The following article first appeared in Windy City’s
fall/winter issue of Blowing Kisses.
Permission granted to forward to sister RWA chapters with proper credit.
Fredericka Meiners, co-editor, Blowing Kisses, Windy City RWA
Aunt Allie’s Guide To Level Headed Hysteria
Your guide to surviving the bumpy ride of writing
By Allie Pleiter
Scene 1: I was promoting my first non-fiction book and had just published my second novel. I had “made it.” I had come off an airplane to see someone holding a sign with my name. Yessirree, I now rated a “driver.” On the return trip, after a live national television interview seen by millions in which I neither spit, fell, nor stuck my foot in my mouth, I saw my novel in the airport bookstore. Of course, I took them to the counter, informed them I was the author, and asked to sign the copies. As I was signing, a young girl came up and asked if I would autograph her copy of People magazine. I informed her I was none of the people on the cover, but she wanted my signature anyway. I complied and walked on air the entire trip home. Heaven.
Scene 2: Having decided to make a leap forward in my career based on positive feedback for a book, I was delighted when my agent called. “Sit down,” she said. Thinking I’m moments away from signing a movie deal, I sit. I learn the book is doing so hideously that there are serious consequences to my career path. The news was so devastating, unexpected, and inexplicable that for the first time in my life I couldn’t get out of bed. I, who normally wear my heart on my sleeve, couldn’t speak of it for several days. Definitely not heaven. The other place.
While I feel as though I’ve had more ups and downs than your garden variety author, I doubt that’s the case. I admit I’m one of those people everyone loves to hate: I sold my first book in single title to a major house. I launched my career quickly when many have pined long years to achieve publication. But I tell you one thing: I deeply admire those who’ve had a longer, straighter career path than this roller-coaster of mine. I’ve gone from 0 to 60mph in 7.2 seconds and back to 0 in what seems like nanoseconds—and I’ve got the whiplash to prove it. As I told someone recently, “The good is very, very good; but the bad is very, very bad.”
Any roller coaster fan will tell you, though, there would be little thrill in a long steady climb; the ups and downs make the ride worth taking. Perhaps we ought to look at our writing careers in the same way. For better or worse, publishing is a career guaranteed to keep your head spinning. There is no job security, no set career path, no guarantee that good work will get you results.
It’s just plain insane. Good thing most of us were lunatics long before we started.
What’s a savvy writer to do? I’m going to offer you the literary equivalent of safety belts. I’ll give you the lessons I’ve learned to handle the twists and turns of a writing career without letting it get to you—too much. How to weather the good and bad without taking yourself, your family, and your friends up and down with you. Call it “Aunt Allie’s Guide to Level-Headed Hysteria.”
1. Decide how public you want to be.
Some of us tell everything to everyone. Others play it much closer to the vest. There are some helpful conscious decisions you can make ahead of time that will serve you well when news—good or bad—hits. Do you want to share good news, or its prospect, fast? Or do you need to wait until it’s certain so you don’t “jinx” it? Do you need to stew in your misery before you can talk about bad news, or does your kind of misery adore company?
When I was faced with the airing of an exceedingly uncomfortable media interview, a wise friend told me to “decide before it airs what you’ll do if you hate it.” Excellent advice: it’s risky to rely on your knee-jerk reaction. I chose a few close friends to share the gory details with, and crafted a vague-yet-gracious public line to give anyone else.
Take some time to think through how you’ll handle big news. Your plan will keep your emotions or your mouth from running away with you (oh, the lessons I have learned on this one . . .).
2. Diversify, diversify.
Publishing is a funny business; not everyone understands it. Not everyone understands that mean comments about your work are like telling a mother her children are ugly. Most people don’t understand that an exceptional piece of writing can meet with rejection and failure for reasons we will never know. I have had people tell me my sales would be better if I write better books. Ugh. Don’t they understand I’m writing the very best books I can? That sometimes below-par books meet with great success while wonderful books meet with gut-wrenching failure? No, they don’t understand.
Non-writers look at you funny if you share the painful news that your eighth book is meeting an untimely death. That’s eight more books than the rest of the world has, isn’t it? They don’t get that it would be like telling a mother not to mourn the death of her third child because she had such a nice run with the first two. Some news is better shared with other writers.
Then again, sometimes you need a whack on the head to remind you what a magical thing it is to pull people and stories out of thin air. It’s good to have someone remind you to be grateful about those eight books, and to remember now and then what amazing odds you’ve beaten to even finish those books, much less publish them.
Non-writer friends will remind you of the magic. Writer friends will understand how it feels when the magic’s not there. You need both.
3. Chose your ears wisely.
It’s not just the idiosyncrasies of publishing that can drag you down—it’s people in general. People come in optimist and pessimist varieties, worrier and warrior, fighters and flee-ers. We can let those differences cause friction, or we can harness them to our advantage.
I have friends who have the souls of poets, who enter into my sorrow or fear and are also great celebrators. I call them when I need to grieve bad news or celebrate good news. They are NOT, however, the first people I call in a crisis. Their dramatic, empathic nature won’t pull me out of a pity party or a fear festival. For that I need someone who’ll find solutions, create calm, and occasionally whack me on the side of the head. It’s not that one friend is better than the other—each of them brings specific gifts. Think about your circle of friends. Who’s the best to call when a crisis hits, who’s best at celebrating, who’s the problem solver, who’s the cheerleader, etc.? Then you’ll know the answer to the classic Ghostbusters query: “Who ya gonna call?”
4. Celebrate Every Little Thing.
No, really, I mean every little thing. Writing is often magic, but it is more often torture. Some days that cursor laughs at you, blinking at the top of an excruciatingly blank page. Critics can be unkind. Agents and editors say “no” far more often than they say “yes.” We’re all waging an uphill battle here. We’re all nice, friendly people, but this is hardly a nice, friendly career choice. It’s not even a nice, friendly hobby. Our best weapon against this ugly foe is celebration. Every reason to celebrate is valid because it fills our emotional well to cope with the “slings and arrows of our outrageous fortune.” I celebrate writing page 1 and page 100. I set small goals for each week and month, rewarding myself when I’ve reached them. I take my family to dinner when I sell a book, and I buy myself a present when I finish a book.
It’s not just because I like presents (and I really do), but I believe in the power of memorializing things. Tangible reminders of events help me recall mountaintops when all I can see are valleys. I have a bead bracelet that gets a new bead for all kinds of positive events in my life. These things speak directly to our hearts, even when our brains get in the way. All too often we give the negatives in our lives more power than the positives. Celebrating helps us bolster the positives—and we stay in balance.
5. Don’t forget to say Ouch! loud enough
No writer writes without passion. We care deeply about our work. So, rejection and criticism can hurt us deeply. We know we shouldn’t take it personally, but we do. I take both the good and the bad of my writing very personally. Earlier this year I suffered a hefty career setback: someone made a business choice that did me harm. Now, I am the kind of person who makes friends with everyone, so I’m even more likely to make things personal. What I failed to realize, however, was just how personally I’d taken this particular setback. I ignored my irrational feelings of betrayal and rejection and tried to talk myself out of them instead of dealing with them. What happened? I let it fester until a very unprofessional blow-up occurred. In a public venue. Not a wise career move.
That incident taught me a lot about giving myself time and space to cry when I take a beating. You can’t always yell “ouch” to the person who hurt you, but you need to yell to someone. My rule of thumb is that after any blow—rewrite letter, rejection letter, bad review, nasty contest judge, you name it—the first twenty-four hours don’t count. Get mad. Throw things. Rant and rave in a safe place. Take the time to be hurt. Recognize that how you feel now is no indication of how you’ll feel later, but how you feel now is real. You’ll never get past that initial rage, and on to something more useful, if you don’t give it the space to blow itself out.
6. Put your desk where it belongs.
Stephen King offers a warning about the place our writing has in our lives. In On Writing, he talks about buying the biggest, most impressive desk and placing it in the center of his study. I know writers who’ve done the emotional equivalent. People who’ve defined themselves only in terms of their writing. People for whom a writing failure is a life failure, and the only way to succeed in life is to succeed in writing. Authors who have precious little life outside their laptops. You might say, “That will never be me,” but watch when a string of tight deadlines is breathing down your back. Even without publishing pressures, it’s an easy thing to fall into because we care so much about our work.
King relates that he later moved the desk to a corner to make his study more about living than writing. I agree. It’s all too easy to let my life be mostly about my books, but I always remember my books will not visit me in the nursing home. I had to work so hard at this that I crafted myself a tiny “board of directors;” six people whose job is to keep me stable, encourage me in other areas of my life like faith and home and marriage, and whack me upside the head when I get too full of myself (alarmingly easy). They are my best recipe for keeping perspective, and for not letting the roller-coaster life of publishing make me crazy. At the end of the day, I hope I have been more mother than author, more friend than writer, more wife than public speaker.
I don’t know what my career holds for me. If the past is any indication, I’ll be overwhelmed, disappointed, elated, pressured, thrilled, but not bored. Just remember to fasten your seatbelts, because we all know it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Allie Pleiter survived three publishers, three genres, two names, eight years of writing, sixteen years of marriage, thirteen years of parenting, and seven published books. A national speaker on parenting, faith, and women's issues, she can be found at www.alliepleiter.com and look for Queen Esther and the Second Graders Of Doom from Steeple Hill Café in February 2006.