This is Part I of a two-part series on dreams, goals, and the creative life. If you’d like to receive Part II directly to your inbox when it drops, subscribe below.
In his newsletter,
, John August—screenwriter and host of one of my favorite podcasts, Scriptnotes—recently wrote about developing active characters using the concept of circles of concern, influence, and control. This theory posits that when it comes to things you care about, they can be divided into the following three categories: 1) things you care about but can’t change (concern), 2) things you might be able to get someone else to change (influence), and 3) things you can change all by yourself (control). I haven’t applied this concept to character-building—I’d never even heard of it until Inneresting—but I could not help being struck by how similar it is to one of the philosophies I use in my creative life: the framework of dreams, goals, and understanding the difference between them.For a lot of writers, myself included, publishing is an emotionally fraught industry. We pour so much of our time, energy, hopes, insecurities, and beliefs into our art. We love the art. We got into it for the art. But publishing, while being composed of many lovely art-minded individuals, is ultimately a business. And when it comes to publishing as a business, the art we all got into it for is also a product, meant to be sold, bought, perceived, criticized, consumed, interpreted and misinterpreted (sometimes in ignorance, sometimes with malice), and, often, discarded. And that can be hard. It can hard to keep loving the art of writing when it feels like there are so many external pressures pulling it in all sorts of different directions according to “the market.” It can be discouraging. It can be hard to keep going.
In the past six years, I’ve relied on this framework of goals and dreams to help me cope with all the things in this business about which I care so deeply and all the things over which I have absolutely no control.
Writing my next book, for example. Writing my next book well. Writing one chapter. (Please, just let me get through this chapter!) Earning out my advance. Getting a good review. Getting a starred review. No, six! Selling foreign rights. Getting a movie deal. Being asked to write the script. Having a pretty cover. Winning an award. Making a best-seller list. (Staying on a best-seller list.) Having a signing line that lasts for hours. Basking in the adulation of my peers. Getting sent on book tour. Getting sent on book tour internationally. Walking onto the set of a TV show based on my book. Meeting the actors! Being asked to sign a book for a reader who loves it more than anything else they’ve ever read.
I have wanted all of these things at one time or another, and I’ve even been lucky enough to get some of them, though not all. (Not even most.) And the list just keeps growing. In the ten years since signing with my literary agent, I keep finding new things to want. Becoming a BookTok sensation. Sprayed edges and special editions. Getting picked for a celebrity book club. And so on. Sometimes the multitude of my wants is overwhelming. And frustrating. And depressing. Because there are too many things in this industry to aspire to, and no matter how much I try or how hard I work, whether or not I get them is ultimately—and perhaps brutally—not up to me.
So, then. What to do?
It was the Stoics who first came up with the idea of circles of concern and control, though they left it at that—the circle of influence is a more modern introduction, developed by psychologists in the 20th century. (And since it’s concern and control I think about most in my creative life, for today’s newsletter I’ll stick with the Greeks.) In Inneresting, August cites an article by Anna Katharina Schaffner, who quotes the philosopher Epictetus (c. 50 – c. 135 CE): “Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some aren’t.”
In my experience, struggling with a staggering multitude of wants leads both to unhappiness and creative paralysis. All those wants make it difficult to focus on the thing that drove me to write in the first place: the art. That’s what I love. That’s what makes me happy. That’s where I feel most powerful, most creative, most myself, most free.
For me, one part of protecting that part of my creative life means separating the multitude of my wants into two categories: dreams and goals.
This isn’t my idea. As I’ve recently learned, it’s the Stoics’, but I was first introduced to it in the summer of 2017, almost a year after the publication of my first novel, The Reader, when I was invited to a writing retreat by fellow young adult author E.K. Johnston (Pretty Furious, Aetherbound). The week was, with the exception of some day-long plumbing issues, idyllic: a little cottage in Ontario’s lake country, seven writers, and a shimmering expanse of water just off the back porch, where we could sit in the faded wicker chairs and listen to the looping calls of the loons. We had time to write during the day, communal dinners, and, after the dishes were done, living room chats, curled up on the sofas, that lasted well into the night.
Much to my dismay, I discovered that I am no good at writing retreats. (If there are interesting people to hang out with, I’d always rather hang out with them than write!) But those nighttime conversations were exactly what I needed. I loved talking to other writers about their manuscripts, hearing about their struggles and successes and fears. Every evening, Johnston (known familiarly as Kate) would propose a different topic for discussion—sometimes on writing, sometimes on the business of publishing—and one of those topics was goals; another, dreams.
With the help of Kate’s prompting, I began to consider “dreams” as wants that are out of my hands. To use the parlance of the Stoics, they’re within my circle of concern, but not control. They’re not achievements. Getting them isn’t up to me or my talent or my perseverance. In short, getting them isn’t up to me at all.
I know I said I was going to stick to the Greeks, but there’s something to be said here for the circle of influence, for having a great team who believes in you and has the power to influence others, but there’s an undeniable element of luck in there as well. Not everyone has the right team. Not everyone has the right team with the right influence. Not everyone has the right team with the right influence at the right time. And then we’re back to the circle of concern. Some things are just out of your control. (Thanks, Epictetus!)
Now these might sound like hard truths, but for me they’re also freeing. If I know that nothing I do will change these outcomes, then I don’t have to worry about them anymore.
Let’s revisit my multitude of wants, shall we?
Writing my next book. Writing my next book well. Writing one chapter. (Please, just let me get through this chapter!) Earning out my advance. Getting a good review. Getting a starred review. No, six! Selling foreign rights. Getting a movie deal. Being asked to write the script. Having a pretty cover. Winning an award. Making a best-seller list. (Staying on a best-seller list.) Having a signing line that lasts for hours. Basking in the adulation of my peers. Getting sent on book tour. Getting sent on book tour internationally. Walking onto the set of a TV show based on my book. Meeting the actors! Being asked to sign a book for a reader who loves it more than anything else they’ve ever read.
I’ve put my dreams in bold so you can see just how many of them are in my circle of concern, and yes, it’s most of them. Pretty much all of them, in fact. I suppose it could be depressing, seeing just how many of my wants are out of my control, how many things I may never get, no matter how much I desire them. But here’s what I love about this exercise: These are also wants I can set aside.
If I know I can’t control them, I can set them down. They don’t have to weigh on me anymore. Sure, I can have them, but I don’t have to carry them around with me, and I don’t have to rely on them. My sales record or signing line isn’t a reflection of how good my book is. Neither is getting a good review or winning an award. My worth is a writer isn’t tethered to being a best-seller or getting my book turned into a movie or having the adulation of my peers. Would those things be nice to get? Sure. But getting or not getting them does not define me. Or my work. Or that beautiful creative impulse inside me that drives me to write.
And I like that. I find it comforting. Because I don’t want my worth as a writer to be dependent on external factors I can’t control. (Maybe I don’t want my worth as a writer to be measured at all!) To me, here’s what’s actually important: Did I write the story I needed to write in the best way I knew how? Did I push myself to grow as an artist? Did I tell a story that I believe was worth telling? Did I do it in a way consistent with my values?
If the answer to those questions is yes, then I’m happy. And invigorated. And free to write the next thing.
This isn’t to say there’s no value in dreams. If you’ve read my past newsletters (on the launch of Kindling or the TV documentary series Growing Floret, for example), you know that I consider myself outrageously ambitious. I’m ambitious about the projects I take on and the challenges I set myself and the way I push my craft with every story I write.
And, as you’ve now seen, the dreams I dream.
At that writing retreat in 2017, the night we talked about dreams, Kate asked us all to search our hearts for our deepest dreams and speak them into the universe.
I think there’s so much power in that. It’s like by giving voice to our dreams, we’re acknowledging the possibility that they really could come true one day, and we don’t have to be ashamed of wanting them or afraid of not getting them, no matter how distant they seem.
I was one of the last people to participate, and as I listened to the other writers speak their dreams into the universe, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. Get an agent? A book deal? I’d done that. Hit a best-seller list? Check. So what did I want? What did I want so deeply that I hadn’t allowed myself to admit it, for fear that it might never come true?
When my turn came around, I took a deep breath, and I looked directly at that deepest, most heartfelt dream, the one I’d never articulated to anyone, not even to myself, and I spoke it to the universe:
I want a Printz.
Four years later, the universe spoke back to me. In January 2021, my fourth novel, We Are Not Free, was awarded a Printz Honor. (Some of you may not know what this is—at the time, many of my loved ones didn’t either—so I’ll explain the Printz and the other American Library Association Youth Media Awards to you the same way I explained it to them, as “the Oscars of children’s literature” without the red carpet. Or the commercial breaks.)
It wasn’t magic, exactly. I worked hard on that book. I didn’t let up. I gave my ambitions and skill and imagination free rein, and I’m proud of the result. But it wasn’t entirely merit either. I was lucky enough to have one of those great teams that got me and got my book and knew how to get it in front of more readers who would get it too. Even then, there was the issue of timing. In any given year, there are books that resonate with readers, reviewers, critics, and award committees, and there are ones that don’t, not because they’re less deserving but because so much of anyone’s literary taste is simply reading the right book at the right time.
But I believe it was also (kind of) magic. To me, the magic of speaking your dreams into the universe is the magic of seeing your own dreams clearly, of seeing yourself clearly. The magic is believing in yourself, no matter how impossible your aspirations may seem. The magic is trusting that you know your own path, and if you have the courage and the skill and the determination to walk it, it will be there for you.
Will it always happen like this? Can I guarantee that speaking your dreams into the universe will make them come true? Of course not. I don’t believe either publishing or life work that way.
But I do believe there’s value in it. To me, the best part of speaking your dreams into the universe has always been letting them go.
Because then you’re free. Free of the multitude. Free of the pressure, the burden, the fear, shame, and doubt. Free to keep going. Free to focus on the art. Free to write the thing that you love, the thing that is deep inside of you, dying to get out.
That’s why we really do this, I think. Not for the accolades. Not even for the sales (although, for a lot of us—if not all of us—they’re a necessity). But for love of the work. And, at least for me, letting go of my dreams helps me remember that. It keeps me from drowning under the multitude of my wants, keeps me focused, keeps me balanced and emotionally resilient, keeps me in a state of fulfillment (if not always happiness), and all of that keeps me doing this thing I love.
I’m here for the writing. Everything else, I leave to the universe.
If you liked this newsletter, stay tuned for Part II. To receive it directly in your inbox, subscribe below.
In case you missed it
Kindling made Indigo’s Best Books for Teens lists for 2024! Huge thanks to the staff and readers for recognizing Kindling in your best-of roundup this year.
In October, I had the great pleasure of doing a virtual panel on YA fantasy retellings with Robin Ha, Markelle Grabo, R.M. Romero & Tara Sim. Thanks so much to Lili from Utopia State of Mind for hosting us!
What I’m into these days
Speaking of Scriptnotes, host Craig Mazin— screenwriter and, from what I can gather listening to the podcast, puzzle enthusiast—recently mentioned the puzzles of Mark Halpin, Associate Professor of Scenic Design and, apparently, an excellent puzzle-maker. If you know me, you know I love puzzles, so I immediately went and downloaded Halpin’s latest (free!) set of Labor Day Extravaganza puzzles, “Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes”… and they are difficult. But wonderful. My partner and I have solved two so far, and I’m trying to figure out a way into a couple more, but that may take some time…
Since reading this post on rhythm by
and the included quote by Virginia Woolf, I’ve been wondering a lot about rhythm in writing. What is rhythm? I have a bit of musical training, so I feel like I understand it on a sentence-level, but what does rhythm look like in terms of plot? Character? Theme? Story? I’m not sure, but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about it, and that thinking led me to The Wave in the Mind by Ursula K. Le Guin, a collection of essays, some of which deal directly with the question of rhythm and some of which only touch on it in passing. I don’t have any answers yet, but I’m finding the pursuit of them fascinating.