Agent Monday: Too Soon?

Happy sunny Agent Monday, gang! It’s too soon for shorts and bathing suits here in the Northeast, but the signs are there. Birds singing. Days starting to grow mild. The promise of hot sunny days ahead. But you can’t rush it. Likewise, in my agent inbox, I often see queries of books that are promising, but not there yet. So in today’s post, let’s talk about that important question writers should be asking themselves before submitting: Is it too soon?

To kick off this post, I have to tip my hat to a wonderful book: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Are you an artist of any sort (musician, fine artist, writer, etc.) who isn’t producing work the way you’d like? Or are you enjoying it less and less? Or feeling angry or stressed in some way that is impairing your true creative spirit? Dude, buy The Artist’s Way, follow the chapters and do every single exercise in there that feels right to you. It will change you and free you. I’ve been using this book myself for the past 8 months, and I am definitely different. I am better for it. It’s a gift you can give to yourself. Take it!

Okay, back to the Too Soon point. In Cameron’s book, she states something so simple and elegantly true: “An act of art needs time to mature. Judged early, it may be judged incorrectly. Never, ever, judge a fledgling piece of work too quickly.” She points out that many hits are sure things only in retrospect. “Until we know better, we call a great many creative swans ugly ducklings….We forget that not all babies are born beautiful…”

Some of these judgements come into our writerly minds before we set a word on paper. We think, eh, that’ll never sell. That’s been done. That is crap. And we never write that idea down, follow it to completion. Some of these judgement we inflict on our work after it is written. We say to ourselves, this sucks. No one will give a damn. We tell ourselves that we will never break in or break out. In all of these cases, we are the block between the idea and the possible future reader of our work.

And sometimes we are caught up in the rush of competition. I’ve written it. I’ve made my agent list. BAM! I’ve sent it out. Done!  But wait…no responses. Form rejections. The answer the writer can take away from this? My writing sucks. I suck. I’m done. I have another idea, but what’s the point?

Okay, so nothing promises success when you take your idea from inception and trot it out into the world. That’s the artist’s life. But, as I’ve said, I often see things that are half-formed. That have a good voice and style, but a half-baked idea. Or I see works that need more focus. Or people who are just starting out in their fiction writing and who have created their very first novel. Obvious ideas, mimicking other writers, stories that are really just their own lives told back. All the things that a new writer must work through before creating something more original and unique. In sum, I often see writers who show promise, but don’t have something they are showing me that is in a state of readiness that’ll make me sit up and think – yes! This is ready.

I’m talking far beyond spell checking and formatting something correctly. I’m talking about a writer not rushing. Taking the time to let a work sit and stew. And to then revisit it with revisions, and have others read and react to it, then let THOSE comments sit and stew, then revise again, tweaking what feels right. Only when you feel your work is fully developed, fully realized, only then should you be sending it out to an agent. And THEN you should move on to create something else. This may be a young novel for you. Maybe your next one will be more developed, maybe the one after that. But you’ll never know if you don’t give yourself the chance to grow.

I’ve said it before in this blog: you must take a long view of your career. That means that you should take the time you need to develop, produce, grow as a writer. — that’s something that never stops for the true artist, no matter how many books you write or even how many get published. You should look at setbacks as something to learn from and move beyond. Thinking that you will write X many books and stories and send out to X many agents and publications and that should definitely lead you to your shiny goal of publishing success is all well and good. BUT you will hit walls and you cannot control what’s on the other side.

Hey, if you as a writer are looking for reasons to stop writing, you will find them. TONS of them. But if you want to write, then don’t look for reasons to stop. Ever. Your ideas are valuable. Your voice is valuable. As Cameron says, “The need to win — now! — is a need to win approval from others. As an antidote, we must learn to approve of ourselves. Showing up for the work is the win that matters.”

So I guess what I’m saying is don’t be in such a hurry. Enjoy your creative process and see it thoroughly to the end. That fulfilling creative world will give you endless joy and rewards. And then send it out into the commercial world. And move on to create something new and well and thoroughly despite the outcome.

Slow and steady can win the race. And if that race is artistic fulfillment vs. success, that is a race you can definitely win. And I would argue that artistic fulfillment will open up all sorts of success.

So what’s the hurry?

 

*Marie is an Associate Agent at the Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency in New York City.  To keep up with all her posts, subscribe to her site by clicking on the Follow link located on her page on the upper left margin.

 

 

Agent Monday: Nurturing the Creative Side

Hi gang!  Happy Agent Monday to you all.  I almost forget it WAS Monday. I woke up early and quickly got swept into doing different stuff. Emailing this. Reading that. Responding to the other…  Doesn’t that happen to everyone? You get all tied up in the goings on of the day and then before you know it? Time has passed. As a writer as well as an agent, I know this phenomenon all too well. In the taking-care-of-business mode, we keep up with deadlines, but it is easy to neglect the creative side. The side that doesn’t necessarily have a deadline, but that defines us as writers. So, while this column is often dedicated to the business side of a writer’s life, today I’d like to chat a little about nurturing the creative side.

How do you as a writer keep yourself disciplined? It can be hard when it isn’t your full-time job and you are squeezing it in between life. But it can also be hard when it IS your full-time job. It’s not just discipline that’s the problem. Sure, you need to be self-motivating as all get-out in order to write a book from start to finish even though there isn’t a guaranteed contract waiting at the end of it.

But what if you are self-disciplined, yet you just can’t seem to hit your creative sweet spot and write anything new that you feel is meaningful? At some point every writer has probably been there. Let’s not say you’ve hit a writer’s block, because, honestly, I don’t believe in that. But what you may need is to retrain yourself in the way you approach your work. To renew your creative spirit. To reconnect with your own personal joy of writing and to separate it from the “gotta write to the market if I want to get published” pressure you may be squeezing yourself under.

Yeah, be aware of the market, but then set that aside and be true to who you are as a writer. Create what you truly believe in if you are a creative writer. That really is the path to satisfaction.

So if you aren’t creating anything new, and haven’t in a while, maybe it’s time to pause and take better care of your creative self.

Many of us pro writers spend countless hours each week doing things that are writing-related, and even necessary, but in the end don’t add anything creative to our inventory.  Necessary things like marketing existing work, building platform, networking, teaching and leading workshops, etc.  You can fill the entire week with this stuff and tell yourself that you are a busy writer…but have you written anything? And many writers at all levels are on an endless treadmill of taking care of others and doing our day jobs, etc.

But still, you need to hit the pause button and look closely at your day and your life, and to make time for your creative self to flourish. Maybe you wake up an hour earlier than your family and spend that time journaling, or you take a brisk walk at lunchtime with a notebook in hand and jot down what comes to mind, or you schedule a sacred writing time where someone covers for you at home and you escape to somewhere to put words on paper.

It doesn’t have to become a novel or even a short story.  Your efforts just need you to reconnect with your creative self and to take a mental deep breath. Then the words can flow. Ideas and stories will come if you make space for them.

To that end, a few author friends of mine have just cobbled together a “creativity group” where we will meet every two weeks, not to talk marketing or plotting or to crit eachother’s works, but to explore ways to nurture our own creative selves in a way that will help our own writing flow better.  We’ll be working through exercises in the classic book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron to see what might click, and setting our own goals to follow in between meetings. One thing that really clicked with me was when one friend mentioned having a spot that is just for writing, not editing or anything else. A creative spot.

I really like that idea, and I’m already shifting things around at home to set up just such a spot – something cozy and private that has room beside it for me to set down a proper cup of Earl Grey tea.

Your creative side deserves attention and nurturing, whether you give it a brisk morning walk every day or a lovely leather journal to expand in. Or perhaps you should set up your own creative group with fellow writers and artists. Give your creative side time and thought and care. And if you have ideas that have worked for you, or books that you’d recommend to others who need a creative boost, please feel to share these here in the comments.

Let’s all take care of our creative spirits and let them grow!

 

*Marie is an Associate Agent at the Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency in New York City.  To keep up with all her posts, subscribe to her site by clicking on the “Subscribe to Marie’s site here” link located on her page on the upper left margin.