So my writing process for non-fiction, much like my process for fiction, tends to be a little haphazard. I usually take a seed of an idea and expand outward, stacking roughly adjacent notions together until I get a structure starting to form, which then sends me back to build around that structure a little more tightly.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. That’s the curse of this particular appaoch, although it does mean I’ll find directions I’d never conemplate without it.
What follows is a very roudh draft of an idea I’ve been toying with for the past few weeks, laying different approaches to the topic together like a house of cards until I can see the shape.
—
On Focus And The Locus Of Creativity
I’ve been writing long enough that I’m never entirely sure where I first heard a particular piece of advice, but my decades-long archive of notebooks suggest I first heard ‘focus on the things you can control’ from Lee Battersby at Clarion South in 2007. It’s a common bit of advice in spec-fic writing circles, and Lee undoubtedly heard it from someone else during his early development as an author, just as I’ve passed the advice on to countless folks I’ve taught in classes, workshops, and online screeds in the fifteen years since.
Focus on the things you can control.
For writers, this means taking your eye off publication as a measure, because you don’t control editorial decisions. You do control how often you write, how often you submit, and how you revise. You control the time you invest in levelling up your practice, and who you choose to work with as mentors, teachers, and publishing partners. You even control what you want to write about and the compromises you’re willing to make along the way, and can do everything possible to present editors with a story you believe in.
But no force of will in the universe will force an editor to say yes, and the factors influencing that decision are out of your hands. Editors are going to do what editors are going to do, and once they say no, it’s time to move on to the next editor.
Of course, the weft and change in the publishing industry has delivered a whole lot more control than they had twenty years ago. The rise of indie/self-publishing tools mean that any book you want to release can be released, without the challenges of dealing with editorial decision making. Ebooks too hard? You can release your work on a blog, or via Facebook posts, or a newsletter. It might not sell or earn your money – audiences, like editors, are outside your control—but the process of making a book and putting it into distribution is comparatively cheap and easy when you measure it against the realities of the early nineties.
Of course, the great illusion of publishing right now is that you do have control over reader choices—countless folks are marketing advertising secrets to indies eager to sell copies of their work—but that’s an illusion of control at best. Like a publisher, what you control is the positioning of your book, trying to ensure that the development resonates with an existing audience and marketing tools give as many readers as possible the opportunity to buy it. Many folks have excelled using those tools, but others do everything right and get crickets because ultimately the readers have control over whether or not they purchase and read.
Notably, writers also have no control over how readers respond to their work. The story you believe is the best thing you’ve ever written is met with a resounding ‘eh’ by your readership, while the throwaway you churned out over a weekend is hailed as the best thing you’ve ever written. Your career frequently feels uneven and wrong and utterly like the effort you put in doesn’t matter, but that’s because you’re trying to control an uncontrollable thing.
Don’t do that.
Focus on the things you can control: how you work, what you work on, how it goes out into the world and how often you put things out there.
To do otherwise invites a level of anxiety into your career, and that anxiety will eat at the foundations of your writing the way termites devour the structure of a house.
The Temptation to Surrender
In 2009 journalist-turned-author Elizabeth Gilbert swept through the writing corner of the internet with her TeD talk on genius and creativity. Science fiction and horror writers who would be be caught dead reading Gilbert’s bestselling Eat, Pray, Love eagerly reposted and embraced Gilbert’s theory that we lost something in abandoning the notion of an externalised, mythic muse.
Ideas, Gilbert argued, were magic. Unknowable, uncontrollable, and driven by a need to manifest.
At the time, I hated it, and railed against its core message with the familiar argument: focus on the things you control. Don’t pretend this whole writing career is luck and happenstance, because that’s an excuse to ignore the work and the creation of opportunity.
What intrigues me about Gilbert’s speech, revisiting it thirteen years after release, is not its conclusion but its starting point: delivered after the massive success of Eat, Prey, Love, Gilbert speaks of the fear attached to the creative process. The worry of friends and acquaintances concerned she’d never again reach the heights of her break-out release, which mirrored the fear of family members when she first pursued writing as a career.
Many writers have felt that fear, even if they decry Gilbert’s philosophy of creativity. It’s that quiet, nagging, subconscious voice that asks, What if you work, and nothing comes of it? What if a career is only possible if you’re a genius, and it turns out that you’re not? What if you spend your whole life pursuing this, and you end up dead and crazed in a gutter? Gilbert arrived at the idea of surrendering to genius after contemplating the idea that her greatest work was now behind her, and nothing she would do was ever likely to equal the freakish success of Eat, Prey, Love.
The genius, or the muse, or the externalised locus of creative energy, became the protective psychological construct that allowed her to keep writing. Rather than focusing on the things she controlled, she leaned into old myths of creativity and the way they managed the anxiety around creative work. She looked to the ancient Greek notion of the daimon, or the Roman notion of a genius—an attendant spirit or supernatural force assigned to the creator and a shaper of creative work.
For Gilbert, this externalised locus of creativity serves as a defensive mechanism–the artist cannot be narcissistic about their work, because it’s not truly theirs; similarly, if the work failed, then your genius is to blame. The cultural transition of genius from something you have, to something you are, strikes Gilbert as the biggest mistake we’ve made as a culture.
Asking the fragile human to be the font of all creativity is too much pressure for us, and Gilbert suspects that weight has been killing off artists since the Renaissance.
I understand the appeal of this approach, even as I decry it. It fits with the expectations western culture has of artists, eliminates any hint of business or commerce from the decision to try and make your living from art. It plays into long-held philosophies that art is a gift, and trying to commercialise artistic product is a crass and terrible thing. It taps into an ancient suspicion that this is how art’s meant to be, repeated and reinforced by endless cultural narratives for a century.
Ironically, Gilbert’s speech came at the dawn of the book era. A period that delivered unprecedented amounts of control to writers and their creative product. Rather than needing to be a genius in order to get a book published, a writer just needs a basic mastery of word processing and a willingness to put the book online.
Ancient Underpinnings
Writer’s don’t really have a clear path from ambition to success, not the same way other careers do. Want a career in medicine? There’s a pathway through university and practice that any guidance councillor can give you. Want to become a plumber? Find an apprenticeship and learn your trade. Want to become a writer? Kid, you’re on your own. Report back if you make it, and make sure you’ve got a back-up plan. Every writer I know has largely carved their career path out of a feral wilderness, figuring it out as they go along.
And Writing for a living is hard on the psyche. I’m acquainted with a number of full-time and part-time writers, and very few of them have built a career without a stretch of insane stress or poor mental health. A few years back I went through my own bout of mental health problems, and found myself undergoing cognitive behavioural therapy and mindfulness training. Every two weeks I’d visit a psychologist and learn a toolkit for staying in the here and now, rather than projecting into a catastrophic future and charting out all the bad things that could stem from a current decision. Two months in, I noticed a familiar refrain, albeit once couched in different language: emotions were uncontrollable, an limbic response to external stimuli that preps the body for a particular response. You’ve got no control over your emotions, but you control how you respond to them.
Focus on the things you can control, rather than the limbic surge urging you to engage in flight, fight, or despair because no real option presents itself. Address what you do—and who you want to be—in the here and now.
I found the concept showing up yet again during a recent read of Ryder Carrol’s The Bullet Journal Method, where he waxes philosophical on the notion of control.
We invest immense amounts of time and energy, not to mention money, trying to prevent or mitigate negative change like losing our jobs, status, security, health, or relationships. The same is true for implementing positive change, be it our education, appearance, ability, or general personal growth. In both cases, a lot of that effort goes to waste, because it’s applied to things we simply have no power to change. Knowing what we can change begins with defining what’s in our control (Carroll, Ryder. The Bullet Journal Method: Track Your Past, Order Your Present, Plan Your Future, p. 189).
What separates Carroll from my psychologist and the various writers I’ve encountered who offer sage words about control is this: he traces the advice back to primary sources. More specifically, to Stoics and their philosophy of using self-control and ethics to conquer base emotion. In essence, he points to the source code upon which all manner of popular advice is built.
It didn’t take much to confirm the connection. There’s plenty of writing tracing common Cognitive Behavioural Therapy techniques back to the cores of stoicism, and many of the “big name” philosophers such as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius are quoted in an embarrassing number of productivity guides and self-help books.
It’s advice that seems to make perfect sense in a Western, english-speaking culture, not least because there was a strong stoic streak among the Roman philosophers and they’ve had an undue influence on our culture for centuries now. Its valorisation of reason above emotion also holds a level of cache in a patriarchal culture that holds reason as a masculine virtue and emotion as female irrationality.
It’s easy to cleave to a notion like focus on the things you control as a virtue, but there’s all manner of hidden bugs glitches in that there source code.
Bugs in the source code
It’s easy to find arguments against the system that were built upon stoic belief. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is beloved of many clinicians in western society, but it’s also inherently capitalistic: the treatment is short-term, structured, and can be empirically tested. Hell, CBT can be transformed into an easy-to-use mental health app, and it’s almost as effective as speaking to someone in folks with mild cases of anxiety and depression.
I don’t disregard the use of the tools I learned doing CBT, but I’m also aware of the lack of nuance. The core assumption of CBT is that poor mental health stems from distorted thought, but I would argue my thoughts at the time were quite ordered for the situation I was in (going into my second year unemployed, recently broken up from my fiance, with a family member recently diagnosed with a degenerative illness). Whatever aid CBT provided me paled compared to starting a new, fulfilling job a few months after my therapy ended—an event that stemmed from luck rather than proactive steps on my part.
In his article, The Problem with Stoicism, Jules Evans interrogates the problems with stoicism and the history of critiques levelled against it. Stoicism appeals, he argues, because it sits at the heart of European thought, and feels more natural than philosophies such as Buddhism. He also suggests two inherent flaws: first, that the sublimation of all passion is not all it’s cracked up to be. Second, that it sets aside the ritual and community that are inherent parts of many belief systems, even ones with philosophical alignment.
Which brings me back to writing advice, and the echo of the stoic Epictetus’ advice to distinguish between what is and isn’t within our control because there’s no rational point in wasting energy on things we can’t change. Most days, I would argue it’s brilliant advice. Hell, most days I’ll rail against any attempt to introduce irrationality to the processes of art, whether it comes in the form of artistic genius or inspiration from the muses or just the sheer litany of bad behaviour that stems from people assuming writing isn’t work.
George Orwell argues there’s four great reasons to write, and the first—and unavoidable—reason is sheer goddamned egotism. Serious writers—especially those who cling to the job after the age of thirty—are among the most vain and self-centred of people, driven by a desire to be remembered, to be talked about, to be acknowledged as clever, or to get their own back against those who snubbed them. “It’s humbug to pretend this is not a motive and a strong one,” Orwell argues, although he notes they share this trait with scientists, soldiers, teachers, and other parts of humanity.”
Egotists have great faith in their own ability to control their destiny. It’s one of the reasons you leap into writing in the first place, confident you can achieve the near impossible in a culture that’s stacked against you.
And yet, for all the appeal of stoicism’s focus on the controllable, I don’t think you can make writing work as a career if you come at it from a place of emotionless logic and rationalism. Too much of the industry is irrational, and no sane being commits to art as a career. Some small part of you needs the irrational dream, the dogged faith that everything will pay off if you just keep creating and putting work out there. Some small part of you will always cleave to the notion that you, somehow, are special and destined to defy the odds.
The worst periods of my writing life have always coincided with the times I try to assert too much control, messing with well-worn processes for creating work to the point where I stop creating and lose myself in the mire of what might be.
What are you focused on?
In 2016, Elizabeth Gilbert parlayed her TED talk into a book on creativity, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. Like her talk, it drew a lot of attention and recommendations from writers of my acquaintance, and like her TED talk I found myself irritable and eager to argue with the text. In her 2019 interview with The Cut ahead of her forthcoming novel, Gilbert described her standard work day when producing a book:
I’m only actively writing a book once every three or four years, and when I am, my day is very simple. I get up at 4:30 or 5 a.m. and I write nonstop until midmorning. Then I spend the rest of the day staring at a wall because my brain is like a fried egg. I’ll have an early dinner and an early bedtime, by 7 or 8 p.m., and I’ll do it again the next day and the next until the book’s finished. It’s a very militaristic thing, the early hours. But I really want to be uninterrupted and the world doesn’t wake up in a way that bothers you till about 9 a.m. That’s when the phone starts ringing, emails and texts start coming in. If you can get a four-hour jump on that, it’s incredible how productive that time is.
There is an easy-to-miss moment in Gilbert’s TED talk where she describes her process as distinctly unglamourous, nothing at all like the sudden struck-by-outside-inspiration creativity she’s advocating for. Her chosen metaphor is mule-like, and seeing the bones of it laid out in an interview touched upon the through-line of both her talk and Big Magic that rankled me: Gilbert’s process is pragmatic, verging on ritualistic. It’s focused on the things she can control—time spent on the project; getting things finished; minimising distractions–while lionising the elements of creativity that so often obfuscate the work required to create.
Hidden beneath the layers of Gilbert’s rhetoric on creativity lies focus on the thing you can control in a slightly different mask. The genius model she advocates for isn’t a step away from the work of creativity, but a means of surrendering to the inevitable inability to do anything but produce the work. I simply wish it didn’t frame the argument in such a way to make the work seem unnecessary.
Increasingly, I find myself wondering if focus on the things you control needs to be retired and replaced by a more accurate approach. Recent research into motivation and practice suggests that long-term thinking will get you excited and eager to start on an ambitious goal, but the folks most likely to stick with it shift their eyes away from the horizon and focus on the day-to-day steps they’re required to do.
The desire to lose weight and eat better motivates you to join a gym or make changes to your diet, but focusing on that long-term destination will ultimately undermine your efforts. Things don’t move fast enough, and success feels far away and disconnected from the effort. If the focus shifts from the result, and moves to immediate action—today I’ll eat five serves of fruit and vegetables; today I’ll walk around the block three times—it’s easier to stick with those tasks than if your constantly focusing on how much you’ve lost.
Perhaps the advice we give aspiring writers shouldn’t be focus on what you can control, but focus on the next step available to you. Perhaps it’s true that every writer seeks the ego gratification George Orwell suggests is part-and-parcel of being an artist, but it’s probably true the folks most likely to achieve it are the ones who actually finish and mail out their books, regardless of whether those books emerged under the aegis of genius or sheer dogged persistence and an understanding of publishing’s goals and learning curve.