How can you focus when you're feeling evaluated?

Schrödinger's garbage book

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It is typical for me to both acknowledge that I am weirdly efficient and productive while also feeling like a lazy piece of shit. On the one hand, I accomplished a lot less than I wanted to in 2024. I had bold ideas of finishing book 3, growing this Substack, finishing and polishing a screenplay, and branching out to some non-mainstream projects I was interested in outside of my standard mystery-ish novels. I kind of didn’t do all that. I did finish book 3, to be fair, but it took me way longer than I wanted and felt a lot more difficult. I did finish a screenplay, but that was part of a class (meaning I was adhering to someone else’s timeline, not my own), but I never polished it. I did grow this Substack—not as much as I wanted to, but went from 0$ to a not insignificant amount of $.

I have this very romantic idea of myself in 2022. I was coasting on a moderately successful debut. I was contracted for a second book that wasn’t due for another year, and was very confident that I would make that deadline, because I tend to hit deadlines. I had estimated (before I wrote it) that A Step Past Darkness would be 700-800 pages. The draft I turned in was 660 I believe, and I turned it in early. That year I had chugged along like a bullet train. That was “good me.”

Lately, I’ve been feeling like “bad me.” I’ve been wanting to do a lot more reading—today, in particular—but found myself rewatching an old TV show. I thought about getting off the couch and working on this essay, but then watched another episode. This weekend (which is now virtually over) I wanted to work on the character profiles for planned book 4. I’m not sure I will actually do that today. I might have mentioned that 2024 was one of the worst years of my life. It is actually sort of a miracle that in that year I both 1) wrote a book at all 2) did not become addicted to any substance. Can I just like, cut myself some slack..? Probably not. I’m a Virgo with perfectionist tendencies.

If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen me say that my publisher decided that there would not be a paperback release of A Step Past Darkness. I have all kind of feelings about this, most of which I will keep to myself, but the main feeling is just one of rejection. I am a regular reader of the subreddit /pubtips and amongst all the hand wringing and consternation of what authors can do to sell books, there is one user (I regrettably don’t know who they are) who consistently pops in with “It’s my job to write good books. Not my job to sell them. Sales aren’t a reflection of me. That’s it. Period.” I deeply admire this person’s attitude. Because what I am doing now is spiraling. Is the book not as good as I thought it was? Was it a mistake for me to be a multigenre author, particularly after my agent told me it would make my career harder? Why did I explicitly insist on writing a book with different pacing than my first one? Was I being too stubborn about who I am as an artist, when maybe I should have thought more about marketability and how readers would receive it? [Please note that I am not fishing for compliments about the book. In my heart of hearts, I know it is an outstanding book and that one day I won’t feel the way I do today.]

I am—in the midst of this spiraling—currently on submission with book 3. Which is, yikes, different from both book 1 and book 2. (And why have I done this to myself again..?) I’m supposed to be working on the creative background stuff I do before drafting with respect to book 4. But then there’s that part of me that thinks, “well… would that even sell?” and I find myself watching TV.

There is a scene in the movie Ratatouille where Remy (the rat) cooks something for this critic who is dining at the restaurant. The critic is known for being overly harsh and nasty. Remy decides to make a version of ratatouille and the moment the critic tastes it he gets this flash of experience: coming home as a kid and his mom setting a bowl of homemade ratatouille in front of him. He drops his pen. He’s delighted.

Being a writer is like walking around being that critic. He even looks drab, dour, and depressed. He is there to taste food but he sort of hates food. He has become wrapped up in everything about the restaurant world and criticism and forgotten the basic simple thing: a love of food. The simplicity of tasting something good.

It’s perfectly understandable that writers currently querying are obsessively checking their emails, lamenting positive passes from agents (these are somehow worse than non-positive passes), wondering if they are good enough to make the cut. Published authors will obsessively check sales, or look at other authors on Instagram and wonder how they write so fast, how they can fill entire bookstores with fans, how they got that awesome blurb. Because I’m on sub, I worry that the book I sent out is garbage while simultaneously thinking that it is good enough to get published, in fact better than some other books that are published—but that fact is actually independent from whether it will get published. People fret about publishing even before they’ve finished a book. They fret about publishing more than they fret about writing, I think. As an author, when you do a Q and A session after a reading, you will always get a “How do I get published” question, but very, very rarely a craft question. Why are we throwing ourselves towards evaluation rather than creativity?

When you’re in that spiraling space, you’re like the critic who has forgotten the taste of food. Or what he loves about it.

One of the best and most accurate times I have seen someone portray how the actual act of writing feels is in Stephen King’s Misery, which gets more into the author’s mind than the very excellent film adaptation does. Annie Wilkes has her favorite author, Paul Sheldon, hostage, essentially, and has forced him to write a book that will bring back the beloved heroine he killed off in his most recent book. At first, Paul is like, this woman is fucking crazy. He hates writing Misery books—that’s why he killed her off. He makes a half-assed attempt that doesn’t really make sense. Annie is not buying it, and demands he starts over. Paul is randomly thinking about things when suddenly he has a revelation: it could have been a bee sting. Misery could have been stung by a bee, and because it was olden times, people might have mistaken her for dead and buried her alive. Not only does this reasonably bring the character back from the dead, Paul realizes this could this leads to a dramatic scene where Misery’s lovers race to dig her up with their bare hands before it’s too late. He also makes another connection: earlier in the series, another character died of a bee sting. Paul realizes that he could take something from the past that he never planned to be significant and use it as a twist: Misery is secretly related to that character. Despite the fact that Paul didn’t want to write the book, he really gets into it. King/Paul describe that feeling of getting into it as disappearing into a hole in the page. Let me ask you, when you are actively in that hole, are you thinking about book deals and critics and Instagram? No. I would argue you aren’t thinking at all outside the bounds of the world of your book. At least for me, when I experience a flow state, I’m not really conscious of myself at all. One might not feel their body to the extent that they forget that they might be a little hungry or have to go to the bathroom.

For writers, we have the good fortune of having two different types of “critic having a bite of ratatouille” moments. One is when you’re reading a book and have to put it down for a second and think, damn, that’s good. The other is when you disappear into the page. I’m willing to bet that the times you disappeared into the page are the times that someone else had a “damn that’s good” moment with your writing.

I wish I had magical advice to tell you on how to always be in that mind state. The basic stuff—stop looking at Instagram—feels pretty obvious. I do know, though, that when I am dicking around with a story idea, I am actually being productive, while trying to calculate other authors’ sales absolutely is not.

Photo by Stefan Cosma on Unsplash