Authorial Yoga

Last week, I felt rubbish, so I said so and wrote a “let’s be gentle with ourselves” email that applied as much to me as to anyone else.

Unexpectedly, I got a ton of responses which told me that the message really hit home. And it made me think more broadly about the pressures we put ourselves under:

• “I promised myself I’d start on my next manuscript now, but I’m feeling really tired and need a long holiday this summer.”
• “I told myself this would be the manuscript that got an agent, but I’ve not heard anything positive yet, and maybe I just need to accept I won’t get published.”
• “I wanted to reimagine myself as a crime author but Expert X trashed my elevator pitch and now I can’t face the labour of bashing out the rest of this draft.”

And so on.

Almost every time, the thing that disables us from doing what we want to do (write a book) comes from our own set of self-demands and self-expectations. The moment we ease up on those expectations is also the moment that we release ourselves into motion again.

Being kind to ourselves often has a corollary: changing our idea of who we are or who we ought to be.

So take that person who thinks she ought to start her next manuscript now, but actually realises she needs to give herself a proper summer break.

Perhaps part of her thinks she ought to be tough and all-conquering: Rest is for wimps. Manuscripts don’t write themselves. If a bear needs wrestling, I’ll wrestle it. That kind of person.

And maybe she’s not. I mean, yes, perhaps she’s happy to wrestle bears from September to June, but come the start of Wimbledon, maybe she just needs a break. That’s OK. That’s not better or worse than the wrestle-bears-all-year sort of person; it’s just different.

There are plenty of other ways in which we can be caught by our own demands. In my career, I wrote old-fashioned Sidney Sheldon style romps, then those drifted into historical fiction, then I jumped to non-fiction, then switched to crime, and currently have a ridiculously literary project on my laptop.

I didn’t plan those switches ahead of time. They just made sense, so I made the jump.

Take, for example, that switch from my early fiction to non-fiction. I saw that my sales, while perfectly respectable, were declining. I knew that my advances would drift down to a level I wasn’t happy with. So I changed my approach.

The simple fact is if I’d stuck narrowly to a particular conception of myself as a writer, I’d have stopped writing.

Maintaining a flexible sense of who you are will pay huge rewards. It will:

• Allow you to mess around with different genres
• Allow you to mess around with different approaches to publication
• Allow you to reconceive your current project in ways that might be creatively richer than the path you are now on
• Allow you to get more from the friends and connections you make on your writing journey

It will, in the end, help you write better books, get more readers and (deo volente) make more money.

That flexibility is also an essential part of creativity. Without thinking too hard, I can think of occasions when:

• I turned a male character into a female one. The book worked better.
• I realised I needed a splash of violence halfway through the MS. The book worked better.
• I realised my ending was a total mess, and I re-did it. Then realised it was still a mess, and re-did it again. The book worked better.
• I realised there were 20,000 words too many in my book. So (contrary to the advice of my editor at the time) I slashed the length, and the book got better.

Honestly, I think one of the things that separates a successful writer from an unsuccessful one – and a long career from a short one – is that ability to bend. To think one thing yesterday and a fresh thing tomorrow.

Do that, and you have every chance of making this writer-lark work out for you.

I was going to end the email there, except that two further thoughts keep banging at the door.

Thought The First: Life

I write as someone with a disabled wife, four young children, a business to run, and no books published for several years now. I don’t know what your life situation is, but quite likely it’s full of demands as well. In which case, stop beating yourself up about inadequate productivity. Life is long. You’ve got plenty of time to write books. And there’s not a lot of point writing them if you don’t enjoy the process.

Thought the Second: Publishers

The “be gentle on yourself” and “be flexible in your self-perception” messages are good ones. They’re true, they’re kind, they’re helpful.

And at the same time, it’s simply a fact that sometimes – too often – agents or publishers behave in such a distressing way that it becomes almost impossible to put our focus where it needs to be – on the act of creativity. How a creative-centred industry can so often be so hopeless at looking after its talent is beyond me, really, but these things happen a lot.

In these circumstances, that “be kind to yourself” slogan – how is that meant to help?

“Be flexible” – yes, but what about the duties of others to be flexible, kind and basically professional in the way they handle you, your book and your career? They should count for something too, right?

In the end, I don’t have an answer. Agents and publishers should always act professionally, but often they don’t, and their failures can make it miles harder to do your job. There’s nothing I can do to help with that, other than to say it’s true – and to tell you that, yes, I’ve been there myself, not once, but often.

That’s all from me, now. My kids have produced some poetry books, two of which include extremely lengthy and heartfelt odes to our two gerbils. I need to go and be moved.