What I learned about dating and relationships from publishing
I began my career as a novelist (and later published author) only a few years ago. I started dating waaayyyy before that. I used to describe my love life a string of train wrecks, every one of them preventable. But it wasn’t the wrecks themselves that were so bad as much as the time I spent pining for that happy train before it went off the rails. Thank goodness I didn’t take those habits with me into my publishing process. It turns out that the pursuit of getting published is much like that of getting a mate. When I discovered this, and discovered how much more functional I was in the publishing process (not to say that I didn’t make mistakes), my outlook on dating and relationships completely changed.
Here are perhaps the three biggest lessons I learned.
1. Know what you want and why you want it.
It’s important to get really clear on what you want in terms of your publishing goals. Do you want an agent and go the traditional route, or do you want to self-publish (or perhaps you want the latter to lead into the former)? Do you want your books to have a mass commercial audience, or a highly selective audience (and once in awhile these do cross over)? Do you want to make a living as an author (and a comfortable one at that), or are you content to sell a few books along the way and keep your day job? Do you want to be a mega bestseller, complete with movies and merchandising and indie rock bands naming themselves after your characters?
All these things are reasonable goals (yes, even the last one, although I’ll save that for a different blog post), as are the goals of casual dating (or even one-night stands) vs. monogamous dating, cohabitation, marriage, kids, the picket fence, etc. Even if your goal is the Prince Charming fantasy, be aware of it.
But knowing is only the first part. You also have to know why you want what you want. What do you think being a published author is going to bring you? What do you want it to bring you? Money? Love? Sex? Freedom? Personal fulfillment? Fame? Ditto with why you want to be in a relationship (or not). None of these reasons are to be judged at this stage as lofty or shallow or on target or misguided. You only need to be aware of them. Lesson #2 is where you start to dig deeper”¦
2. Bring what you want from the relationship to the relationship.
This applies to the publishing relationship (yes, you are entering a relationship, regardless of whether you get an agent or self-publish), and here’s where you start to examine your choices. For example, if you want to be a bestseller, you’ve got to bring that bestseller to the table (how does that work? I’m not quite sure). If you want an agent or a publisher (or in my case, readers) who is/are absolutely crazy about your book, then you’ve got to be absolutely crazy about your book. Insanely in love. You-wanna-sleep-with-your-characters-and-live-in-their-world in love.
If you are expecting your readers (or anyone else) to validate you to make up for the validation you’ve never given yourself, then you likely won’t get the results you’re looking for (or, you just might, but only on the surface. You could become a mega-bestseller, but it won’t be enough). If you want perfectionism”¦well, good luck with that.
Are you seeing the parallels here? If you want a man (or woman) to notice you, then you’ve got to see yourself as you want to be seen. If you want them to treat you with respect, then you’ve got to respect yourself (and others). And so on.
Be in love with what you write and who you are, and you’ll attract others who do.
If you want something that hasn’t come to you yet, then you have to act as if it already has. You can’t promise you’ll make writing as your sole career a priority as soon as you’ve hit the publishing jackpot. Anytime you set a goal in the future, it forever stays there. Put it in the present moment, and you’ve already attained it. That means you’ve got to find a way to do your day job (if quitting is not an option, and for many, myself included””although I’m really close to stating otherwise””it’s not) and be a full-time writer. You can’t put it on the bottom of the priority list. You’ve got to make tough choices (know what you want).
3. Rejection ain’t so bad.
Man, if I had learned this a long time ago, I would’ve saved countless tears, pounds, anxiety, and a lot of stupid moves. When it came to love, rejection was my monster under the bed. I feared it more than anything else; and sure enough, as a result I attracted it more than anything else. Serious attachment issues. And then I blubbered endlessly about it.
I actually learned how to take rejections in publishing as a result of growing up and watching my brothers in the music business. Their losses were my gain. Although it was painful (downright heartbreaking at times, as I’m sure it was for them) to see record company after record company pass on them for one reason or another (and they’re uber-talented, although perhaps one would call me biased), over time I witnessed that they never became less talented, never stopped finding an audience for their music, and never quit the business (well, one of them did, but I don’t think it was because of the rejections).
I had always sensed from day one that Faking It was something good, something that was going to have to find its own audience along the way. So even when agent after agent rejected it, I thankfully was able to detach (not that I never felt disappointment; one or two of them stung, and I’m sure if you’ve gotten a lot of rejections over long periods of time it starts to get to you) and move on. No rejection ever deterred me from pursuing what I wanted. No rejection sapped me of my ability to write (if anything, I honed my craft even more””and I did it for me, not for them), and not a single one ever convinced me that maybe I should give this thing up.
God, why had I never made that connection with dating? No rejection ever diminished the essence of who I was, nor was I rejected for being less than (only my ego told me otherwise. Man did she get it wrong.) Not everyone likes the same thing. Heck, some people don’t even like chocolate””what’s up with that?
Which goes back to lessons one and two. If you are relying on an agent or publisher to tell you that you’re the best thing since sliced bread, or if you think a five-star review is somehow going to make you worth something and you don’t already think that, then you’re in trouble. But if you already know the essence of who you are, if you believe what you’ve written is greater than the sum of its parts, then rejections become nothing more than a process of elimination. In some cases, they even help you clarify what you want by showing you what you don’t want. They become much easier to detach from and release after you’ve felt your brief disappointment.
Of course, when you sit back and stop trying so hard, things usually come to you when you’re not looking, both in love and in publishing. When I decided not to pursue an agent or a publisher (rather, I decided that my career would go just fine without one), AmazonEncore came along and swept me off my feet. Really, they wooed me””how could I not be smitten with them? And it’s been a good marriage so far.
As for my love life”¦well, I’ve decided not to date anymore. At least not right now. And I’m totally at peace with that decision because I know my reasons (which I’m not sharing) and am living the essence of what I wanted from all those relationships. At least now I know that if I re-enter the dating world, then I’ve got this rejection thing licked.
In the meantime, I’ve got everything I asked for.
Contest Time!
You don’t need Valentine’s Day as an excuse to treat yourself to a good book and beautiful flowers. Elisa Lorello’s debut novel, Faking It, became available on March 15th from Amazon Encore. Faking It tells the story of what happens when an escort and a writing professor become friends and take a deeper look at one another. Andi offers to give Devin writing lesson in exchange for Devin teaching her about sex. The winner of this contest will receive one dozen roses from California Blooms along with a copy of Faking It. The winner can choose to have the flowers and book sent to themselves or someone they love. Fill out the entry form completely and we will choose the winner on March 31st. Answer the question below correctly for your chance to be entered. This contest is open only to residents of the continental U.S.
Click here to enter to win.
Leave a Comment