When it comes to writing, there is a beauty in the unselfconscious mind. We allow our words to flow freely onto the page, we explore worlds and we try to disconnect from the audience. We are fully immersed in the writing process and business is a word we don’t even comprehend…during the writing process. Then we finish our books, our works of art, and have to begin to explore the business side. I have often heard from writers about the terror this stage of the game produces. Fixations on things like book sales, Amazon rankings and media coverage can suck all of the joy and energy out of that which you once dreamed about: being a writer.
I read an interesting piece on a blog the other day, ironically it was on a blog about acting! In the essay he writes that essentially you have to let go of the end result in order to succeed.
We need to have a direction we want to move in. But we must detach from the results. If we don’t detach from the results we will be locked in misery and thought. Also, detaching from the results opens us up to a possibility much grander than what our minds can imagine. We need to plant seeds and let them do their magic under the soil.
We often use the planting seed analogy when talking about publicity. We reach far and wide, send out messages and information to all appropriate outlets and often times the results far exceed our expectations. But these seeds also take time to come to fruition. You can’t send someone a book and have them read it, react the way you want and then cover it in a short period of time. However, often these seeds bloom in ways we never even dreamed. One person reads a book that we have sent them and it registers in an impossibly enlightening way. The right book at the right time. But if you, as the writer, spend your time obsessing over Amazon rankings or trying to beat the competition, you lose sight of that goal. To find readers and have them connect with your work, to open up a world inside the pages of a novel or memoir or non-fiction guide and have people understand and appreciate what you have created. In order to change lives and leave an impact, to honor your work as a writer, you have to detach from the results because it will only leave you self-conscious and stalled when completing future work. As Deepak Chopra (bestselling author and guru) says,
You do not want to dig up the seeds of your desires to see if they are growing, or get rigidly attached to the way in which they will unfold. You simply want to release them.