If you’re playing along, this is the beginning of week 2 of The Artist’s Way. A couple of things really struck me as I read Chapter Two this time around, three ways that it’s easy for a pro to unintentionally create blocks. You learn these lessons in layers as you grow and advance through your career, so I wanted to talk a little about pro pitfalls vs how the same points appear before that first sale.

Page 55 lists the “Rules of the Road”. Out of these 10 rules, 2 really jumped out at me. They are: Fill the well, and set gentle goals and reach them.

As a beginner, you might deal with filling the well pretty easily. You’re making time to write on top of your other responsibilities, but you haven’t yet added publishing’s workload. Life balance is workable. But after that first sale, you’re still writing the next book. And you’re also doing revisions, copyediting, proof-reading, dealing with cover art, a million website updates and promotional issues.

Chances are the first sale didn’t allow you to quit your day job. So your time just got a lot tighter. To compensate, maybe you stop spending time on your hobbies, going to movies, reading for fun. This seems like the logical place to trim time, but it’s a terrible move for your creative longevity. Those “time-wasting” activities are the very things that fill your well and allow you to keep writing the next book plus juggling everything else. So your very first move as a pro is to unintentionally set yourself up to get blocked.

Our next pitfall is setting gentle goals. You do this long before that first sale, so it seems like something you’ve got down. Until you sell, and the editor wants your next proposal in a week. Or the full in six weeks. Or a novella for an anthology that will really help expose you to a broader readership and gain more interest in the connected novel but you’ll have to squeeze it in with all your other commitments. Or your agent really wants Hot Idea in Hot Genre right now so it can be shopped at Current Big Industry Event.

You say yes, because you want to impress Agent and Editor, you want to take advantage of Better Time Slot or Excellent Anthology Opportunity, you desperately want to sell in Hot Genre. You’re already worried about career longevity because you’re not stupid and you know most first novelists never sell a second book. You don’t want to say no to anything. But if the time frames for delivery aren’t reasonable, you’re better off saying no than setting yourself up for burnout and ultimately becoming blocked.

Which leads us to the next issue. “Often our creativity is blocked by falling into other people’s plans for us.” Again, pretty easy to cope with as a beginner. You catch on to the critique partner who hates your genre and keeps trying to get you to write like a literary novelist. You learn to say no to the friend or family member who always needs you to take on some responsibility to fill up the time you’ve set aside to write.

Then comes that first sale and everything changes. When the person who has plans for you is your editor or your agent, it’s a much more subtle issue. Are they really helping you grow creatively and build your career? Or are they pushing you in the wrong direction? You don’t want to disagree and risk losing your agent, your publisher, your fledgling career. But if you only have a career by saying yes to everything no matter how you feel about it deep inside, you’re not building a stable career anyway. Or not one you’re going to want once you’ve built it, even if you don’t end up catastrophically blocked in the process. It’s easy to believe experts know more, but now more than ever, it’s just not true. Nobody knows where things are going, but you can at least know how to be true to yourself. 

The way circumstances and the guises common pitfalls will appear in change so much through your creative life that you’ll always be learning these same lessons in new layers. Which is why after 18 titles in print and 10 years since my first time through it, I’m still learning something from The Artist’s Way.