Creatively Contracting

In Which We Discuss the Business Side of It All Affecting Your Art 😥

One of the things all of us no doubt do from time to time while we’re in our amenity-rich rooms aboard this writer cruise ship is write the hell out of a manuscript. You’re in your lush robe, you’ve got your preferred tea/coffee/cocktail and snacks, you’re making yourself cackle and cry and swoon and experience all the emotions of the characters of your heart. You get into *the zone* and feel on a creative high.

But then you’ve got to send that manuscript out to the wider world (thanks to our very trusty at sea internet), and—huzzah!—your book gets picked up and instantly talks of the next book are hitting your inbox and you get back to the keyboard and…crickets. From your own mind. The mind that was kicking ass when you wrote that first manuscript.

This is the situation one of our fellow passengers finds themself in. They write:

I'm a children's book author and illustrator at the beginning of the publishing side of things with a debut book coming out soon and some others on the way. I'm so excited to be at this point. But I'll also admit that it has been a steep learning curve. One big thing I wasn't prepared for was how working under contract would impact my creativity. I spent many years creatively blocked due to perfectionism; I had been trained from an early age to focus on the results over the process, and it definitely hurt my creativity. After years of being stuck, I discovered THE ARTIST'S WAY (which helped so much) and spent years retraining my brain to enjoy the process again. It was great! I had a million ideas, and I could finally write words down and make marks on the blank page. 

But then...the contracts. I'm honestly so grateful for my publishing contracts. I've been dreaming of this moment for a long time. AND I'm also realizing how the publishing system and communication processes can feel very results oriented. It isn't so much the deadlines that have impacted me as I set those for myself. It is the conversations around those deadlines. The idea of a story being "approved" or receiving "the green light." It definitely has triggered my approval-seeking-people-pleasey side. That side makes creativity really hard sometimes. I've found it hard to tap into my playfulness which is essential to my creative process. And I've also had moments of feeling depressed and powerless which is sad because my stories usually empower me. 

I also believe in the power of collaboration and that feedback and the publishing process can improve stories significantly (I've seen it!). But sometimes it feels less like collaboration and more like I'm working under someone -- rather than next to them. 

I'd love to know how you protect your creative playfulness, sense of empowerment, and trust in yourself, especially under contract. And how you avoid letting things like perfectionism and people-pleasing get in the way of your creativity when the system is sometimes set up to be more "approval" based than collaborative. 

You’ve totally just hit the nail on the head, Creatively Contracting, about how once the ink is dry on our publishing deals, things can all of a sudden stop being polite and start getting real. The real world (see what I did there?) seeps in and all of a sudden you’re slapped in the face with how this isn’t just about having fun anymore, but about being a part of the big business machine that is publishing. So my big go-to's when I'm feeling the pressure and become creatively stagnant are two-fold:

Reading basically every day, even if it's for only 15-20 minutes, really helps me. I usually do this at the start of my day because it's what I need to get my brain to turn on. I truly love reading so much, it's why I got into writing, so when I have that grounding moment as a reminder of why I create (to make the feeling I'm having while reading a feeling someone else can have too), it inspires me to get to my projects.

But, if only it were as easy as reading a book, right? Other times, when I’m feeling creatively pressured, I do the exact opposite of good sense and work on something that’s not on deadline and is not under contract. I know it seems counterintuitive to pile on more stuff to do, but I think of it like a treat in the same way I do reading. I'll spend 15-20 minutes (which often turns into an hour or two) working on this for funsies project which gets me into the zone so that I can then go over to the projects under deadline and keep that zone momentum, even if only for a little while. This doesn't always work if I have no ideas on what to write next, which is where I found myself for a good chunk of 2024, but a fellow Ventorship author recently advised me to take the for funsies writing concept and turn it into a Writing Anything concept, even if it's crap, to just go with some wild idea and see if anything comes of it. That was hard to wrap my head around as a very Virgo Virgo, but it's helping me remember how to write for fun, which I think could apply here, when you're losing the fun and need little reminders of the joy creating can bring.

As for your mention of things getting approval and the green light, I find that the vast majority of the time, editors totally understand how the business side of things can sometimes butt heads with the creativity of it all. They want to set up an environment that leads to you creating the best book you can, but can be just as affected by the cogs of the business machine as we writers are. But, even then, the whole approval-based method you described can feel like the end-all-be-all as you gets votes of yay or nay from various departments. At the end of the day, it’s your name that’s going to go on the book, and really, you should have the deciding vote on the story going to get published with your name on it. If you ever feel like you’re getting steered in a direction that doesn’t feel true to you, or you simply need more time to get that playfulness that will help you unlock your next book, this is when I would tell you to talk to your agent and have frank conversations with them about your worries and let them help you have the convo with your editor about how to get your ideas and their ideas for what you should create next on the same page, or to help wiggle the timeline around a bit. Your agent wants to be in your corner, so don’t let the people-pleasing side of you prevent you from asking for help when you need it.

Again, I know this is all easier said than done. I’ve got that perfectionist side to me too, and I just want folks to like me, right now (total tangent, but did you know this is actually what Sally Field said in her iconic Oscars speech, not “You like me, you really, really like me”?). When it comes down to it, if things feel off about what we’re creating, we’ve got to say something instead of compressing it all down. When you let it fester, often a book doesn’t end up being made anyway, because you can’t get the words to work, so it’s much better to voice your uneasiness sooner rather than later so you can find yourself in *the zone* again.

If all else fails, set the contract on fire and see if that helps. Out of sight, out of mind has to work some time, right?

-JJ

What about you, fellow authors? Any suggestions on how to set the pressures of contracts aside and get into that creative flow? Put your thoughts in the comments below, or if you’d like to stay anonymous, feel free to write them to me at heyjasonjune@gmail.com and I’ll post them here for you.

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If you’d like to vent about anything author/writing related, write to me at heyjasonjune@gmail.com with the subject: VENTORSHIP. I’ll give you my take in a post, and we’ll crowdsource author opinions in the comments. You’ll remain anonymous, and any haters will be thrown overboard. Ultimately, I think you’re going to be buoyed up by author love and support as we realize we really are all in the same boat 🛳️