It Pays to be Inflexible – It Pays to be Flexible

I’m currently writing a novel based on the collapse of an Australian company. Virtually overnight, the business went from being worth around $300 million to being practically worthless. When I started, I wasn’t particularly interested in business per se, but as I’ve interviewed survivors of this corporate disaster the project has grown on me somewhat. It’s more than a story about numbers.

Why would I even embark on the major commitment of writing a novel on a subject that I wasn’t interested in? Well, I’d already had that experience writing Air and Space Disasters of the World. Again, it wasn’t a subject that I would have chosen as a top ten from a wish list, but New Holland wanted me to write it and I figured, ‘What the hell.’ As it happens, it turned out to be a fascinating subject, full of human emotion and folly and it’s one of the works I’m most proud of. The issues surrounding air disasters aren’t any more about aerodynamics and metal fatigue than a business story is about accounting. All stories, ultimately, are about decisions. What makes people take one path over another, paths that often lead to disaster, but that can also lead to dazzling success?

I’m pointing this out because I’ve observed that writers, would-be or otherwise, aren’t necessarily the best judges of what’s best for them. It is possible to be over-precious about who you are and what you do.

Yesterday in the Dymocks Melbourne store, I attended a talk by best-selling crime writer Jeffrey Deaver. He highlighted some points about the reality of making a living as a writer that are always worth repeating and are all based on the central premise that writing is a business.

A writer produces a product much in the same way that Proctor and Gamble or Colgate makes toothpaste.

Lots of people are involved in the creation of a book besides the writer.

All have their role to play and all need to do things according to a schedule. So if you’re ever lucky and hardworking enough to get a book contract, you have to treat your deadline as sacred. I know of many talented people who’ve damaged their careers because they consistently couldn’t deliver on time. The editors, copy checkers, designers, printers, marketers, publicists, journalists and booksellers who all have rent to pay and mouths to feed because of what you’re doing, won’t be too impressed if you’re late delivering your manuscript. You might be able to get away with it if you’re literally selling millions of books and you have a patient and loyal fan base, but unless you’re Robert Jordan who’s so sick he’s actually dying and can’t deliver the next installment in The Wheel of Time on time then you’re unlikely to have a good enough excuse to stop the presses. In the case of deadlines, it pays to be inflexible.

The subjects that you choose to write about are another matter. I agree that you ought to write about subjects that you’re interested in or even passionate about, otherwise where is the energy coming from to power the writing over the long haul? I think you’d be surprised how, if you examine it closely enough, a whole area of existence you’d previously had no interest in can suddenly come to life. Nevertheless, you run the risk of doing yourself out of a career if one day you decide to stake everything on some obscure and esoteric work that only you and a half-dozen people will ever be interested in, like Swahili translations of 13th century Bulgarian feminist poetry – A Marxist Interpretation. As Deaver pointed out, Proctor and Gamble don’t make liver-flavored toothpaste because the market is too small. Know your market. Liver-flavored toothpaste might work really well for dogs. I’m not saying you shouldn’t write your live-flavored toothpaste novel, just don’t expect it to sell by the millions to human beings.

Know Your Market

Here, flexibility is your friend. Some markets are highly commercial and some aren’t. I was amazed to find out that William Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature and two Pulitzer Prizes couldn’t support himself on the proceeds from his novels, short stories, play, poetry and essays. So he sold scripts to Hollywood. If William Faulkner could sell out to put food on the table for his family then we all can.

However, there’s a difference between ‘selling out’ and ‘compromising your integrity to the point of stupidity’. It’s up to each and every one of us to work out how much compromise we can live with. I can’t imagine writing Protocols of Zion: The Musical no matter how much money, infamy or other enticements the Ku Klux Klan offered me.