My Dirty Little Secret
The other day I got asked one of my favorite questions:
“Todd, you’re writing online a lot about being successful and how to create better stuff. Don’t you have any actual creative projects to work on like a novel?“
Here’s the short answer: Yes, I do.
Here’s the longer answer:
90% of you know me only from the work I do online – the motivation, the creativity tips, the success advice.
But to be honest, the only reason I started writing is because I wanted to write a novel.
I fell for the great legend, the myth: just me alone and my cabin with the typewriter pounding out the next great American work of art.
Once I actually tried that – I practically locked myself in a room for a whole month. I wrote my novel. In the middle of my school work and my part-time job, I slaved over the thing.
It’s certainly one of the big accomplishments in my lifetime. The characters, the plot, the scenes are all uniquely mine. Nobody can take away my novel.
But nobody’s ever read it either.
And that’s why I’ve leaned more toward online writing.
See, the problem with traditional publishing is it’s outdated. I’ve shopped around for agents and publishing houses and the responses have been pretty similar:
First-time authors are not welcome.
Now, do first-time authors still get picked up? Of course. Can you land an agent and get that big advance? Sure. Do those dreams still come true? Yes.
It’s just very difficult.
So here’s my big secret, the big game, the evil plan.
I’m pouring myself out clean: everything I learn, every insight I have, all my breakthroughs on creativity over the last 8 years that I’ve been formally creating new things all goes to you.
For free.
The result is electric.
More than the solitude and power I feel from creating my own worlds, I adore the delight and responses which come from passing along the lessons.
One “thank you” makes all the work worth it. Your feedback is my oxygen. Thanks to my parents, I am a teacher at heart, and one shining moment of enlightenment from a reader is worth more than 50,000 words of hand-crafted art.
I’m doing all this in the hope that I will earn the luxury of spending my days in a dream world – writing fiction.
That being said, I want to offer this piece of advice:
It may not make sense for you to follow my path.
I’m big on blogging and speaking because I have a weird little narcissistic bone in my body who needs the applause. The work alone does not sustain me.
I’ve milked the fiction writing bone to the tune of 150,000+ unread words on my hard drive over the last three years.
That may not be the case for you.
In a world where everyone is saying “Get out there!”, maybe you should plug your ears, shut out the world, and do your work.
Who knows, maybe one day I will publish that novel, but if I do it’ll be a culmination of the audience and support I’ve gained here. It’ll be because my Muse decided it was time to go back to that dream.
It’ll be because that’s my path.
Now go find yours.
