First Envision, Then Figure Out The Compromise

I’ve got a long history of advising writers to clarify their goals and vision around writing, and a recurring question is often how? It’s too big a question to tackle in blog posts, but something that occasionally gets some clarity during the longer, face-to-face (or email-to-email) conversations that take place with friends.

One insight is this: envisioning a career is a two-step process.

The first step is envisioning the kind of career you’d like to have—how much you want to write, what kind of work you want to do, what kind of readership you’d like to develop. Looking to benchmarks—writers whose career (not necessarily work) like to emulate in terms of approach and schedule—then doing research to figure out whether their current approach to work represents the way they built their profile up in the early days.

No writer comes out of nowhere, and overnight successes are often the product of decades-long effort and build.

The second step is figuring out where you’re willing to compromise and the circumstances in which you’ll do so. If your principal goal is “doing good work,” how far are you willing to compromise that to make working at writing full time happen? If your heart is set on working in a particular genre, are you willing to switch genres—or go to non-fiction—in order to achieve other parts of your goal. If you’ve set yourself the goal of writing one book a year, in order to really give it your focus, are you willing to do two or three if publishers really want you to push the pace? Are you content to write to a small audience, or do you crave recognition and large crowds?

Are the things you were unwilling to sacrifice as a single author the same when you have a working partner, or a family who needs your support? What happens to your vision of what productive means as a writer if you get sick, or develop a chronic illness? Do you want to build your career fast, or would you prefer to take your time?

We all make bad comprises over the course of our careers and only learn we’ve crossed a line in retrospect. Moments when we look up from the long, hard slog of a project and wonder, “what the hell was I thinking? This is making me miserable!”

Bad compromise is inevitable. (And doing work that makes them miserable is a boundary plenty of writers will compromise on if the trade-off gains them something else they desire; I use it because it’s frequently the area I don’t want to compromise on). 

But thinking about your boundaries in advance—the permeable goals that will shift and mutate because of circumstances—helps you cut back on the mistakes, and gives you a clearer vision of what each opportunity represents and what it costs you to say yes. 

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Want more insights into building a writing career, but don’t want to mess about digging through blog archives? You Don’t Want to Be Published compiles some of my best writing-about-writing from this website, along with articles and essays I’ve written for other publications.

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