My fifth bit of advice for writers was this:
“Be at peace with being lousy for a while. Chesterton once said that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. He was right. Only an insufferable egoist expects to be brilliant first time out.”
But let’s unpack this a bit.
1. Concert pianists do what they do because they practiced scales for years. So most of the music that comes from them over the course of their lives gets “thrown away” in the practice studio. The quality of what you keep will be directly proportional to how much you are willing to throw away. Drills, scales and exercises should not be something you consider to be beneath you.
2. If a striking expression hits you, don’t hold back just because you are writing an email to your sister. If you think, “I need to save that kind of thing for my memoirs,” you are a stingy writer with a heart like a walnut, and you won’t have any memoirs to save it for. Who wants to read the memoirs of Old Walnut Heart? Writing ability is a developed and honed skill, and the more you develop and hone it, the more of it you will have. Writing as well as you can in every setting is the way to have reserves to draw on when it comes to writing for publication. Pianists don’t have a limited number of C major chords they are allowed to play in the course of their lives. They aren’t afraid of “running out.” Writing skill is not a zero sum game, and so you shouldn’t be afraid of using up all the colorful adjectives. Extending yourself in any situation is the best way to be able to extend yourself in every situation.
3. Make sure you don’t have a faulty and deterministic view of talent. The older clunkity clunkity view of genetics was sadly simplistic, holding that your “genius,” if you had any, had been packed into your genetic suitcase, and if it had not been, you were wasting your time trying to unpack it. Your genetic package certainly has something to do with what you will be able to do, but your range of opportunities do not come to you fully assembled. Your genetic givens interact with your situation, and what you do with it will help determine what you are able to do with it. While it is true that you can’t put in what God left out, it is also true that God put a whole lot more into most of us than we are currently using.
4. If you are good with practice runs, if you are okay with not being as good as you are going to be, if you see the need for playing in the minors, then it should follow that you are emotionally prepared for negative feedback. If you enter your first pie in the county fair while knowing it will not get the blue ribbon, you should also be eager and ready for your friends to tell you why it didn’t win the blue ribbon. What is true of your life over all should also be true of your writing life. Criticism should be received as a kindness (Ps. 141:5).
5. Speaking of criticism, your enemies will sometimes be more accurate, more perceptive, and more to the point than your mom. Be willing to learn from anyone, regardless of their evil motives for pointing out your deficiencies. The “misunderstood” writer is a stock character, and so don’t be that stock character. Assume that every critic, even one with a black cape and handlebar mustache, has something you can learn from. This point needs especially to be remembered when you start getting published, or are at least public enough to garner attention. Once you start getting reviewed, negative reviews should not be treated by you as simply revelatory of the blackened state of the reviewer’s soul.
6. Openness to criticism is not the same thing as that faux-humility that prepares to inflict itself on everybody, with absolutely no reason to do so. We all know the type. Someone gets up to sing for the church dinner, and spreads out a safety net for himself before singing one note. “I am sorry about this . . . haven’t had any time to practice this week . . . just getting over a cold . . . was just asked asked to do this at the last minute.” When this goes on for a bit, the sentiment of the audience soon becomes, “Why then, when you were asked at the last minute to do this, didn’t you say no?”
Openness to criticism is not the same thing as apologizing for being there. If you shouldn’t be there, don’t be there. If you shouldn’t be there, then don’t show up. Nobody will care. But if you should be there, if God has called you to the writing life, then put it out there, and no apologies for having done so. Then, no defensiveness when you get the feedback. Don’t criticize it yourself beforehand, but when the criticism comes afterwards, listen. Take notes.
7. Remember that relative competence cannot be universal, and that this applies to your critics, reviewers, editors, and publishing houses as much as to you. There will always be a bell curve spread, but do not make the mistake of over-valuing what the bell curve actually tells you. The bell curve explains relative placement. The next time you make a medical appointment, it may be helpful to recall that exactly one half of all American doctors graduated in the lower half of their class.
Whatever the industry standard is, half of the publishing houses are going to be in the lower half of it. This doesn’t make them bad, but it does mean that 90 percent of them will not be above average.
If you are going to be a writer, you should want to be a writer who excels. It also means you should want an agent who excels, an editor who excels, a publicist who excels, and a publishing house that excels. Happy the man who gets all of them to line up, which is, given the nature of the case, sort of like having a glorious comet appear on your fiftieth birthday, promising you another fifty fruitful years.
A writer should have some working idea of what these others in the publishing business are for. He doesn’t have to be an agent, but he should know what an overtaxed agent is supposed to do — besides not returning phone calls. He should not be afraid to have opinions about what publishing houses do in making their decisions, and then to use those decisions in making his decisions about what houses to go with.
There are many examples, but here is one. It is a current industry practice to project sales of any proposed title, a practice that can be standardized and bureaucratized, just like financial analysts and political analysts and global warming analysts do. And like these three examples, the predictions will almost universally be wildly off. Alfred Knopf once asked, “Why can’t we publish only best sellers?” Our lives are a mist, and we cannot predict the future (James 4:14). We can, however, use computer modeling to conceal our helplessness. We can publish enough books such that the random successes will carry the others, and we can predict wildly erroneous sales figures for all them so that we feel useful in the meantime.
So a writer should be realistic and, to the extent possible, he should want to work with realistic people.