Eighteen thousand dollars and three years for nothing

It’s good training to solely rely on yourself.

When you have experiences that force independence and resourcefulness, they teach you to place your faith in your own judgment. You learn to trust your own sense of what works and what doesn’t.

And that becomes an asset you can rely on in the future.

When I first started authoring books, my editor was key part of my publishing process. She improved my grammar, strengthened my arguments and ultimately made my work better.

But somewhere around my twentieth book, a transition happened. Her editing services, while valuable in their own right, were no longer essential or even helpful to my process.

I had reached a point in my writing career where I’d written enough to know what kind of writer I was. I accrued enough data to draw informed conclusions about my words, so I trusted my voice.

What’s more, since writing books was no longer my livelihood, volume and speed were far more important than accuracy and quality. Making my books twenty percent better wasn’t a smart use of my time anymore, considering so few people were actually reading them anyway.

Where’s the upside to spending six weeks and six hundred dollars per book making marginal improvements that nobody would even notice anyway?

Listen, my editor is a brilliant and lovely person, and we eventually parted ways amicably. Today, my books are not edited. There is no reworking, rewriting, proofing, reviewing, feedback, culling, sending out sample chapters or any other form of editing.

First words, best words. I write things once. And they’re the best books I’ve ever written.

Now, does this mean typos, grammatical errors and other mistakes find their way into the manicurists? Absolutely.

Does this mean my books aren’t as good as they could be? Almost certainly.

That’s fine with me. Because my goal isn’t writing flawless prose, it’s getting better at trusting my own judgment.

My goal isn’t achieving literary perfection and immortality, it’s metabolizing my life experiences as quickly and honestly as I can, without wasting any more precious time on redundant parts of the process that could easily become a distraction.

This bottleneck happens in book publishing all the time. Authors and editors get sucked into pointless and expensive jousting back and forth until every word is perfect. They get trapped in creative limbo, a disorienting and intermediate state where almost nothing gets done.

But nobody complains about it, because complexity feels like progress.

When the reality is, most creators simply don’t trust their own judgment, so they trust other people’s, which might be entirely wrong for them.

Look, if we want to evolve into the kind of creators we’re meant to become, then we must be increasingly capable of working independently, trusting our intuition, and relying solely on our own judgment.

Not a hundred percent of the time, of course. Getting another pair of eyes on things can go a long way. We can only gain so much perspective on our own work, being so closed to it.

But let’s do a little math here.

Had I continued using my editor for those last thirty books, I would have spent an additional eighteen thousand dollars, and an additional three years, producing marginally better products that almost nobody is reading or buying anymore.

That’s a significant investment of time and money that be more usefully deployed elsewhere.

What experiences have forced you to rely on only yourself? To what degree do you trust your creative voice?

And let me be perfectly clear, I have no doubt that my books could be better. I know there are editors whose opinions are invaluable and whose services could substantially improve my work.

It’s just not the game I’m playing right now. I’m optimizing for speed, volume, joy and independence; not quality, collaboration and accuracy.

I would rather go to my grave having written a hundred good enough books and die with an insane faith in my own judgment, than croak having written ten bestsellers but feel alienated from my true voice.

Anyway, there are probably numerous holes, inconsistencies and errors in the argument above, but frankly, I’m too excited about what I’m going to write next to go back and fix them. Or pay someone else to fix them.

Do you take people’s advice because that’s what’s given to you, or do you actually have your own opinion on what works and doesn’t work for you?