{"id":6389,"date":"2020-11-20T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-20T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/townhouse\/articles\/the-red-rosette-the-silver-cup\/"},"modified":"2020-11-20T13:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-11-20T13:00:00","slug":"the-red-rosette-the-silver-cup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/the-red-rosette-the-silver-cup\/","title":{"rendered":"The red rosette, the silver cup"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two weeks ago, I told you, roughly speaking, that you don\u2019t have to be good at everything. You won\u2019t tick every author-marketing box. Your work will have its weak spots. You can\u2019t be great at everything.<\/p>\n

Last week, I talked about that scary abseil moment. Your book isn\u2019t going quite right. You don\u2019t feel in love with the solutions that present themselves. And my advice was just to push on through. It won\u2019t be fun, but just the action of laying down sentence after sentence will push your story on into a place that releases you back into the happy land of inspiration. Nothing says you have to enjoy every moment of writing a book. (Or, for that matter, of climbing a mountain. The two experiences have quite a lot in common.)<\/p>\n

This week, I want to close this little trilogy with one more message:<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t have to be fast, you don\u2019t have to be flash, you don\u2019t have to win everything.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, you read about authors who got their very first book published. (I did. Most don\u2019t. My second manuscript was a car crash and I had to rewrite it completely, start to finish, to rescue my contract and my career.)<\/p>\n

Yes, you read about self-pub authors who write four books a year AND are highly adept at marketing them AND are making lots of money AND who have the time \u2013 and the gall \u2013 to go on podcasts to tell you about how much more productive they are than you. (Me, if I wrote four books a year, I\u2019d write rubbish. So I don\u2019t even try.)<\/p>\n

Yes, there are people who never take a course, read a how to write book, get an editorial assessment or any of that stuff. Some of those people still end up writing the kind of books that get six or seven figure advances, and have the literary press all a-twitter with excitement.<\/p>\n

But who cares?<\/p>\n

I mean, really, honestly, who cares?<\/p>\n

In the end, this game of ours comes down to one thing and one thing only. Do we get pleasure and satisfaction from the stuff we write?<\/p>\n

That pleasure is multi-dimensional, of course. If you earn money from your writing, there\u2019s a glow of satisfaction in that \u2013 and a heating bill paid off. If you get a fancy publisher, your mum can boast about you to her friends, which is a nice thing for all concerned (except, probably, the friends.) And if you do have the whole agent \/ publisher thing going on, then there\u2019s a pleasure in the whole business side of the affair. The lunches in London or New York. The whole being an author thing. Speaking at festivals, signing books, guesting on podcasts.<\/p>\n

But the real glow comes from writing a scene and liking it, then editing it and liking it more, then reading it back and thinking, \u201cyes, this pretty much nails what I was trying to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you write stuff you like reading, you\u2019ve won the game<\/strong>. The red rosette, the silver cup, the top of the podium.<\/p>\n

That truly is all. If it takes you ten years to get there, you\u2019ve done just as well as if your first book was a bestseller. My first book was a bestseller, and I\u2019m still fond of it, but the stuff I write now gives me a deeper pleasure, because the writing is better.<\/p>\n

In fact, the public face of my career looks sort of scary. \u201cGuy writes book without help. Becomes bestseller. Writes lots more books for lots more publishers and makes plenty of cash. Gets prize-shortlists and TV deals and all that malarkey.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the inner story is more like this: \u201cGuy writes a book that\u2019s zippy and bouncy and fun. It sells a lot of copies, but he isn\u2019t really a master of this writing game. He\u2019s still a novice. So he writes lots more books \u2013 which, fair dos, all sell for good money to decent publishers \u2013 but it\u2019s probably a good ten years into his career that he actually achieves mature writing. And those books do fine, but there are plenty of people who sell more books and make more money and win more gongs.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s always going to be true. Unless you\u2019re Usain Bolt in his prime, there\u2019s always someone you can look at and think, They\u2019ve achieved more than me.<\/p>\n

But so what? I don\u2019t care.<\/p>\n

The only writers I genuinely envy are ones who can do things on a page that I can\u2019t. And that doesn\u2019t make me think, \u201cOh, so I must be crap.\u201d I generally think, \u201cGosh, I\u2019d love to be able to do that. I wonder if I could bring a bit of that into my work.\u201d The envy is there, but it feels like a productive, generative envy. Something that actually nudges my work forwards.<\/p>\n

And in the end? When you drop your pen and look back on what you\u2019ve done?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll bet you a mountain of Vietnamese dong to a couple of rusty Russian kopeks that you most cherish the books you loved writing. Those will also be the books that you still love as you re-read them.<\/p>\n

The rest of it still matters, don\u2019t get me wrong. Yes, you should want to get published, and make money, and market yourself, and all of that. All those other wants are a worthy part of an urgent, busy, aspirational life. It\u2019s what Jericho Writers is here to help with.<\/p>\n

But write books that you love to read.<\/p>\n

Do that and you\u2019ve won. The rest is all secondary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two weeks ago, I told you, roughly speaking, that you don\u2019t have to be good at everything. You won\u2019t tick every author-marketing box. Your work will have its weak spots. You can\u2019t be great at everything. Last week, I talked about that scary abseil moment. Your book isn\u2019t going quite right. You don\u2019t feel in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJericho Writers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/the-red-rosette-the-silver-cup\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The red rosette, the silver cup – Jericho Writers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Two weeks ago, I told you, roughly speaking, that you don\u2019t have to be good at everything. 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