Write Market

I’ve heard many times that you should pursue your passion, and not worry about the money.  “It will come,” they say, “they” being people with vacation homes and retirement plans.

But many of us would love to pursue something that’s difficult to make money at, even for the best of us.  For me, it’s writing.  Over 90% of books published in a year don’t sell more than 1,000 copies, or so an agent cited at a recent Writer’s Digest conference.

It that’s not enough to make you hang up your keyboard, then you have the constant self-doubt and crushing criticisms.

And then there are days when you don’t even know what to write.

In her TED presentation, Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, talked about the need to nurture creativity.  She spoke of her own pressure and the realization that it’s exceedingly likely that her greatest success is behind her.  “That’s the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at 9 o’clock in the morning.”

I know how she feels.  Except for the greatest success part.

Then she muses on a creative force being outside the self, that maybe we should go back in time to when they used to think it was due to external forces, like the muses or – like where the word comes from – genies.  Then, rather than put all this pressure on ourselves to produce, we could blame our genies for not doing their jobs.

True creativity, she says, doesn’t come from a person, it comes from the creative genius that that person is connected to. Just remember that great ideas always come when you’re not thinking. You need the silence to connect to your ‘creative genius’.

As I listened to her, I thought, yes, that’s it.  I’m not lacking lost, my genie is.  And, being Irish, I figure my genie is probably just drunk somewhere.  I just have to wait until he’s sober.  Then I’ll know what to write.

But she also says that our job is to do the job, the work.  Do your part, show up, make the effort – again and again, and sooner or later, the genius will come.  And perhaps, so will the money.

Tags: content, creativity, editorial, inspiration, writing