If you’re a writer—particularly if you’re a fiction writer, or a poet (you poor thing)—you know how it feels to work your creativity to the bone for little reward.
You can change all that. All you need is a little self-deception.
The trouble with many of us writers is we set challenging and often unrealistic goals, expectations and standards with regard to our work and our financial gains related to it. We all aim to create books of Cormac McCarthy-type quality and rake in J.K. Rowling-type sales figures. And when we inevitably end up falling ridiculously short, we brood, question our talent, and seriously consider pawning our laptop and thesaurus.
There’s no need for us writers to be so hard on ourselves. Leave that to literary agents and publishers, and to readers who comment on our Amazon page after we self-publish. What we need are a few easy wins, a couple of small accomplishments, to help inspire us to keep fighting the good fight and writing the good (or at least mediocre) write.
What we need is to lower the bar a bit.
With that in mind, following are some slightly less lofty goals, expectations and standards to shoot for going forward:
Write one hundred words a day. Stop being so ridiculously ambitious with your one thousand or two thousand words-a-day goal. All that does is leave you burnt out and disappointed. Now, a hundred words a day … that’s something you could do in your sleep, leaving you with a lot more time during the day to get drunk in celebration of your achievement.
Receive personalized rejection notices. Enough with your pipe dream of having a literary agent tell you she/he is interested in your novel. Just be happy when you get a rejection notice that actually includes your full name and the title of your book that will never get representation. Most agents these days either completely ignore queries or reject them with a form letter, so yeah, you’d better be proud when you get personally spurned. It means you’ve almost come close to making it.
No more than one typo… per page. With all the distractions of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Tinder, nobody can expect a writer to write totally clean copy, or even to catch their grammatical and spelling errors during the editing process. If you can keep your typos down to just one per manuscript page, you deserve a pat on the back and have earned the right to continue wasting valuable time on social media and dating apps.
Sell more than one copy the first week. All your friends and relatives and people you corner at gatherings and the grocery store will express tremendous interest in your novel, but only .001 percent of them will actually buy it. Knowing this going in will save you lots of disappointment and self-harm. Now, certainly your own mother or father (though probably not both) will buy your book immediately after it becomes available, so selling one copy the first week is nothing to cheer about. However, if another human being (and no, you don’t count) purchases your book the first week, you’re allowed to pretend to be proud. If five or more people buy your book the first week, you’re allowed to actually be proud.
Get two legitimate reviews on Amazon. Too many authors—especially newbies—eagerly check their Amazon page for rave reviews every few hours after releasing a book. First off, it’s difficult to garner a ton of reviews when only three people have read your book. Secondly, most people hate to take the time to write anything, aside from Facebook posts about their kid or how upset they are about the season finale of their favorite TV show. So waiting for a bunch of reviews to pour in is an exercise in futility. Set the bar at two reviews on Amazon (over the life of your book), and there’s a fair chance you’ll achieve your goal. Just don’t expect either of the reviews to be more than three stars. Remember, you’ve got to aim low to guarantee the illusion of success.
Win an award … of your own making. Forget about the PEN/Faulkner Award or the Man Booker Prize—those are for masters like Philip Roth and Don DeLillo or writers you’ve never heard of but who got their MFA at Brown. It’s easy to feel like a failure if you shoot only for the elite book awards. Still, winning at least some type of book award is essential to tricking yourself into thinking you’re a successful writer. That’s why I recommend vying for awards that have a minimal number of entrants, such as awards you yourself create. You’re a fiction writer, so there’s nothing wrong with winning a fictional award. Before I was lucky enough to win an Independent Publishers Award (“IPPY”) in 2015 for my novel The Exit Man, I was the proud recipient of such awards as “Best Dark Comedy About a Party Supply Store Owner Who Lives a Double Life as a Euthanasia Specialist” and “The Greg Levin Lifetime Achievement Award For Literary Brilliance.” Not to brag.
Feel free to leave a comment below. My goal used to be to get ten comments per blog post; now I’m following my own advice and shooting for one.
You can change all that. All you need is a little self-deception.
The trouble with many of us writers is we set challenging and often unrealistic goals, expectations and standards with regard to our work and our financial gains related to it. We all aim to create books of Cormac McCarthy-type quality and rake in J.K. Rowling-type sales figures. And when we inevitably end up falling ridiculously short, we brood, question our talent, and seriously consider pawning our laptop and thesaurus.
There’s no need for us writers to be so hard on ourselves. Leave that to literary agents and publishers, and to readers who comment on our Amazon page after we self-publish. What we need are a few easy wins, a couple of small accomplishments, to help inspire us to keep fighting the good fight and writing the good (or at least mediocre) write.
What we need is to lower the bar a bit.
With that in mind, following are some slightly less lofty goals, expectations and standards to shoot for going forward:
Write one hundred words a day. Stop being so ridiculously ambitious with your one thousand or two thousand words-a-day goal. All that does is leave you burnt out and disappointed. Now, a hundred words a day … that’s something you could do in your sleep, leaving you with a lot more time during the day to get drunk in celebration of your achievement.
Receive personalized rejection notices. Enough with your pipe dream of having a literary agent tell you she/he is interested in your novel. Just be happy when you get a rejection notice that actually includes your full name and the title of your book that will never get representation. Most agents these days either completely ignore queries or reject them with a form letter, so yeah, you’d better be proud when you get personally spurned. It means you’ve almost come close to making it.
No more than one typo… per page. With all the distractions of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Tinder, nobody can expect a writer to write totally clean copy, or even to catch their grammatical and spelling errors during the editing process. If you can keep your typos down to just one per manuscript page, you deserve a pat on the back and have earned the right to continue wasting valuable time on social media and dating apps.
Sell more than one copy the first week. All your friends and relatives and people you corner at gatherings and the grocery store will express tremendous interest in your novel, but only .001 percent of them will actually buy it. Knowing this going in will save you lots of disappointment and self-harm. Now, certainly your own mother or father (though probably not both) will buy your book immediately after it becomes available, so selling one copy the first week is nothing to cheer about. However, if another human being (and no, you don’t count) purchases your book the first week, you’re allowed to pretend to be proud. If five or more people buy your book the first week, you’re allowed to actually be proud.
Get two legitimate reviews on Amazon. Too many authors—especially newbies—eagerly check their Amazon page for rave reviews every few hours after releasing a book. First off, it’s difficult to garner a ton of reviews when only three people have read your book. Secondly, most people hate to take the time to write anything, aside from Facebook posts about their kid or how upset they are about the season finale of their favorite TV show. So waiting for a bunch of reviews to pour in is an exercise in futility. Set the bar at two reviews on Amazon (over the life of your book), and there’s a fair chance you’ll achieve your goal. Just don’t expect either of the reviews to be more than three stars. Remember, you’ve got to aim low to guarantee the illusion of success.
Win an award … of your own making. Forget about the PEN/Faulkner Award or the Man Booker Prize—those are for masters like Philip Roth and Don DeLillo or writers you’ve never heard of but who got their MFA at Brown. It’s easy to feel like a failure if you shoot only for the elite book awards. Still, winning at least some type of book award is essential to tricking yourself into thinking you’re a successful writer. That’s why I recommend vying for awards that have a minimal number of entrants, such as awards you yourself create. You’re a fiction writer, so there’s nothing wrong with winning a fictional award. Before I was lucky enough to win an Independent Publishers Award (“IPPY”) in 2015 for my novel The Exit Man, I was the proud recipient of such awards as “Best Dark Comedy About a Party Supply Store Owner Who Lives a Double Life as a Euthanasia Specialist” and “The Greg Levin Lifetime Achievement Award For Literary Brilliance.” Not to brag.
Feel free to leave a comment below. My goal used to be to get ten comments per blog post; now I’m following my own advice and shooting for one.
