Agreement

While you are working to get yourself established, it is easy to see gatekeepers as individuals capable of granting you a gift every artist craves when they first look up and realize they would like to entertain and inspire other people for a living: validation. After all, anyone can sit at their desk and bang out a story if they’re willing to take the time. Then what? How do you know anyone else would like your story the way you like the books you so love?

It’s a compelling question that haunts a great many newer writers, a question that agents, editors, and even teachers, to a lesser degree, seem capable of answering. There is some truth to this perception, as agents and editors in particular spend a lot of time sifting through submissions. That’s a big part of their job: recognizing what they believe will be successful. Of course, they’re not always right – but who is? Surely when one these people who have made it their work to identify “good stories” accepts something you’ve written you will feel that satisfying exhalation of relief that comes when someone tells you that you are as good as you hoped you were.

I certainly felt a bit this way the first time an agent took on my work. Her belief in my novel was a like a life raft to which I clung as I drifted in the waters of self-doubt. She liked it, and she’d sold a lot of books. However, this was an unsatisfying view of our relationship, and also, if I was honest, inaccurate. What that agent, and every other agent and editor I’ve worked with since, gave me wasn’t validation, but agreement. They agreed with me about the value of what I’d written. As for what the future held for what I’d written, they ultimately knew no better than I.

As the writer in this relationship, I must remember that the story came to me initially, and that I was the one who first identified its value, who chose to translate it into something another person could enjoy. Whether I am writing it, selling it, or promoting it, my job is always to articulate its value. No one can possibly do that for me, in the same way my agent cannot write my books for me. If I doubt the value of my work, the reading world will agree with me. And if I accept that I love it, that it’s interesting and compelling to me, and if I do all I can to do dream that story forward, I will find those reader who agree me with me as well.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com