my writing journey? Every author is capable of looking at a past work and pulling it to pieces. But in doing so, you’re looking backwards, not forwards; you’re pulling a piece of art out of the time to which it belongs; you’re beating your younger writer self with a large, prickly stick. Toying with a book for months, years even, isn’t helpful because:
Are you living the dream as an author? Or have you got a little lost along the way? Remember all the long years that you yearned to become an author, and you envisioned what that would feel like? I wonder: is the reality everything you’d hoped it would be? Or have you slipped into feeling miserable for any (or many) of the following reasons:
I’ve been working one-on-one with authors for more than 18 years, and in that time I’ve known plenty who’ve become disappointed, perhaps even bitter, that the reality of being an author doesn’t meet their expectations. They grit their teeth and plough on, until they reach breaking point. For some, that’s after one book; for others, after five or ten. But it’s a safe bet that for those authors who really aren’t enjoying writing, the end will come, and it won’t be in the form of a three-book deal from Bloomsbury. Robert Frost wrote: ‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.’ To that I would add: ‘No enjoyment for the writer, no enjoyment for the reader.’ |
A blog for authors...Writing. Editing. Publishing. Creativity. Inspiration. Books, books, books.
‘If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.’ – Toni Morrison Recent postsCategories |