There’s a carpenter bee stuck between my patio door and the screen. He got that way after spending ten minutes bumping into the glass over and over as if desperate to get inside. Our screen door is slid mostly open and during one of his bumps he crossed the threshold and now can’t figure out how to get out. He keeps bumping against the patio, tiring himself out, and then hanging on the screen and doing a booty dance while he cleans himself.
The tree frogs who regularly hang out on our patio doors eating the bugs attracted to the light from within the house, however, have no issues maneuvering this obstacle course. They come and go with ease, except when they accidentally hop inside and then we chase them out as best as we can.
I wish I could say I was a tree frog in this instance, but I am more like that fat bee, stuck between two screens hoping to get out. I’ve been stuck here a while, but I think I need a new perspective to get myself free. Like the bee, I need to approach it differently.
I just don’t know what that looks like.
I wrote my first book, an urban fantasy, in 2020 and published it in August 2021. I had another book idea, a mystery, one I wanted to chase, but all the conventional wisdom for first time authors said, “Stay in your lane (both in genre and series). Finish this series first before you work on the next.”
And I listened. They knew better than me, right? They were successful. They also pitched the fast release model, where you get as many books out as you can in a short period to build your backlist. Financially, it makes sense. The more books you have out, the higher the read through. So I doubled down. In the next three months, I wrote two more books in my urban fantasy series even though I wasn’t sure what I wanted to have happen next. Even though that other cozy mystery book and another urban fantasy book called to me. But I had a taste for the writer’s life and I was all in.
It took me six months of painful focus to edit my second book, and it still wasn’t the best book it could’ve been. I struggled with the plot. I struggled with the character arc. I struggled with the book I wrote that wasn’t ready.
In that time period, I threw caution to the wind and also wrote the cozy mystery idea because I was dying inside. If I couldn’t get my urban fantasy series out, I’d do it with my new second cozy mystery. This is also advice I’d heard from other authors — if your series fails to sell, move on and do the next one. I also wrote a short story in my original urban fantasy series and I released that in August 2022. Six months later, I finally released urban fantasy book 2, but it sold even less than my first book, and the thought of editing book 3 filled me with dread.
So, I took a new tactic and focused on a cozy mystery series. I wrote another book in my cozy mystery series and a short story as well. I wrote 35,000 words on a new urban fantasy idea, brainstormed a different kind of urban fantasy world with my husband, and wrote book reviews and nonfiction pieces on my blog and on Medium to ‘be seen.’
I got so burnt out by pushing hard to ‘be a writer’ that I stopped writing. I stopped pushing my stuff on social media. I stopped trying altogether. But I remained in author circles, brainstormed a shared cozy fantasy world with a group of authors, attended author conferences, and still had a head brimming with new ideas.
It took me a year to find the joy in writing again. To follow my muse instead of ‘conventional wisdom.’ To keep moving forward on whatever book or story strikes my fancy rather than finishing my debut series. To keep writing, no matter what.
I’m still bumping up against that screen like the bee, when my ego demands that success requires I plan for the future and get something published. Or I berate myself for ‘wasting time’ on a new urban fantasy story idea I wrote the first chapter for on a random Sunday. Or wasting writing time on my nonfiction pieces I decided to start again, not because I have to but because I want to. Because I have things to say or to process.
I’m still stuck on book 3. I want to edit it. I want to publish it, but I refuse to force myself to do so. I spent two years forcing myself to do what others said was right for me and it left me a husk of my former self. So here I am, following my muse, refusing the call to ‘get something done and published,’ even though the internal pressure is there. I don’t know my process, but I’m having fun playing with it.
Even when it’s painful.
I listened to Brianna Wiest’s, 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think, a few weeks ago. While much of what she said didn’t apply, since her audience for that book appeared to be twenty-somethings, one of the essays on Stuckness stuck. In it, she said, “Success is more a product of habit than it is skill. To excel at something you must be able to do it prolifically.”
This is probably where the belief comes in that to be a ‘real’ writer requires you to write every day (Stephen King is famous for saying and believing this). While I obviously don’t subscribe to that take — every writer has their own process, whether that is an every day thing or a few times a week thing or a disgorging over a weekend once every month/few months/year thing — I do subscribe to the main premise in that statement.
In order to excel, you must practice.
You can’t continue to master your craft if you write one book and call it done. You have to write many books, some shitty, some mediocre, some great. It’s why, if you were to reread your favorite author’s first book after having read their fifth or tenth or even twentieth, you can see where their craft shifted and became more refined.
In 1967, psychologists PM Fitts and MI Posner discussed three specific stages of learning in Human Performance.1 Even though their research discussed motor skills, the stages still apply to creative endeavors. The three stages are:
- Cognitive, where we figure out what we don’t know, try, fail and find a new plan;
- Associative, where we’re still struggling to do the thing, but making progress, just not on every aspect of it; and,
- Autonomous, where we can be in flow and allow the habit we’ve been building to take over.
As creatives, we can get stuck between phases two and three. Many people give up when their first book or few books (or products or creative endeavors) don’t sell the way they thought they would. I see it all the time with new writers and the ones I follow on social media. We all start out bright and full of hope, but after weeks, months and potentially years, it fades with every failed launch or bad review.
I’m still in the associative phase, stuck between what other people told me I should do to be successful and what I wanted to do, what I was dying to do. I had moments of wanting to give it up, some as recently as a month ago, when I spent time writing a new idea instead of making progress on my other books.
Where I wondered if I would ever be ‘good enough.’
Ira Glass calls this the creative gap, where our taste is better than the work we produce. Where our craft and where we want it to be is as big as the gap between a screen and a glass patio door for a bee.
He said, “For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. … It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.”
What we do in this situation defines whether we continue to master our craft. Do we give up or do we double down (or at least take limping steps forward)? As Brianna Wiest states in her essay (and does so better than me), “The difference between the people who persevere to see that their work rises to their standard and the people who toss in the towel is not one of sheer unprecedented talent. It’s just a matter of having the often uncomfortable commitment to keep growing. If you don’t have the desire nor the ability to push past the plateau, then an exodus is a means of showing you that there’s something else better suited for you. If you do, it means you must eliminate the unnecessary details, work with your current threshold for self control and keep going. Getting unstuck is realizing that you were never stuck in the first place.”
Even if it feels like you were or are.
For me, this just means I keep moving forward, keep writing, even if the project I’m working on isn’t the one I think I should be doing. Even when they go nowhere. Even if they’ll never be a success. Even if it is a non-fiction piece about how stuck I am when what I sat down to write was a cozy fantasy mystery. Or an urban fantasy. Or any of my many book ideas.
Like that bee, I’m going to keep buzzing against the barrier until I find my way free.
- Fitts PM, Posner MI. Human Performance. Brooks/Cole Pub. Co; Belmont, CA: 1967 ↩︎