"Yes." "No." "Eh."

figuring out how to say yes or no as a creative

This week, one of my writing students asked me how I decided what to say “yes” or “no” to as a creator—she was talking about conferences, podcasts, library visits, reader e-mails, and the like, but the question is actually one that dogs creatives at every stage in their process, so I thought it was worth talking about my decision-making process.

Here’s what I told them.

When faced with competing interests for your time and emotional bandwidth, it helps to define a task's MAIN value to you (why you're tempted to say yes): is it primarily of a Financial value, a Publicity value, a Marketing value, an Educational value, a Philanthropic value, an Interpersonal value, a Personal value?

Obviously some tasks will hit more than one of these, but placing it into a bucket can help tie break.

• Financial: pretty straightforward. You do X task, you get Y dollars.

• Publicity: any promo that you don't pay for. You're invited onto a podcast. You're profiled in a newspaper. Blogging. Marketing is any promo that you pay for. You PAY to go on a podcast or blog tour, for brochures or mugs with your face on it. A Publicity value task offers (often amorphous amounts of) exposure, but costs you nothing.

• Marketing: a task that offers amorphous exposure, and it costs you something.

• Educational: a task that furthers your skill, often without an immediate concrete reward (in some cases, like certificates, for a more definite financial benefit).

• Philanthropic: a task that helps other people with no real benefit to you.

• Interpersonal: a friend or family member has asked you to do it, with social consequences if you turn it down (I'm putting this coldly, but I mean . . . if Uncle So-and-So asks you to talk about his book idea and it costs you an hour of time, will your friendship suffer if you say 'I can't, man', or will it feed you both to say 'let's do this?')

• Personal: a task you want to do for yourself, for no good reason other than it is cool/ interesting/ pleases you.

A last wishy-washy piece to factor in: bandwidth. Creative tasks are not quite the same as, say, loading the dishwasher or building a house, right? We can set our brains on automatic for those tasks, no matter if they are for Financial, Interpersonal, Philanthropic values. But we need our best brains to do a generative creative task, no matter if it is for a Financial, Interpersonal, Philanthropic value. That means that sometimes, choosing a non-generative task deprioritizes the generative one even more than it seems on the surface. Agreeing to go to a friend's birthday party (Interpersonal value) leaves you TIME in the evening to do the creative task (Educational, Financial), but not the BANDWIDTH.

I try to figure this “cost” in along with the task’s main value as I pit it against other tasks in the same category. I think it's easy to see that you can say a task that pays $500 for a week's work is better than a task that pays $65 for the same thing. A philanthropic task that helps 40 people in a meaningful way is better than one that only helps 1. A publicity task that reaches 30 people definitely interested in your project is better than one that reaches 3000 humans milling in a building.

It is, of course, more complicated than that, as many tasks hit multiple values. It helps me tie-break to know what my current life priorities are. For instance, two years ago, my priorities were Educational——>Financial. I was working hard on being a student of writing again, throwing myself into leveling up my craft in order to turn out a novel like THE LISTENERS. Philanthropic, Interpersonal, and Personal asks were demoted. Now, however, I’m in in the middle of 27 weeks of writer bootcamps, my last big teaching hurrah before I take a sabbatical to focus on my own writing. I knew what the bootcamps were before I began them: Philanthropic, Personal, and Interpersonal.

Knowing that meant I could feel good telling other tasks they were second priority. Having a definitive end to this life priority means I will feel okay about minimizing Philanthropic/ Teaching in favor of my next season’s priority: Financial/ Creative (writing my next novel!).

In summer, I know I will have to shift to Publicity/Marketing, which will put a damper on my writing. In fall, I know my busy year will have left my interpersonal priorities wanting, so I’ll focus on that.

Now, it's important to really consider that bandwidth piece and how it affects my decision making process. It can be very tempting to take on lots of tasks that don't use bandwidth, especially when my novel’s in a tough stage. There are always all kinds of tasks that don't require creative bandwidth on the to-do list, tasks that satisfy the Financial, the Philanthropic, the Interpersonal, etc. I must resist the temptation to fill my dance card with the pragmatic to avoid the ephemeral.

HOW DO I THINK THIS RELATES TO ANYONE STILL IN THE PRE-PUBLISHED TRENCHES?

Aspiring creatives live in an amorphous Education place. To what end? You don't know! Perhaps you will publish a book. Perhaps not. Most authors don't make a full-time living, even if their writing career is doing well, which means most writers are pursuing Education not to change your life, but instead to satisfy a different, Personal value.

It's important to be honest about that piece.

It's tempting to assign our Personal tasks a Financial value in order to justify the time spent on them. ("I can't go to the birthday party with you, honey, I'm working on this novel so I can CHANGE OUR FINANCIAL LIFE!!!!") But you don't need to fudge the amorphous value of a task to a more concrete one to make the task both important and worth spending time on. You can learn for learning's sake, if that is your current priority.

When you are an aspiring writer, your primary value must be Educational and Personal and Interpersonal. If your value is purely Financial, this is the wrong industry! Your time would be better spent pursuing a more tactile Education--->Financial pipeline.

Conflating values, like mistaking an Educational task for a Financial one, ends up with you crushed when the book you used to teach yourself to write on doesn’t sell, or sells for just enough to make you able to deduct expenses on your taxes. Mistaking a learning process for a financial one makes writers cling to projects for too long, thinking they need to get concrete compensation for all the years they’ve put into it. It makes writers play it safe on a manuscript, because the consequences of failure are different when it’s a job versus a practice piece. Likewise, mistaking a philanthropic task for a publicity one can result in you feeling bitter that a gratis library visit never results in book sales, etc. etc.

But if you went into that library visit thinking “I have time to pay it forward, I’ll say yes to this one,” then you will get exactly what you planned for, and for the right reasons. If you labor on a manuscript for years and discover you can’t really fix its naive structural problems but are grateful for everything it taught you about character development, you’ve made an educational goal and gotten exactly what you wanted. Ah, how satisfying. I do like getting what I want.

And now, I guess, in conclusion, have a list of New-to-Me-Songs from this week that I like:

“Along for the Ride” - COIN

“LA” - London Grammar

“Good Vibrations” - MISSIO

“Body Song” - Radical Face

“Talker” - Wilderado

“Color De Dolor” - Angélica Garcia

“Naked And Alive” - Milky Chance

“Martyr” - Jake Huffman

“Francesca” - Hozier

“Just a Bird” - Blind Pilot

“Walter Reed” - Michael Penn

“New Propeller” - Nada Surf

“A Thousand Pokes” - Stick in the Wheel