on the writing advice that almost got me cancelled

A couple of years ago, I posted my all-time most controversial video on TikTok. 

I deleted it after a few days in an anxious panic, but I really wish I hadn’t, because it would have made an excellent prop for this post. Alas, the pitchforks got to me. So I’ll just have to describe it to you instead. 

It was a simple talking head video, from a hotel bedroom where I was staying after attending the HarperCollins summer party at the V&A in London. Very fancy, you might think, but my career was not in a good way. I was about to publish my eighth novel, but was completely out of contract thereafter. I’d subbed three fantasy projects in the preceding two years, but nobody wanted them. I’d changed agents twice, had a string of pandemic-based bad luck for my releases, and I genuinely thought my career was over.

Everything felt bleak, but I’d been doing a lot of soul-searching, and I’d come to realise that the work had to be the reward. I had to get enough out of the act of writing that even if I never sold another book, I would still want to do it.  

This is what I opened the clock app to share. It was a short video, only forty-five seconds or so, and in it I said that if storytelling does not, on some level, bring you joy—if you are doing it just for fame or wealth or social status—then it’s going to be difficult to sustain a writing career, to endure its endless peaks and troughs.

The outrage this video inspired is something I’m still trying to wrap my head around. The vitriol in the comments. My heart still palpitates at the thought. 

I was accused of three things:

1. Suggesting that it was not important for authors to be paid for their work. (This could not be further from the truth—I have long advocated for a minimum acceptable advance level, at least in line with national living wage. My first two advances were $0 from a big 5 publisher. I danced back and forth over the poverty line for eight years with my advances, remortgaged my house in a last-ditch effort to make this dream work. Believe me, I care whether or not authors are paid. But once people online decide what they think you mean, it’s almost impossible to defend yourself.)

2. Ableism against those whose mental health struggles prevent them from feeling joy. As someone who has Been There, I admit perhaps I could have phrased it better—maybe “joy” shouldn’t have been the bar, the benchmark, the catch-all standard. Perhaps I should have said that writing should give you something. Catharsis, escape, purpose. Some reason for doing it, other than money and acclaim.

3. Not making very good art, because good art must cause its creator immense suffering. 

I’m not even going to touch number three, because it’s gross.

But I am going to double down on what I was trying to say in the first place. And I’m going to do so with one of my favourite kinds of metaphor: a running analogy.

**

I have always been a mediocre runner. I have a clear memory of a secondary school P.E. teacher (think: very Scottish, very matter-of-fact, little to no interest in the feelings of her pupils) patting me on the head and saying, “You’re not much of a runner, bless you, unless you have a ball to chase.” (The golden retriever energy has always been strong with me.) 

Essentially, I simply would not run unless there was a compelling reason for me to do so. I dabbled a little in sixth form and my early uni years, mainly for very problematic calorie-burning purposes, and did a charity 5K, about which I complained ceaselessly for the whole forty minutes it took me to complete.

Then I graduated, and snagged my first job out of university at a glossy lifestyle magazine. A few weeks in, I realised almost everyone in the office had run the Great North Run, a famous half marathon in our home city. Most staff writers were running it that year, so I entered on a whim, mostly because I just wanted to say I’d done it, and not because I had any real desire to do it.

I ran a couple of ten-mile training runs, a few scattered 5Ks, and rocked up to the start line woefully underprepared, with 50,000 other people who looked alarmingly capable—including actual literal Mo Farah. (He won, obviously.) 

It was terrible. It was very hot (people died that year), and hillier than I expected, and so unreasonably long. I finished it significantly later than all of my colleagues, in a time I was pretty embarrassed by (even though in hindsight it was a fine and normal time), and didn’t run again for years. But hey, I got a medal. I could say I’d done it. 

Fast forward to a global pandemic, at the start of which I’d become a mother for the first time, and I was struggling majorly. I was isolated and afraid of how much I loved my child, with PTSD from a traumatic birth, and developed fairly brutal postpartum anxiety. I started running again for the headspace, for a government-sanctioned reason to get out of the house, and slowly started to build two things: 1) an actual base of aerobic fitness, and 2) a love of running for running’s own sake. Not for a medal, not to say I’d done it, but because the act of doing of it gave me something. Joy, or catharsis, or escape. 

I still wasn’t running very fast, but I was running further and further, and feeling better and better. Then, earlier this year, I decided I wanted to run another half marathon. A redemption half, for the right reasons. And, erm, because I wanted to see if I could do it faster than before. 

I threw myself into learning everything I possibly could about the sport, about training, about race strategy, about VO2 Max and cadence and good form. I tried out lots of different types of runs—tempo, zone 2, fartlek, threshold intervals, mile repeats, track—and grew to enjoy the uncomfortable feeling of pushing myself. The burn in the lungs, in the legs, the way it scorched all the anxiety in my head clean. 

Yes, I had a goal time in my head for the half marathon, but it stopped being about that. It became about the feeling of collapsing onto my bed with a bottle of iced water after a hard session, my face red and sweaty and beaming. It became about tan marks and vitamin D from so much time spent outside in little shorts and a sports watch. It became about the excitement of a new playlist, a new audiobook on my long run. It became about the thrill of seeing all the things my body could do.

I turned up to the start line feeling ready, but also at peace with whatever happened during the race. Because the real joy was not in the medal, but in the process of earning it.

I finished the race almost forty minutes faster than I did ten years ago. And what was I most excited about, when I crossed the finish line and saw 1:56:01 hanging over my head? Not the time, although that gave me such an incredible thrill, but the thought of what I might train for next.

I had fallen in love with the work.

(Last night, Katie Ledecky swam the 1500m freestyle at the Olympics and absolutely annihilated her competition. Watching the frankly superhuman race, the commentator said this: “Do you know why Ledecky is the best in the world? Because she just loves the work.” I’d already drafted this post, and said aloud to an empty room “yes, that, exactly that.”)

**

As I mentioned at the start of this (now quite lengthy) post, I had a similar epiphany in my writing career two summers ago, during a fallow spell I wasn’t sure I’d ever bounce back from. And, as I talked about in my previous newsletter, before I wrote Silvercloak, I did a lot of internal work on letting go of number-based goals, and instead pulled my focus towards how I wanted my reader to feel when they immersed in this story—and, in turn, how I wanted to feel writing it. 

Lo and behold, the series sold for seven figures, notched up a ton of translation deals, and a bunch of other stuff I can’t talk about yet. All of this made me happy! Of course it did. But nothing makes me happier than the world I created. 

This is not to say that writing should always feel great. Over on Instagram, I’ve talked about another running analogy, the Rule of Thirds, which most professional athletes hold stock in. It’s the idea that if you run a lot, you’ll find that a third of your runs will feel fine, a third will feel amazing and like you can fly, and a third will feel so bloody terrible that you’ll want to quit entirely. 

Same holds true for writing. If you show up day after day, those percentages largely track. It doesn’t have to feel good all the time, but it should still feel worth doing, even on the bad days.

What I’m trying to say, and what I should have said in that ill-fated video, is this: Don’t chase goals because you think achieving them will make you a happy and fulfilled person. Chase goals because the process of working towards them makes you a happy and fulfilled person. 

More often than not, you’ll hit the goals anyway. But by the time you do, it’s just the cherry on top of an already delicious cake.

P.s. I obviously still believe authors should be paid at least minimum wage.

P.p.s. If you’re in the mental health trenches, I see you, and I hear you, and I feel you. If you’re able, try running. Trust me.

P.p.p.s. You do not have to suffer to make good art.