First Cup of Coffee - January 4, 2019

Why the advice "if you're bored, the reader will be bored, too" is really terrible, how being a writer is a job and requires work. Also trusting your gut and deciding what to work on next.

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Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy. Here was my first cup of hot every Today is Friday, January 4th, 2019. The end of our first work week of the fresh new year. Hope it treated you well. I think everyone has been sort of working their way back into a routine. Some people haven't even gotten there yet. I've got friends who are still on vacation. Um emailing with some of my author friends yesterday on some projects, and one mentioned she said, okay, the kids go back to school on Monday, and I've got to get back into my writing routine. So I think we're all feeling it. That's a thing, and I I might bring this up often, but I think it can't be emphasized enough, is that even if you are a writer and fortunate enough to get to make your living as a writer, um, and I guess I should say, even if you are a writer, a writer is someone who writes, even if you are uh making money on your writing, and which is the definition of being a professional, a certain bar of making money on your writing. And if you are even more fortunate that you can make a living at doing it, um it is a job. It it will always be a job. And I think there's a perception that it's that it doesn't have to be a job, you know, they that you won't work at it, um, or that you won't feel the what the the slog. I remember a friend of mine once said that to me. I suggested a project to her, and she said, Oh, but Jeffy, the slog of it. Um she's just not that kind of person. Um, but a lot of times things are a slog. That's um what it takes. You know, maybe that's the whole metaphor of of laying bricks, uh, paving the very long highway. Ultimately, there are a lot of things in life that feel like paving bricks or laying bricks. And I think that um you know, I would lay it at the the fault of this misperception at the foot of the people who say things like, uh, you know, do what you love and the money will follow. Or um, if you were if you have a job you love, you'll never work a day in your life. You guys know I already hate those things. What are they aphorisms? I should really look up again what the word is. It might be an aphorism. Uh but anyway, that a saying that sounds good but is ultimately meaningless is the word that I want there. I should write down some of these words I can never think of while I'm talking and keep them next to my chair. One day I'll get to move outside again. Right now it's still cold and snowy. Snow, snow everywhere. Uh, but one day I will be back out in the arbor. I should look and see what day it was that I was last outside and then see when I can first go outside. It'd be a good project for my mom. Mom, figure that out, would you? Um so anyway, this whole idea that if you love what you do, that it's not work is really vilely wrong. It's just wrong. And I hear variations of this all over the place. And and you guys have heard me complain about the um advice I often hear pandered about, say where uh writers say, you know, if you're bored with the book, your readers will be too. I was like, oh Jesus Christ. No, no, sometimes work is boring, sometimes laying bricks is boring, sometimes work is a slog. That's just what it requires. Uh you know, and and it comes back to this idea too, you know, of like all of us growing up with this idea of the movie montage of our lives, you know, where we see the writers and the musicians and the artists, even when they're flailing, even when we have the montage of them spending months or years on some project where they're like tearing out their hair and flinging themselves on the floor and throwing canvases out the window or falling asleep on the piano and all of these wonderful things. I mean, it all looks very romantic and exciting, right? But it doesn't feel that way because your life doesn't get to be a movie montage. There are no jump cuts, there's no saucy soundtrack. Um, if there is, it plays at real time. So three minutes and 30 seconds of your life is one song and three minutes and 30 seconds. It doesn't, you don't get to like gloss over those months and years of effort. And and we all know this, and yet I think that somehow we end up having this sort of implicit expectation that it will feel otherwise. So that's one of the things about writing Oriah's Enchantment, this fifth book of Sorcerer's Moons, is that with it being a long space between my original idea and getting to this now, I lost some of that excitement for the project. And I kind of moved past it in some ways. I got interested in newer projects, and I bring this up because I hear people talk about writers in particular, um, talk about, you know, only write what you're excited about. If you're not excited about it, you won't write it well. And I don't think that that's true. And we come back to that uh that great quote by Neil Gaiman, which I think is really so important, where he talks about that laying of the bricks. And he says that, you know, that some days the writing feels exciting and wonderful, and other days it feels like a slog. And when he goes back to a completed work, he can no longer tell which days were the slug and which were the excited days. And I've mentioned this to a lot of my author friends, and some of them are perplexed by this because we all think that those glorious, exciting days are like, you know, that's when you're inspired. You know, people talk about the muse, and that's when you know the angels have touched you, and you know that you're really onto something, and yeah, it feels great. Or if you didn't have those, you might not be able to get through it all. But when they start paying attention, they all find out that this is true, that they cannot tell which things they wrote, that later they can't tell which things they wrote when they felt excited and expired, and which things were on those slogging days. And it's just it's just the nature of being human, I think. You know, that sometimes you have to push through. But sometimes I think you have to almost prove to the universe that you are committed enough to push through the boring and difficult times. And this can be difficult to communicate because sometimes when writers will talk about, uh, you know, say, well, which project should I work on? I don't know which of these several things I should work on, which happens more than you would think. You know, when you're selling for Trad, yeah, you um have a certain amount of contractual deadlines determining which project you really have to get done next. But some a lot of times you don't, a lot of times you have more time and you finish something, and it's like, okay, I have several series that I could go back to and finish, like I'm at right now. You know, I'm have Sorcerer's Moons, Unfinished, and Uncharted Realms and Missed Connections. Uh, I have people asking me if I'll go back and write more in Covenant of Thorns. Uh so you know, all of these things are options. And so you think, okay, what should I work on next? And sometimes it's financially driven, sometimes it's contractually driven. Um, but other times what we'll say to each other is go with your gut. What's your gut feeling? And I think that that can be misleading because I think that saying the gut feeling that people have this idea that this is like the movie montage gut feeling. Um, this is uh Jeffrey Rush playing Rachman and off being driven to do the thing. Um, you know, and and I don't think that that's what the gut feeling feels like most of the time. Sometimes you get that, but if you had that, you wouldn't have to ask the question. No, instead, the the gut feeling can be the it's it's really just trusting your intuition, it's just trusting the um what the the non-conscious decision. In fact, one good way to get at a gut feeling is to choose something at random and find out if you don't like it. If you say, oh, well, well, okay, I'll do this thing, and then if you're disappointed that that's what turned up, you know, like I sometimes I would do like um assign a list of ideas, a list of numbers, and then randomize. And it's very easy to randomize on the internet, you know, you just put in your numbers from like one to ten or twenty or whatever, and then have it pick a random number, and then you say, Okay, whichever one comes up, that's the project I'll do. And if the project that comes up is disappointing, and you think, ah, I was kind of hoping it was going to be this other one, it's your gut feeling. So, but I can promise you that there will never be a book that you write, or a story you write, or a painting, or a home improvement project, or what have you that will feel glorious from beginning to end. You might be super pleased with results, you might be super excited to begin with, you might have moments of triumph along the way, but you will also have the slog. And that is how it works. And for me, coming back and writing this book, I'm writing it because I need to finish this series, because people are expecting the end of this series, and because that's my job. It's also my job to make it the best story that it can be, and to fulfill expectations on this story. So when I hear writers say things like, oh, I just write the stories um oh, you know, that make me happy, or you know, whatever's whatever the voices in my head are saying. I I I kind of hate that one. Um, if you are, if you choose to be a writer as a career, then you have to accept that sometimes you will be working on projects that will be work, that will be the slog for no particular reason. Um, it could be just that this particular book was difficult for me to get to for no good reason at all. Um, there's a lot of um, I don't know, um I want to say maybe emotional stuff happening in this book, some places I didn't necessarily want to go. I remember um with Exile of the Seas. Was that Exile? No, actually it's Warrior. Yes, sorry, it's Warrior of the World, which comes out on Tuesday, so I really can't spoiler it. But there was a point at that book where all of a sudden I was writing along and I was having a great time. I was having a fantastic time. Um, my variole was happy, things were going great, and and I suddenly realized what was going to happen. And it was like sometimes it can be like that. Um, you know, like watching the movie, and you get that sense of dread, and you realize, oh no, something bad is going to happen now, and you want to stop it, but you keep watching, yeah. And and you think that as an author, you can change that, and yet you can't. And I complained to uh one of my author friends when that happened, and I was like, I can't keep writing, I don't want this terrible thing to happen. And that's Kelly Robson, and she said, um, she said, Don't take the monkey bypass, which is a line of hers, which I think is great. That apparently I think it's a Canadian thing, she's Canadian. But there's apparently an animal park that you can drive through. And at one point, there is the the monkey enclosure. And if you drive through the monkey enclosure, it's kind of a nightmare because the monkeys jump all over your car and they sit on your windshield and they strip your windshield wipers and all kinds of stuff. And also a lot of people don't like driving through the monkey enclosure. So this park implemented what they call the monkey bypass. So you can skip that uh that particular ordeal. And she's used that as a metaphor for uh when you choose things in writing, and I think that's a good one. That you, as a writer, you can't take the monkey bypass because, tempting as it may be, because it's that's not part of your job as a storyteller. You're supposed to go through the part where your characters have to suffer, the monkey enclosure. And so I faced that in writing Warrior of the World, and I was very unhappy. She said, Don't take the monkey bypass, just write it. And it was difficult and miserable. Uh, and I think that that's happened a bit in Oriah's Enchantment. Uh different things happened in it than I expected, and both Lonan and Oriah have had to go through some pretty difficult stuff. Um, but I think it's gonna be more fun to write book six because, and I'm still trying to figure out a title for book six that won't be too spoilery. Um yeah, I can't I can't even use the words I'm thinking now because I don't want to give it away too much. So I have to figure out something. But uh now I'm starting to think about lone and lone and something. Uh um at any rate, we I'm sorry, I'm fatally distracted starting to think about titles now. Um it doesn't matter if which book is fun for me and which book is not, because uh that's my job, right? That's how it works. So pop quiz. What was the theme for today? I guess I was a little bit on theme today. I hope you all have a wonderful Friday. I hope you have a fantastic weekend. I hope that you are enjoying the first days of the new year and that they are full of promise and wonderful things that bode well for the road ahead, be it a slog or a skip. And I will talk to you all on Monday. Bye bye.