No. 28: Savor the Hype; Prepare for the Slog
The Long Haul of Excellence
My phone exploded with Kamala Harris hype all week.
Energy, exuberance, conviction that a new candidate for President — a Black woman, no less — would be the one to take down Donald Trump.
I scrolled past, no change in my heart rate.
I’ve known hype before.
Hype doesn’t mean anything once you get to the slog.
And Kamala is about to hit the slog.
Novelists live in the slog.
Every book is a long-haul marathon: two years, at least, from first word on the page to when it hits shelves.
Each day, I show up at my writing desk in a different state. This week, for example. On Monday, I was dead sore from loading hay bales at the farm with my partner and his nephews all weekend, then played tennis with Lower Case at 6am, which meant that by the time I sat down to write, I just wanted to chill — the result being this kind of fugue-state sprint on Chapter 24, a spree of 900 crisp, clear words. On Tuesday, I woke up grumpy, combative, questioning the entire premise for the book, and made very little forward progress in writing, but towards the end of the day, realized I wasn’t questioning the entire premise, but rather a small logic leap in the previous chapter, which was affecting the current one. On Wednesday, I was high on having attended a screening of the new Diane Von Furstenburg documentary (she’s one of my idols), so I bounded to work, raring to go, thinking of DVF’s mantra of being “in charge” of your life and I ripped through the second half of the chapter like a consummate pro. On Thursday, I spilled a case of blueberries at 5:30am when I didn’t have my contacts in and stepped all over them and then started thinking that nothing in my book made any sense, but muddled through the workday on persistence and faith, reminding myself that none of my books made sense until they did, before I spent the evening watching House of Dragon episodes and mentally poking holes in them to remind myself that even the pros screw up. And today, Friday afternoon, I’m reading the finished chapter and am totally into it and realizing, yes, right, this is how it was supposed to be all along and it fits right where it belongs, after Chapter 23 and Chapter 25. And the week-long drama that went into all of this evanesces into a beautiful champagne fizzzzz.
What’s the lesson, then?
To not believe what my mind tells me about my work. This is the jewel in the crown. After all, the sheer amount of noise in your head during the course of writing a novel could fill a thousand of them alone. Which is why it has to be ignored. The good voices, the bad voices… they’re from the same warped engine. I’m reminded of that carving over the gates of Wimbledon, from Rudyard Kipling’s If:
“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.”
It’s the closest thing I’ve ever found to the meaning of life.
All of this isn’t just good practice for the writing. It extrapolates to everything else. The more I learn to ignore the self-judgment, for instance, the more I excel at ignoring outside opinions too. In the early days of my career, for instance, I’d check Goodreads obsessively to look at reviews of my books and mentally argue with anyone who gave something less than 5 stars. It was an illusion of control, of course. The insecurities of a debut writer. Yet as I learned to prioritize the work over how I was feeling about the work… reviews stopped being important to me. I haven’t looked at Goodreads or read reviews in many years now. Whatever people are saying about my books, I genuinely have no idea! Because truth is, it doesn’t matter. What matters is showing up and following that muse inside me, which I have zero conscious access to and is a complete tyrant, and has stories to tell and won’t let me rest until they’ve been told.
It holds true for the idea for a book too. I get so hyped over new ideas. I have them all the time.But I also know that hype is a glimmery, ephemeral veil. That’s why I don’t follow an idea until I’ve had it for three or four years — at minimum! — and it’s been tossed around and tested by time. New Novel is an idea I’ve had for 5 years. And the series I’m planning after this one is an idea I’ve had for 7. The good stuff sticks.
Even outside the career, acceptance of slog over hype matters.
In a relationship, for instance.
The early days are all heat and lust and novelty and both parties seeing the hype instead of the person. But it’s in the slog, the day-to-day grind where nothing is sexy or exciting or adrenaline-fueled, that real love is born.
I think it’s also a big reason why I was so reluctant to get in a long-term relationship for the longest time. I’d go on dates and think: I’m loving the hype… but I can’t see the slog with this person. Slog meaning when a pipe bursts and the house floods or we lose all our money or our skin starts to sag or the zombies come and we’re hiding in a forest for our lives, just the two of us…
Because that’s how I also have to feel when I commit to a book.
Book / boyfriend, the calculus is the same = the idea of us is nice, but is this going to last?
The movie process for The School for Good and Evil taught me this kind of patience too. At one point during our time at Universal, we were on a fast-track to release in 2016 — a full 6 years before the movie actually came out. That came and went, the hype turning to slog. I wrote 4 drafts of the screenplay, gave notes on more than 50 others. All along, I had to stay calm, telling myself we were only at mile 10 of a who-knows-how-long marathon.
Maybe the biggest lesson came when we had a screenwriter on the project who just hated the source material and wanted to do something completely different with it and I remember months of rage-induced insomnia, thinking through all the scenarios of what would happen if they ended up getting their way.
But that person too came and went. On went the slog, writer after writer, director after director, until I’d given up entirely on the movie and told people it was dead and I was perfectly happy with the books to solely live on the page… And only then did the movie gods smile.
Over and over, then, the universe teaches me the same lesson. Work. Wait. Surrender.
In other words, nothing I ever think will happen is going to happen. The story will do its own thing. On my page. In my life. My job is just to show up and follow the rabbit down the hole without judging the rabbit or judging myself for leaving the comforts of life and chasing down a hole.
Which brings me back to Kamala.
She may win. She may lose.
The hype of these early days isn’t going to give us any answers.
What will give us answers is grind to come, the daily tests that reveal the real truth to us little by little.
A story will unfold.
And in the end, whether it’s life, art, love, politics… the story will have its way.
What’s a time where you had to ignore the hype and focus on the long-haul? Do you ever get too tempted by the shiny new object?
Until next week…
Honestly I can relate to having writing slogs, especially when disastrous things happen daily. I tend to question the whole point of my stories and I find I only stay in the outline phase, or keep scrapping the first chapter.
But it's interesting to know even published authors deal with it!
Would you say maybe New Novel's most interesting parts were ones written when you were dry and unmotivated? i have heard that people love what the authors hated.
Starting school is always a slog for me. There's the initial excitement of new classes, new classmates, and new teachers, but that quickly wears away after the first two weeks. Only one or two classes continue to bring the same thrill and energy. Thankfully, school has never been shiny enough to be tempting.