The Delusional Live Among Us
Please tell me you're not one of them.
I’m starting this Substack with a quotation from another Substacker, which seems appropriate. She actually has a Substack that I no longer subscribe to (who knows why—I like, the delusional, am a human and humans are endlessly perplexing). I’m 99% sure I’m taking this quote from a panel discussion I read about on Jane Friedman’s newsletter and it’s from a lit agent named Kate McKean.
This is it:
What I don’t understand, what frustrates me about people who want to get published, is that they expect they know everything just because they learned how to write when they were five. But if you want to be a country music singer, you know you have to go to Nashville and go to every single thing and try, try, try, and get rejected 1,000 times. That’s the way it’s supposed to happen. But that’s not what happens when you write. Because you’re a special flower that wrote a perfect thing on your first try. That’s the thing that gets me.
Oh Kate, that’s the thing that gets me, too.
I have never once walked into a hospital, picked up a scalpel and asked where the closest patient was that I could operate on. I haven’t done that because, well, it’s illegal and also because I’m not trained as a doctor.
But there are no laws about who can write. And some people think that it’s not that different than talking. They’re both using words, amIright?
When you got a degree in Creative Writing1 and got your first writing job when you were 21, you are rightfully offended when you meet people who do something else for a living, and studied something else in school2, that casually share that they wrote a book they’re sure will be a New York Times bestseller.
It’s not that these people can’t have raw talent. At Legacy Launch Pad, we’ve published plenty of books written by non-writers. But they have usually required a lot of work on our part to get those books to the point where they were publish-able. And the hardest part about that is you can work with a non-writer on his non publish-able book who believes it is oh so very publish-able and that you are making his book worse by trying to fix it. (Truth: that only happened once.)
So it’s not about talent. Talent is awesome but I know plenty of people with raw talent who remain obscure and frustrated.
It’s about experience (and courage—which I got into in my previous newsletter). It’s about doing it, day in and day out—shaping words into sentences, obsessing over the best way to express ideas, having people tell you that reading your writing is like hanging out with you. Writing well seems easy because experienced writers make it look easy. But it takes a lot of work to make it look that easy.
I also understand that people are also delusional about their writing because some not very talented writers become incredibly successful. So an inexperienced writer reads Glennon Doyle or Rachel Hollis or EL James and says, “Hey, I could do that!” They probably could. But having stratospheric book success is completely random.
I don’t aim for stratospheric success the same way that I don’t aim to win the lottery. I don’t like my chances of success or leaving my fate to another person or people. And I don’t need to—and neither do you. I’ve discovered that if you do a great job on the right book for the right audience, you can become an authority on your topic and from there, engineer your own success.
I’m not telling you that if you’re not a professional writer, you shouldn’t write a book. If it’s on your bucket list to write a book, do it. If you want to have the best book possible, work with a professional.
I wouldn’t want you operating on yourself, either.
Full disclosure: it was the only major that didn’t have tests. That greatly influenced my decision.
This is going to sound contradictory but I don’t actually believe writing can be taught. It is a skill you learn by doing. In my college Creative Writing courses, we wrote stories, workshopped our stories and read our classmates’ stories. I kind of think MFA programs are a crock. Or at least an expensive diversion.
\