As a writer, nothing substitutes your creation process; not publicity, event management, engaging with the readers, absolutely nothing substitutes your creation. The bane of 21st creation is watering down the creation process so you can ‘package’ your work.
Great stories have been messed up because there was a contract that pressured the writer to create within a certain time limit without reviewing the conditions under which the previous parts of the stories were written.
I am telling you to show up online and show up frequently but I am also saying if you compromise the quality of your creation process, it wouldn’t count that you came online. To create is to never break up with your muse, to engage with newer ways to see the world, and to know you are an artist before you’re a content creator.
To create is to enjoy your art even if no one ever sees it, to be invested in each work till there’s nothing else you can take or add to it and to be utterly vexed with everything that interferes with your creative juice.
To create is to remember why you started creating and to evolve in wonder as you go. There is writing for creation’s sake and then there’s writing to meet a content calendar. One takes away the soul of the artist. The more I’ve sat down through niche mastery classes (as a student and coach), the more I have realized three things.
The beginning is never the time to niche down. Refuse the pressure to be a poet, a novelist or a researcher too soon because there’s a whole world out there for you to explore.
The labels make us want to always show up the same way everyday but as a writer, every piece is rewriting who you think you are. So, if you stifle that process in an attempt to niche down, you might miss out on your evolution just to end up with a pretty label.
You don’t niche down on a subject matter.
There are myriads of people who can write poetry or write fiction. So, when you say “I am a poet” you’re saying you’re the same with about a million other people.
You niche down on your style: your way of viewing things and telling them. This is the reason you can hear someone read out a play and identify the author without seeing the book title; their thought pattern, the delivery, the wit, the engagement, etc. You don’t find this sweet spot by studying but by creating so much until the pattern becomes evident.
Your audience isn’t static
We cannot have marketing campaigns except we know whom to target. However, many creatives are becoming imprisoned to the target audience they chose.
Well, you could handle this in two ways:
- Pick an audience, create for them and watch how they consume your work.
- Create and let the work determine its audience by watching those who gravitate towards it.
You have to be intentional to service the audience that consumes your work and cheers you on. It would be silly to disrespect your audience because to be fair, they are the reason your authoring has any profit. Yet, you must be honest and acknowledge when your audience has started hijacking your creation process by insisting you create a certain way or within an unrealistic timeline.
To balance your creation process with marketing. Know your strength and play on it. Some people write ten thousand words in five to ten hours and are content to do so in one sitting.
When I was a younger writer, I remember watching people in a freelance group have word targets everyday and they delivered as long as they never spoke to the clients themselves (the admin handled that).
Do you research and write or do you research while writing? Do you upgrade your vocabulary before sitting to write or do you search for synonyms and better expressions while writing? Do you write short pieces consistently or do you write long pieces sporadically? Do you write in silence or do you write live (with your audience reading and commenting as your work improves).
If you know your strength and your technique, you can play on it. Example: if you enjoy writing and getting live reactions, you shouldn’t be creating in isolation. You should be writing and building a fandom around your work with your audience contributing their quota and dialoguing about your work.
That audience becomes your publicist, your critique and your content curator (they would always bring inspiration to you). This is user generated content at its creative best. Platforms like Goodreads blew up with this technique. By the time the books were completed, authors had enough media buzz to compete with other authors who were already published.
Imagine having twenty-five thousand people talking about a book that hasn’t even been fully edited? Successes like this come from knowing your strength and playing on it.
For example, if you enjoy isolation during your creative process and that’s nothing to be ashamed of. However, your audience does not know what is happening and are imagining that you’ve quit your career or generally do not regard them.
To keep them engaged without distracting yourself, get an administrator if you can afford it. Now, this person can engage as you, through your social media accounts or they can be digital media bestie that the audience can go to find updates about you.
Many publication companies do this; talk about the book, engage the audience and keep the traffic going, giving the writer the space and time for isolation. The benefit of doing this with a single friend instead of an entire organization is they don’t pressure you to finish at a specific timeline except you’re stalling of course. Finally, you can get on social media by yourself when you’re not in your creative space.
Have a live Q & A session with your fan base
Create faceless video content where you tell the behind the scene process. Make random posts without a schedule that reassure your audience that you’re making something. The larger you get and more reliable you are, the less likely your audience are to panic when you get into creative isolation.
The goal is not to be online. The goal is to create something worthy of your time and ours. Let me know how you’re using this information by reaching out on Twitter @iamlizachum.
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Read – Set A Pace – Affluent Authors Column – Liza Chuma Akunyili
