The red rosette, the silver cup

Two weeks ago, I told you, roughly speaking, that you don’t have to be good at everything. You won’t tick every author-marketing box. Your work will have its weak spots. You can’t be great at everything.

Last week, I talked about that scary abseil moment. Your book isn’t going quite right. You don’t feel in love with the solutions that present themselves. And my advice was just to push on through. It won’t 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.)

This week, I want to close this little trilogy with one more message:

You don’t have to be fast, you don’t have to be flash, you don’t have to win everything.

Yes, you read about authors who got their very first book published. (I did. Most don’t. My second manuscript was a car crash and I had to rewrite it completely, start to finish, to rescue my contract and my career.)

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 – and the gall – 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’d write rubbish. So I don’t even try.)

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.

But who cares?

I mean, really, honestly, who cares?

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?

That pleasure is multi-dimensional, of course. If you earn money from your writing, there’s a glow of satisfaction in that – 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’s 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.

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, “yes, this pretty much nails what I was trying to do.”

If you write stuff you like reading, you’ve won the game. The red rosette, the silver cup, the top of the podium.

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

In fact, the public face of my career looks sort of scary. “Guy 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.”

But the inner story is more like this: “Guy writes a book that’s zippy and bouncy and fun. It sells a lot of copies, but he isn’t really a master of this writing game. He’s still a novice. So he writes lots more books – which, fair dos, all sell for good money to decent publishers – but it’s 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.”

And that’s always going to be true. Unless you’re Usain Bolt in his prime, there’s always someone you can look at and think, They’ve achieved more than me.

But so what? I don’t care.

The only writers I genuinely envy are ones who can do things on a page that I can’t. And that doesn’t make me think, “Oh, so I must be crap.” I generally think, “Gosh, I’d love to be able to do that. I wonder if I could bring a bit of that into my work.” The envy is there, but it feels like a productive, generative envy. Something that actually nudges my work forwards.

And in the end? When you drop your pen and look back on what you’ve done?

I’ll 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.

The rest of it still matters, don’t 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’s what Jericho Writers is here to help with.

But write books that you love to read.

Do that and you’ve won. The rest is all secondary.