Wednesday Writing: Secret Projects

I know that it sounds strange when I say that I wish I had enjoyed the period of time in life before I was published. I was so eager to get published, so sure that getting a book contract would be the only way to have legitimacy as a writer, that I really hated being constantly rejected. It's easy, I suppose, now that I'm on this end, and know the eventual outcome, to say that I should have lived in the moment more. But I still do. I'm not saying that you shouldn't be submitting your guts out if you're in that stage or going to conference or reading everything you can get your hands on that is published. But it's a mistake not to understand why it is that published writers envy you.

It's because whatever you write, you are writing "secretly." What I mean is that it isn't under contract. It isn't a book that makes you hear the voices of reviewers in your head, telling you what you should do better, what you shouldn't write, and what you were successful at last time. What you write, you KNOW you are writing because you want to write it.

Or if it isn't, and you are writing something that is purely commercial, then I suppose I don't envy you, after all. I won't say that you aren't going to be published because the truth is, most people aren't published and the people who are work at it really hard and learn how to do it well, and I'm not sure if that happens more often if you love it or if you don't. What I am sure of is that if you are writing something because it is purely commercial, you are much less likely to have a successful career as a writer. Why? Because you will not like your job. And people who don't like their jobs are almost always people who leave their jobs to find one they like better.

Writers who have already published agonize over their next project. They flounder around, and it's not just a sophomore problem. I know SO many professional writers these days and it's always the same story. Trying to figure out what to write next, what a publisher will offer a contract on, what the public will buy in huge numbers, huger than before. No matter what the level of success, and I know a lot of NYT bestselling authors, this is always a matter of a lot of focus and almost always some degree of terror.

If you've already been published, you wonder if you should try to use the same formula that made you successful last time. But you are never sure if you know what that formula was. So, so often, a writer will end up stumbling onto wrong project after wrong project. Sometimes they are wrong for the publishing world and are actually perfectly good projects. Sometimes they are wrong in every way, just plain bad, and the writer will either persist and lose years of time when they could have been working on viable projects or the writer will give up that project and move on to another, and then another, and another, trying to find the write one.

People say that ideas are cheap, and in one sense that is true. In another sense, it is absolutely untrue because the "right" idea is priceless. The problem is that the right idea for one writer is not the right idea for another one. And when I say "right," I mean a project that is the perfect confluence of the writer's abilities, the writer's interests and passion, and the publisher's belief in commercial viability, along with the reading public's willingness to seek out and buy this book.

Then what happens for so, so many writers is that once they have a contract on a project, they find all their interest in it dies. Or if it doesn't die, it wanes. And suddenly, they have a million ideas that are all about completely separate projects from the one they should be working on. It's like, as soon as you get a contract, your creative mind rebels from the commercial crassness and decides that it wants to run away and fall in love with someone Mommy and Daddy don't like.

You try to buckle down and work on the project anyway, of course. Because you have a deadline and your agent tells you to do it and your editor calls you and gives you nice encouraging thoughts to spur you on to greatness. And you sit down, and you have no idea what to write. You don't want to write at all. You would rather do anything other than write. You would rather clean the kitchen grout or weed that part of the garden you let go two years ago or attend PTA meetings. Literally, anything. You'd rather start training to run a marathon. Or maybe not.

I think the way to deal with this problem is to always have at least one secret project to tempt your creative mind with. I'm sure you've noticed that authors talk about secret projects, sometimes taunting their audiences by refusing to talk about them. It may sound superstitious. It's not. Really, it's a vital part of protecting your creative energy NOT to tell anyone about what you are working on. Some writers will do this all the way up until they submit the novel to the editor, before they ever have a contract. I certainly understand this now. It's a lot easier to do the editing part of the creative job once you have a full manuscript than it is to create a whole manuscript when you already have a contract on a proposal.

But if you are in the situation where you are working on something that you HAVE to work on, for whatever reason. Because this is the mss an agent was interested in, because you're an inch away from a contract on it, and you are completely unmotivated, find a secret project. You need something that no one else cares about but you. Something that is play for you, in whatever way you think it is playing. You should tell yourself that the project will never sell, and you should write it anyway. It will probably never actually sell because, well, most projects never do. But more importantly, the not selling is what protects your creative brain from giving up and letting your less artistic side take over.

I'm a working writer. I know when I have a deadline, I have to sit down every day and work on it. I derive different kinds of pleasure from different parts of the writing process. I don't allow myself to use avoid work strategies in general. I get the $(@! done. But I'm more and more conscious of the need to keep my creative mind and my commerical business mind separate from each other. I had a writer friend once who would simply not talk about her new project with anyone until she was ready to send it to her editor. She said that talking about it made her less interested in the project. I think what she meant was that talking about it stole her mojo. It made her creative mind decide that it was being turned off. And you want to keep that creative mind excited.

We don't control our creativity, not really. I don't like it when people wax mystical about their creative process. I certainly don't believe that stories ride in and take you as a writer off on an adventure. I don't believe that characters live in any places other than your own mind. I believe that you have power over your story. Only--I don't think you have absolute power. There is a deep subconscious at work when you write, and you need to respect the way that it works. However you maintain the illusion that your writing is fun, that it is art, that it is purely for you, that it isn't work--I think it is vital to do so.

Art isn't about selling. And writing is art. Art is about play, about what isn't necessary. It's what people do when they aren't worried about where the next paycheck is coming from. Or rather, it's what they do even if they are worried, but they're not going to deal with that right now. It's escape from the real world. And it needs to stay that way. For me, anyway.