Build a Privacy Screen

I’ve often discussed the fact that I’m pretty much the worst judge of my own material, as well as the most clueless person in the room when it comes to my own career. The books I thought would sell usually haven’t, and many of the ideas I thought were nuts when I first heard them have turned out to be the most lucrative decisions I ever made.

In other words, I’m a moron. The only reason for you to take my writing and career advice seriously that I can come up with is the fact that I’ve made every mistake, so you can definitely learn from my general drunken incompetence.

This also means that there’s always a disconnect between the work I’m doing and my feelings towards it and the work that has sold or hasn’t sold. For example, sometimes when working on a new novel I start thinking about whether it can sell—whether a publisher will like it and pay me money for it, and whether it actually appeals to readers assuming that happens. It’s tempting to start comparing it to older books that succeeded or failed, and before long you’re in your own head and the work suffers.

You have to build a Privacy Screen.

Or a Wall

What I mean by that is that you have to disconnect your creative work from your business. While there may be writers in the world who can combine their sense of the market with their creative endeavors (outlining and writing novels based on their sense of what will sell), it’s usually a losing proposition, at least for me. If it works for you, that’s great. It never works for me, and thinking about sales and publishers and contracts while I’m writing usually leads to a lot of dubious decisions in terms of plot, character, and literally everything else that goes into a book.

Instead, when I’m writing a new story, I don’t think about anything except the story part. Years later, after that story has sat for a while and browned up, been revised and had the dark edges trimmed off, that’s when I will tentatively wonder if it has any legs in an economic sense. The best part is, I grow disconnected from my own work over time. A few years after finishing something, it’s like someone else, a stranger, wrote it, so I can usually judge pretty fairly whether something has a chance or not.

Personally, I think this separation is necessary. If I start thinking about a story’s saleability while I’m still writing it, it’s just so easy to talk myself out of what I’m doing out of insecurity and panic.

The cure is obvious, though: Every time I start to think about selling a story while I’m still writing it, I drink until I black out. Usually when I wake up, the story is miraculously finished!