Why Success *and* Failure Can Make It Harder to Write

In order to build a career as a novelist, you need to write--and publish--multiple books over time.

This is true no matter how many copies any particular book sells. Whether you make it onto a bestseller list or a grand total of ten people buy your novel in the first year, your next step is always to write something new. 

Unfortunately, both success and perceived failure can make it harder to write your next book. (Rude, I know!)

Let's take a look at why this is the case and what you can do about it.

The Pressure of "Failure"

You've probably experienced how failure can ding your confidence and make writing more challenging.

Of course it stings when the project you poured countless hours into gets rejected.

Of course it hurts when trade reviewers trash your book or ignore it altogether.

Of course it feels awful when readers hate your newest novel (or worse - feel completely apathetic to it/don't know it exists!). 

Every author experiences big and small "failures" across the course of their career. The books that don't sell to a publisher. The titles that "underperform" in the market. The stories you start drafting only to find there's not enough meat there to get past the first act. 

None of these failures mean anything about YOU as a person, though. YOU are not a failure. Your career isn't doomed, either.

In fact, these failures aren't even guaranteed to make writing harder. (What? Yes. Hang with me.) 

For every author who gets stuck in a cycle of feeling burnt out and creatively blocked after a career setback, there's another author who moves forward with very little fanfare.

Instead of running into a brick wall of despair, they gently ease over a small speed bump of disappointment and keep going.

To recover quickly from failure, you have to control your internal narrative about the situation and extract helpful lessons for the future instead of using the situation as proof that your goals aren't attainable (this is something I help my clients do in coaching).

When you haven't learned those mindset skills, you're likely to use each new failure as a reason to increase the pressure you put on your next book.

You start to tell yourself things like: 

If this next book doesn't sell, I'm done.

I have to nail this next proposal or else my agent/publisher will drop me.

I need to hurry up. All the other debuts have already sold another book. I'm falling behind. 

Nothing I do is working. What's the point of trying again?

These thoughts may be loud and obvious--you might even say them to friends--or they might lurk in your subconscious, showing up in the sense of pressure, urgency, and a feeling of impending doom when you try to write. 

Any time you frame your current project as your "last chance" or require that your next book turn your entire career around, you put unnecessary pressure on the creative process.

This kind of pressure is antithetical to burnout-free writing, especially in the early stages of drafting or idea development. As you'll see in a moment, that pressure can undermine your ability to write.

The Pressure of "Success"

One of the great lies of publishing is that achieving success eliminates doubt, insecurity, and imposter syndrome.

Unfortunately... that's not how our brains work. Success can exacerbate career worries if you don't have the skills to integrate that success into your self-concept. 

At its most basic, "self-concept" is simply the collection of beliefs you have about who you are. This can include your perceived strengths and weaknesses as a writer, what level of success feels "normal" to you, and how confident you are with the different parts of being an author.

Thoughts like "I suck at marketing," "I'm amazing at revision," and "I'm bad at pitching my books" are all aspects of your self-concept. They're part of your author identity.

When you achieve a level of success that goes beyond your current self-concept, it creates cognitive dissonance between your current identity and your external reality.

This mismatch of identity and experience--if left unaddressed--increases feelings of self-doubt and imposter syndrome. You might think your success was a fluke, worry that you're a one hit wonder, or stress about letting down your agent/publisher/readers.

For example, let's say you sold your latest book for a much higher advance than before. How that advance impacts your writing depends on your self-concept.

If this change feels like publishing is finally "matching" what you've always thought you should be paid, you won't add any extra pressure to your writing.

Instead, if that higher advance conflicts with your current author identity, your brain is likely to freak out a bit. You'll start to think things like:

I have to make sure this book is good enough to be worth X dollars.

I need to prove that my editor made a smart decision by investing in me. 

I can't ask for an extension -- they paid enough for me to write full-time. I need to show that I'm a professional! 

If this book doesn't sell well, no one will buy from me again, and my career will be over!

When those types of thoughts get woven into your writing process, the added pressure can halt your creative process. 

This same thing can happen no matter the type of success.

It can also show up if you hit a bestseller list, receive critical acclaim, or get positioned as a lead title.

Commercial success in particular causes many authors to put pressure on themselves (or accept pressure from their publisher) to repeat or exceed those same sales numbers with each subsequent book.

Why Pressure Blocks Creativity

The more pressure you put on yourself--whether it comes from career failure or success--the harder it'll be to write.

To understand why this happens, we need to take a quick detour to talk about your nervous system.

You've probably heard of the fight-or-flight stress response. When facing danger, our bodies kick in automatically to redirect all our energy to either run away to safety or fight off said danger.

More recently, researchers have defined two additional stress responses: freeze and fawn (also called freeze and appease). The freeze response is that "deer in headlights" reaction while the fawn response is an effort to appease someone else in an effort to avoid conflict. 

All four of these nervous system responses are important for survival. Unfortunately, our bodies haven't adapted since our days as hunter/gatherers. As far as our bodies are concerned, stepping into oncoming traffic and getting tagged in a scathing review are equally dangerous. 

While, logically, we know that a massive edit letter (or yet another submission rejection) isn't going to kill us, our bodies aren't so sure. 

Even the perception of future danger can throw our system into fight/flight/freeze/fawn.

This is where all those pressure-filled thoughts get in the way of our ability to create.

When you're bracing for more failure, feeling pressure to achieve success that you don't believe you can deliver, or tying your financial safety to any one particular book, your nervous system starts to see writing as a danger it needs to protect you from. 

Signs that pressure is triggering your nervous system and blocking your creativity include: 

• Freeze: You sit down to work but find yourself staring at the screen feeling tense, frozen, and unable to write. Every single word feels like pulling teeth. A sense of dread washes over you. Your muse / the feeling of creative flow has disappeared entirely. Your mind just goes blank.
• Flight: If you're a champion procrastinator, you might be experiencing the flight response. Whenever you tell yourself it's time to work on your book, your brain offers you a million other things to do instead. Reorganizing the entire kitchen, scrubbing toilets, or scrolling social media for hours suddenly sound way more important that drafting the book that's due next month.
• Fight: When shitty reviews or rejections come in, you draft scathing responses in your head to prove the other person wrong. You resist all your editor's notes, detailing all the reasons why your book is perfect, actually, and they should trust you. (Admittedly, this is probably the least common response for most writers.) 
• Fawn: In many ways the opposite of the fight response, you overly defer to other people's reactions to your book. You read reviews hoping to find the magic formula to write your next book in a way that everyone will like it (an impossible feat that will drive you mad).  

Regardless of which stress response you experience, when your body is in that activated state, it can feel impossible to write.

From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense. When your body is busy escaping from danger, it's not going to reserve energy to fuel your creativity. It's not essential to your survival to simultaneously write a poem while running from a tiger. 

In order to start writing again (after success or failure), you have to teach your nervous system that writing isn't a tiger trying to eat you.

 
How to Make Writing Less Scary

When you've reached the point where writing triggers your nervous system, there are two steps to re-engaging your creativity so you can get back to writing.

First, you have to tend to your body's stress response. You cannot logic your way out of fight/flight/freeze, so you need to pause and show your body that you're safe. There are lots of different ways to soothe your nervous system, but a few examples include: 

• Intentional breathing exercises 
• Enjoyable physical movement (going for a walk, putting on some music and dancing, light stretching, etc. depending on your abilities) 
• Shaking out your body (picture a dog shaking off water after a bath)
• Engaging your senses (name something you can taste, see, smell, hear, feel)

Once your body has reached a more relaxed state, you can move to step 2: lowering the internal pressure by changing the way you think about your career.

Taking control of your internal narrative (also called "managing your mind" or "changing your mindset") teaches your nervous system that writing is not a life-threatening danger. 

Instead of believing that your new advance (that's 3x your previous one) means 3x the amount of pressure, you construct a new story. 

You don't even have to convince yourself that you'll earn back your advance. Instead, you can simply tell yourself that your only job right now is to explore the story. Not get it right. Not make it perfect. Not ensure that it's "worth" the amount of money the publisher spent. You're just exploring. 

You can also remind yourself that every story is its most messy and unformed at this early stage and that you have a history of figuring out the best way to tell the story in revision. 

"All I have to do right now is write a messy version of this chapter" is way less threatening to your system than "I better not screw this up or else I'll ruin my career!" 

Finding the nuance of telling better stories about success and failure without slipping into toxic positivity can take practice, but it's worth the effort to learn that balance. It's an essential skill for a burnout-free author career.

Final Thoughts

If you're feeling a lot of pressure in your author career--whether because of string of failures or a new level of success--please know that you're not alone. So many writers struggle with the same thing, but you can learn how to keep writing fun no matter what's happening in your career. 

It all comes down to the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we're capable of doing. Make sure the internal stories you weave are useful ones.

Happy writing,
Isabel 

PS - I have 4 spaces for new private clients opening later this fall. Get on the waitlist to be the first to know when spaces are available.

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