On Doing What You Love
And why it might not be as great an idea as it seems
A note on my brief absence here:
You may have noticed that there hasn’t been any new Healthier Hustle content for the last two weeks. I took a step back due to a death in my family. It was a clear choice to focus on the people I love and not try to pull together some words here just for the sake of meeting my cadence of weekly posting. The pressure to produce regular content to feed the algorithmic beast is a familiar and ever present undercurrent for most of us who create online. It feels imperative to push back against that and make stepping away for life’s biggest moments a non-negotiable.
I don’t always get it right, but I’m glad I did this time.
Recently, I’ve been reflecting a lot on my journey as a writer.
This is partly due to an exercise I’m doing with a writing group I’m in where each of us is talking about our origin story as writers and what we want to grow into. It’s also partly inspired by reading Kelton’s journey over on Shangrilogs (start here if you want to check it out). It’s also likely due to experiencing death recently. There’s a self-reflective element to grief for me, as it brings the existential reminder that my time is limited back to the forefront of my thoughts.
At the same time, I’ve also been thinking about passion as it relates to vocation. This is in direct relation to the Designing Your Life class I’m teaching and work my students and I do around examining deeply held societal beliefs about things like doing what you love.
So this week I’m sharing my writing journey, those thoughts on doing what I love and where they do and don’t (hint: mostly don’t) converge here.
I wrote my first novel back in the 2006-07 timeframe. The specifics are a little fuzzy because I wrote the story, one tiny bit at a time, one night a week, while I was in graduate school and working full-time. The project started as a chapter I workshopped in a writing class that my husband had gifted me for my birthday (yes, he asked before giving me a gift that required homework).
I pitched that draft novel on a whim at my local writers conference. The idea was just to practice pitching, so I could polish it up and pitch for real the next year. To my surprise, the agent I pitched requested the full manuscript. She ultimately passed on it, but this wasn’t a surprise since I knew it wasn’t quite where I meant it to be yet. She did, however, offer some really kind words about my writing and suggestions around the plot that aligned with my own thoughts about what I wanted to change. Even as a super newbie author, I knew that was a good sign.
After another two years of one-night-a-week revision sessions, I pitched my polished up manuscript to the same agent, and she accepted it for representation. We had a few close calls with editors and I did a major re-write based on that early feedback and some great brainstorming with my agent. Many kind words from editors followed, but ultimately the market was shifting away from the type of story I had written and that manuscript never sold.
By then it was 2013 and I was just starting to hear about self-publishing as an option (these were the nascent days of print-on-demand). I loved my story and wanted to get it out into the world, so I decided to give this route a go.
And thus launched my introduction to the concept of author as entrepreneur. Because it’s one thing to publish a book and it’s a whole other thing to get that book into the hands of readers. Over the next few years in addition to learning more about the business side of things, I published another novel, two novellas (half-length novels), blogged weekly, started a writing podcast with friends, presented at conferences and wrote articles in support of my work as a writer. I loved all of this, while simultaneously being vastly disappointed that I wasn’t selling more books. That I wasn’t making a living off my writing.
Through it all, I kept thinking about that traditional publishing experience. I wanted an agent, I wanted a publishing house. I was not naive enough to think that someone else would take on the publicity and marketing piece— but I wanted an advocate in my corner in the form of an agent, I wanted someone else to handle the production side of creating a book from hiring editors to cover design to publication, I wanted to be able to walk into a bookstore and just see my book on the shelf instead hand-selling it to stores myself.
I also both loved and hated defending self-publishing. I’m a righteous defender of this as a valid choice for publication— for every “just upload and click publish” book on the internet, there is an exquisitely written, well-edited, beautifully laid out counterpart that is just as good as anything put out by a publishing house. But at the same time I got tired of comments that my book was “actually good” and general nose-turn-upping when it came up.
I couldn’t get out of my head, or my heart, or (most correctly) my ego that I wanted to be traditionally published. And so in late 2017, when I’d finished my third novel, I decided to query agents again.
I got close with that third novel. Lots of agents requested the full manuscript based on my query. I did at least one revise and resubmit. I tweaked and changed and re-wrote in myriad other ways and yet it still just never quite landed.
While I was querying, I was also working on a draft of a fourth novel. When I finished that I sent a few queries to agents that had been close calls with novel three. When the those rejections rolled in, I decided to work with a developmental editor on a revision before continuing to query. This was in late 2020. In early 2021 my editor and I both felt like the project was in a good place and I resumed querying.
By the late summer of 2021 I had accumulated 53 rejections of that manuscript, most of them standard passes (not the more customized rejections I’d gotten with book three).
At which point I decided to stop.
If you’re reading this and you know the querying process, you likely have opinions about that decision to stop at 53. It’s a low number. You can find numerous stories of bestselling authors who have hundreds and hundreds of rejections prior to THE ONE offer that changed it all. But I’m not telling this story here today to get into the best practices and keep your chin ups of the traditional publishing process.
I’m sharing this instead to pose the question— what happens when we seek to make our creative passion projects fit into some package to be accepted by others?
There are a lot of different answers to this question, obviously. But mine is that I lost the joy of it. I wrote my first novel out of the sheer fascination of putting words together on the page and creating a world and the people in it.
I wasn’t thinking about what the market was for fiction. What might set my book apart from others. What an agent might be looking to add to their list. What length the book should be to fit into the market.
You hear the advice a lot to “write the book you want to write” and then think about selling it. This is really, truly great advice. Advice I very much tried to follow. Advice I thought I was following, honestly, until I realized that all these messages about market and what was selling and what agents were looking for had weaved their way into my subconscious and it was unclear anymore what I wanted to write.
I stopped at 53 queries because I felt like I needed a reset.
I thought about publishing books three and four myself, but I didn’t feel excited about them. I didn’t believe in them enough to market them to others. I felt as if I edited my own voice away trying to fit into what the market was buying at the time. I also had zero ideas for any future books (which is scary for someone who identifies as a writer of fiction).
We get a lot of messages in the world around doing what we love, and never working a day in our lives. It’s advice that has always sounded really solid, while at the same time not sitting quite right with me, either. And I think maybe this experience has shown me why. By trying to fit this thing I love into a certain box, by letting someone else determine it’s worth— I came to love it less.
And so where do I go from here?
I’m not one hundred percent sure, to be honest. It’s helpful to write here in a totally different capacity. I’m grateful for the space to do it and those who take time to read it. In many ways it’s helping me re-find my voice. I’m excited and curious to keep exploring wellness and anti-hustle culture. I’ve also been wondering recently if I might eventually feel curious about trying some fiction again (how’s that for a non-committal statement). Or if I might pick up books three and four after this time away and find they’re more me that I thought, after all.
Whatever comes next I know that it will take work.
Not just the work of creating itself, but the work of closing out the external feedback and getting really quiet and clear with my vision. But to also the work of acknowledging the role that my own ego is playing in all this. Sure there is external pressure to write to market, but there is also my own internal pressure to publish traditionally or hit some arbitrary sales number I set for myself based on no actual data.
I will need to be intentional. Which isn’t the first thing to come to mind when thinking about pursuing a passion. And maybe that’s the real crux of the difficulty of making something you love fit into something more vocational. We wander into it blinded with affection and forget that the very best of relationships take work.
Be intentional about doing what you love and you’ll work real hard at it everyday, but still love it in the end. Doesn’t have the same ring to it, but it’s closer to the truth.
I’ll take truth over pretty cliche any day, if it means I might find my way back to passion.
Things of Beauty
Just a few things that felt particularly soul-nourishing recently (or maybe just made me smile).
📖 This article, which is another take on reframing the do what you love narrative. (h/t to Tyson for sending it my way)
🐈 This cat and sheep video. Two of my favorite (non-squirrel) creatures in one sweet photo- yes please! And look a their little faces, just so blissfully happy. (I’m not particularly active on Twitter, but I can be lured there by animal videos.)
🧀 If you’ve been following along with my pimento pepper journey— we finally made the pimento cheese! We used this recipe from the chef of a restaurant that was in our neighborhood for years (Comfort). It was hands down the BEST pimento cheese I’ve ever had and the recipe delivered!
Postscript- Just a note to say that my sentiments above should not be construed with any notion that being paid for your art or creative work is somehow bad or wrong. I’m a firm believer that making money from creative work does not devalue it in any way. I have just personally struggled with not thinking about the money while I’m making the art and that’s been not so great for my creative process. (*If you’ve figured this out, please do share!)
Post-postscript- there are links to these throughout the article above, but if you’re curious about my fiction writing, here are all my books in one place. (And thanks for being curious!)
Thank you! This was exactly what I needed today. Truth over the pretty cliche.
You and your family are in my thoughts as you cope with the loss of your loved one ❤️
Thank you for your honesty, vulnerability, and this, especially: “And maybe that’s the real crux of the difficulty of making something you love fit into something more vocational. We wander into it blinded with affection and forget that the very best of relationships take work.”