On being good versus being ruthless

Priorities, priorities.

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Thank you to everyone who came to the In Writing Creative Hour on Sunday – it was wonderful to meet more of you, and I’m really happy there are so many international In Writers as well as us here in the UK. Our next writing get-together will be on Sunday 29 January at 5pm GMT. (That’s 9am in Los Angeles, or midday in New York. It’s 6pm in France and 4am in Sydney – sorry.) I’ll send out the link nearer the time – become a paying subscriber to join us.

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I dropped the ball on the newsletter this week. Usually I write it on a Tuesday or Wednesday, and send it out at 7.30 on Thursday morning, but here I am staring at the screen on Thursday afternoon, and I haven’t yet pressed send.

If you’re self-employed, whatever your job, you may recognise what I’m about to describe. As a freelance writer, I have periods where work goes very quiet indeed. And silence can be ominous. It’s like when you leave a child in the other room, and then suddenly you notice that they’re not making any noise, and when you go back in, they’re holding a green felt-tip and a guilty expression. Or when you make an edgy joke to a friend in a text, and they don’t reply for five days. Or when you say ‘I love you’ to someone and there’s an awkward pause. Basically, I find silence doesn’t often bode well.

Last spring, there was a period of five or six weeks where I had so little paid work that I genuinely started to wonder if I’d been blacklisted. Maybe I haven’t been showing enough enthusiasm for journalism, I thought. Maybe I offended someone. Maybe they’ve just noticed that I’m not actually very good. I was slipping into deep paranoia when, suddenly, two commissions came in within the space of half an hour – and from then, as though the gap had never happened, normal business resumed.

This week, the opposite thing. I had an unexpected pile-up of commissions (sometimes they really are last minute, as in ‘Can you file something in two hours for tomorrow’s paper?’), as well as a podcast recording that I’d booked in weeks ago. Busy times are exhilarating and satisfying, so long as I do actually manage to get everything done – but they’re not great for extracurricular activities like writing free newsletters or book proposals. I’m sorry for my lateness.

I really hate being unreliable. I hate the fact that there are tons of unanswered emails in my inbox – emails with interesting work ideas, friendly emails, emails from people I know and like, and from people I don’t know, but probably would like. I’m really sorry if you’ve contacted me and I haven’t replied: I feel bad about it.

(Also, apologies to the subscriber who asked me to take them off the list this week, but somehow sent this request by text message from their phone to my email. I know you’re with Vodafone and you have an Australian number. I know you’ve made a totally reasonable and polite request. I don’t know what your name or email address is, so I can’t actually unsubscribe you. I’m sorry.)

I also feel frustrated that I’m letting myself down. There’s an urgent creative project that I would love to be working on, a project that has to be done quickly as the window of opportunity is brief. It has potential to be great for me, but in the short term it’s unpaid, and at the moment I’m neglecting it so that I can do the things that pay for the central heating and the wifi, and the things that I’ve promised people I’ll do.

And finally, I feel guilty because I know that many people have much more work stress than I do, and work far longer hours for less satisfaction, and have kids or caring responsibilities, and can’t necessarily unwind by having a bath and then watching Search Party in bed, which is what I did last night.

On the other hand – and I hope this may help some of you too – I enjoyed the psychiatrist and Substacker Lila Flavin’s post this week on the necessity of being ruthless as a writer:

On being ruthless

‘Being ruthless means listening to what you want to do, and if that’s writing, then blocking out everything else that gets in your way,’ she says. I think many successful writers would recognise the truth in this. I remember seeing Colm Tóibín interviewed at an event, and finding him quite unapologetic about doing whatever was required to make his work. It’s a choice I find a bit difficult in my own life, but perhaps it gets easier when you’re Colm Tóibín, genius, Laureate for Irish Fiction, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize and Costa Book Award, etc etc.

I know that I should probably be writing the time-limited thing that I really want to do, and perhaps I should be accepting that I’m going to be unreliable and annoying until that thing is done. I’m also aware that prioritising commitments to other people is partly an excuse for avoiding the scary things on one’s personal to-do list.

How are you juggling your writing this week? What’s being sacrificed and what’s being prioritised? Tell me all about it in the comments.

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At the beginning of the year I created a new thread called In Writers write in – a place for our community here to band together, ask each other’s advice, share useful experiences and recommendations, and generally talk about writing. I’m thrilled to see that it’s really taken off and there’s discussion taking place on all sorts of topics: how to manage your own Substack newsletter; what it’s like to have a novel on submission to publishers; how to cope with agent rejections… and lots more.

From the beginning of February, this thread is going to be for paying subscribers only, so please enjoy it as a free resource over the next week or so, and get chatting:

In Writers write in

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That’s all for now! Good luck with your writing this week.