Be Good, or Don’t Bother

I don’t think Seth Godin ever says anything uninteresting — he might be the most profound bald-headed guy since this dude — but I particularly liked this post, in which he describes the three stages of preparation:

The first I’ll call the beginner stage. This is where you make huge progress as a result of incremental effort.

The second is the novice stage. This is the stage in which incremental effort leads to not so much visible increase in quality.

And the third is the expert stage. Here’s where races are won, conversations are started and sales are made. A huge amount of effort, off limits to most people, earns you just a tiny bit of quality. But it’s enough to get through the Dip and be seen as the obvious winner.

Godin’s point is that the middle stage is useless. You have to go through it to get to what he calls the expert stage, but if you stop there, you haven’t accomplished anything you couldn’t have done at the beginner stage.

As I always do, I thought about Godin’s post in terms of my own publishing career. And when I thought about it, it occurred to me that professionalism — what he calls the expert stage — is a bitch. In the first two stages you’re perfectly willing to send something off to an editor once you decide it’s pretty good. Of course the editor is going to come back with lots of notes, but that’s what editors do, right?

A true pro doesn’t send an obviously flawed manuscript to the editor. You set it aside for a day. Then you look at it from the editor’s point of view. You see the awkward transitions, the gaps in logic, the weak support for a piece of advice you’re trying to convey. You fix all that, and then you send it in. The editor will still ask for revisions, but if you’ve done your job they’ll be minor and straightforward.

The process I just described is really difficult, especially when you’re talking about a book. There’s an old cliche in the writing biz that says easy writing is hard on the reader. It’s not entirely true; sometimes a writer really does nail it on the first pass. But it’s true most of the time. The harder you work on the front end, the easier it is for everyone else down the line. You become a pro when editors enjoy working with you and readers appreciate your work.

But it’s really hard to get there, and it’s even harder to stay at that level. It never gets easier. The more you write, the harder it is to avoid repeating yourself. And the longer you work, the more flaws you see in your own work that you’re obliged to fix before you hit “send.”

Tags: Tags: expertise, professionalism, publishing, seth godin, writing