Saying no

These days, a career in writing has innumerable options. Even if you limit yourself to fiction, there’s screenwriting, playwriting, comics and graphic novels, short fiction, novels, and that’s all before you even get to the Internet and ebook side of things.

And it’s not just a matter of deciding for yourself what it is you want to write, though that alone can be hard enough. The real problem comes from the unexpected opportunities that you have to decide about.

I knew from the start that I wanted to write short stories and novels. What I didn’t know was that I was going to get other opportunities from a very early stage. I’ve had offers to do everything from teaching to editing to screenwriting to publishing; some from people who were well-established and some from hopeful folks just starting out. Some, I’ve accepted; most, I’ve turned down. But because I wasn’t expecting any of them, I often had to think very hard and expend a lot of emotional energy on the decisions. Especially the ones that looked grand and glorious, but weren’t (I decided in the end) quite right for me.

It doesn’t help to have folks like Neil Gaiman around, who are energetic and multi-talented enough to write comics, TV shows, short stories, novels, and movie scripts, all to a high level and without, apparently, reducing his productivity. The reality is that most of us aren’t like that, and so even if we’re interested in many kinds of writing and writing-related work (like editing), we’re better off with a focused career with maybe a few digressions here and there.

If you’re going to have a focused career – and really, even if you’re not – sooner or later, you have to learn to say No. Not just to the things you aren’t really interested in doing, but to things that everyone around you thinks are brilliant opportunities (and sometimes you agree with them), to things you’d actually like to do, but that you don’t have time and energy to do well, or that you can see would take you in a direction that’s a digression, or that you know you don’t have the skills to do properly and the interest in learning the skills fast enough to do the job as it deserves to be done.

The flip side of this, of course, is that sometimes you find yourself deciding to work on a project for the love of it, in spite of the fact that everyone around you disapproves and/or thinks you are wasting your time. That’s fine, to a point; I’ve certainly done it a time or two. The trouble here is that unless you are the sort who, like Neil, can hit the target whang in the gold in multiple areas, it is best to pick your for-love projects with a bit of care, and not just jump into whatever interesting comes down the road.

Writers are intellectual pack rats, and that means that we are easily distracted by the latest shiny new interesting thing…and everything is shiny and interesting. Few people can write something for the local small press and start a comic book with their best friend from college and write a script for a small theater company and get deeply involved with writing and producing an Internet video series on vampires and finish their novel on time. If you are one of them, go for it, but if not…learn to say No. Or at least, “Maybe later.”