Be True to Your Creative Dreams When Wishing for Success

When I was a little kid, my older brother found a $20 bill once. This was 1972 and it was a princely sum. I thought he was the luckiest kid in the world.

It was summer and, being latchkey kids, a big part of our day was to walk to the corner drugstore where we could buy candy, comic books, and crappy toys with whatever money we had scrounged. Accompanying my brother that day was excruciating as he had the pick of the place.

Twenty dollars!

As he shopped, I asked him if I get something. "Sure," he said, "with your own money."

Every day after that, when I stepped out of the house, I whispered, "I wish I find some money."

Two weeks later, as I sat on the curb in front of our house, lamenting my boring life, the wind blew a scrap of paper along the gutter across the street. I had a feeling about it. Sure enough, it was a $10 bill.

I remember that spark of joy like it was yesterday.

I'm well aware of the phenomenon of finally noticing something after thinking about it. Like, if you suddenly decide to buy a yellow Volkswagen Bug, you suddenly see yellow VWs everywhere. The number of yellow VWs hasn't changed; your brain was ignoring them.

It's important to be honest with yourself about what you want to find in the world because you'll start noticing whatever that is and then you'll be tempted to get it.

In writing, you’ll see how genres emerge from the doldrums with big sales and you might wish you could try that. But writing a story is not like finding a $10 bill on the street because you’ve been looking down in the gutter all day.

In fact, it’s more like the opposite: you, as a writer, are the $10 bill getting knocked about by the breeze. You can’t decide what will happen to you.

You can only decide to be the best possible $10 bill you can be.

Romantasy is the hot genre at the moment. You might be tempted to drop your current writing project and figure out the tropes for dragons and forest faeries falling in love so that you might cash in.

You’re best bet, though, is to write in the genres you love reading. Those genres are familiar; you know the tropes, and you’ll know how to delight the reader by subverting their expectations. That’s where your writing has the best chance of being entertaining and compelling.

And yet, I've chased other genres the past few years, such as personal essays and short humor. I absolutely love them, and think I know how to write them, but I’ve been spread a little thin.

I talked to a writing coach earlier this year and he quickly pointed out that it’s difficult to serve multiple bosses, and every genre is like a boss.

What’s worse is that I have an actual boss for an actual 9-5 job, and only can write from 5-9.

Every day becomes a popularity contest for my various projects. There are winners and losers.

Like the cobbler whose children go barefoot, I find it difficult to block out all the distractions. The best I can do is to hope my novels in my chosen genres (crime, sci-fy, and thrillers) win the daily popularity contest.

My advice is to pick a genre, master it, and write your best work there. Don’t chase the hot genres. Try to be prepared for when your chosen genre heats up.

If possible, allow your voice to be its own unique self, and tap into your creativity so that your stories become a genre unto themselves.

One day, you may step out of your house and find that the world is waiting to read everything you write, and that moment will feel like you’re a broke-ass kid who just found a $10 bill.