“Success is shy — it won’t come out while you’re watching,” said Tennessee Williams.
When faced with challenges in and with our work, we writers rely on the wisdom of famous writers, but Williams’ bit of information comes as bad news for me. For years I’ve been expecting my personal writing projects to magically sprout into a successful, creative writing career. It’s been so long now that I have to finally acknowledge that my office job is not the temporary stop-over I once believed it to be, and release any resentment I’ve been feeling toward my 9–5 work.
6. Continue under all circumstances.
“Don’t give up. Really, don’t give up,” advises Natalie Goldberg in an issue of The Writer. “Continue under all circumstances.”
Yes, persistence is at the top of the cheerleading list, and like you, I have continued under all circumstances, encouraged by editors, instructors, and other writers. Keep writing, they said, so I did. I wrote through maternity leave, through a career change, between corporate writing assignments, while juggling continuing education classes, while recuperating from a serious motor vehicle collision. I wrote as my son traversed through childhood. I wrote as he moved through his teens. I wrote as he stepped into young adulthood. I made time in every corner of my personal life to write, too often to the exclusion of family and friends, determined to build a creatively fulfilling and sustainable freelance writing career.
This learned resilience produced a satisfying livelihood with room for freelance and corporate work, for fiction, non-fiction, and technical writing.
5. Expect to work for The Man.
Anna Deavere Smith offers this nugget of truth in her book Letters to a Young Artist: “. . . you always have to deal with the Man. The Man is important to your survival.” In other words, don’t quit your day job.
I could have saved myself years of grievances and contempt for my day job had I expected, and accepted, that I need The Man for a base salary, if nothing else. We all need an income. To keep the lights on, feed and clothe our selves, our dependents, but some of us struggle against our reliance on office work. It makes us feel caged-in, trapped by a steady paycheck, or hemmed in by healthy hourly rates. In doing so, our circumstances give us wonderful excuses for resenting our day jobs, maybe even an excuse for not fully engaging in our creative instincts. (See #6.)
4. Hope, art, confidence, and a plan.
Novelist Lorrie Moore suggested to readers of The Paris Review that writers need the following: “… some sort of foolish hope, but also a deep involvement with one’s art, some sort of useful self-confidence, and some kind of economic plan.”
It may be easy to blame employers for stealing creative energy and artistic impulses, but somehow we manage, with foolish hope, to routinely make time for our passion projects. Like you, I have a deep involvement with my art, while over time self-confidence quietly worked its way into my work over time, but as for that economic plan my only plan has been to keep my day job as a technical writer and have someone pay me to improve my skills. (See #5).
With a regular writing practice, I’ve grown content with the process rather than focusing solely on making my efforts pay off. However, we can’t overlook the need for financial stability.
3. (Re)define success.
The late Maya Angelou reminded us that self-expression is its own form of success: “Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”
Likewise, Anna Deavere Smith tell us to stop defining success by the money we make from our creative work, “Artists are in a business in which there is absolutely no direct relationship between effort and success.”
Most days I enjoy the work my day job brings me, so then why do I continue to define success through such a narrow scope of working full-time at my creative work? There is a why for my day job and creative projects to co-exist without hostility. (See #4).
2. Focus on the work.
Keep submitting your work, but consider this advice offered by writer Russell Banks: “Keep your career and your work separate from one another. Don’t confuse the two in any way whatsoever because they are completely separate. One of them you can control and that’s your work; the other you can’t control and that’s your career. Let it take on its own momentum, for better or worse.”
Squeezing hard for results (read: publication), the more scrambled and inconsistent your efforts may be, but by letting go of expectation allows you to focus on artistic expression instead of trying to control the course of your career.
If you’re looking for a spiritual slant on this advice, it’s this: “You don’t give up the intention, and you don’t give up the desire,” Deepak Chopra advises in The Seven Spiritual Steps to Success. “You give up your attachment to the results.”
Detach, if you can. It’s holding you back. And keep working (see #6).
1. Stay connected to the material.
Don’t lose connection with the work,” writer Stuart O’Nan tells us, “because it takes too long to get back into it.”
In Brad Listi’s Other People podcast, O’Nan explains that keeping your manuscript with you, in the way an actor keeps a script close, allows you to keep connected to it.
Take your manuscript with you to your workplace every day, he advises because “Somewhere in your day you are going to have five minutes. And if in five minutes, you can fix something from yesterday with fresh eyes, or if you can move it forward one sentence, that’s a huge victory.”
I have since tried it, and it is working. This is indeed a huge victory.