The Snowball Effect
One thing I’ve learned in the last few years is that the work you put into your writing tends to snowball. It starts small and is easy to handle. As you keep working, it grows and grows, and suddenly . . . (if all goes well) suddenly it’s a monster. You’ve created something huge!
This happens all the time to ordinary writers. All the time.
You work and work on your novel, and then all of a sudden, the writing starts getting easier, the editing is more natural, and you find that you can write far more in one day than you used to in a week. Your craft has snowballed.
You write a novel and launch it and a few people buy it. Then you write another and launch that, and your previous readers buy it, and so do a bunch of new people. After a few books, suddenly everyone seems to know who you are. Your marketing has snowballed.
The problem is that a large snowball can be good or bad, depending on circumstances that have nothing to do with the snowball.
If you are rolling your snowball downhill, it gets easier and easier to push, because its weight pulls it in the direction you’re pushing, helping overcome friction. In this case, success breeds success. Growth in this case is good.
But if you’re rolling that pesky snowball uphill, it gets harder and harder to push, because now its weight is pushing back at you. In this case, the more you succeed, the harder it is to keep moving. Eventually, you stop because you can no longer handle it. Growth in this case is bad.
What’s the difference? In each case, the snowballs are the same size. But in one case, growth works FOR you; in the other case, growth works AGAINST you.
I believe there is a strong analogy between snowballs and your writing (or any other business). Writing, after all, IS a business.
You can treat your writing like a fun hobby that needs no organization. If you do that, you’ll see growth for awhile, but it’ll stop being fun as you start getting more and more successful. And you may grind to a halt just when you really start succeeding. The fun will be dead.
OR, you can treat your writing like a business from the get-go. If you do that, you’ll also see growth for awhile, but the more you grow, the easier it’ll become. When you really start succeeding, it’ll be rolling along with hardly any push from you. That’s when it gets really fun.
Ironically, in the long run, it’s more fun to treat your writing like a business than to treat it like a hobby.
Of course, it’s never too late to change. If you’ve been pushing a massive snowball uphill, you can always stop, get on the other side, and start pushing it down. It may take some time to get momentum up, but once you do, you’ll have an unstoppable snowball.
In the last year, I’ve become a huge fan of treating my writing like a business. Why? Because treating it like a hobby just got too hard. Why? Because I was starting to succeed, but I didn’t have the organizational skills to manage that success. Unmanaged success can kill you. Managed success can give you a great and thrilling ride.
Last year about this time, I chronicled my transition from bad management to good management in a series of teleseminars with Allison Bottke. Allison kicked my butt and persuaded me to work smarter instead of harder. I’m glad I did, because 2007 was a much easier year than 2006. I expect 2008 to get even easier. If you’d like Allison to kick your butt too, then you may find this page
helpful: http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/info/abottke/clean_act.php
Caution: It is not terribly fun to stop what you’re doing and change directions. It can feel unnatural. It can even be (gasp!) boring. Good management skills are like Brussels sprouts. It’s just more fun to eat Twinkies. When you were a kid, your mama could make you eat right, but when you’re an adult, you get to decide. Healthy adults make healthy decisions. Then they take action on those decisions. And they keep taking action until they get the results they want.
