June 17, 2005
Eric Mayer was covering this topic in an interesting fashion on his blog here on Journalscape a while back, and it came back to me today because of today's keynote speaker at the meeting I'm attending. Her name is Pamela Jett Aal, President & CEO of Jett Communications out of Mesa, AZ, and her talk was "Success is an Attitude." The AGT began putting inspirational speakers of some sort at the beginning of their conferences, then following them up with the usual technical stuff, so if you have normal brain function you at least get off to a good start.

Anyway, I've tended to take the attitude--and I have this written above my desk--that SUCCESS IS A JOURNEY, NOT A DESTINATION. Now, Pamela Aal, who looks a lot like the actress who plays Tim Allen's wife on "Home Improvement" and sounds a lot like Holly Hunter, is selling how to make the decision to be happy. She had some new things to say about shifting brain hemispheres when you get angry (try doing complicated math in your head or naming the 7 dwarves, because it's a shift to the logic hemisphere from the emotional hemisphere), and I thought that was pretty interesting. She also noted that research studies found that people talked to themselves 600 to 800 words a minute, and that 70% of that is negative. [I find that frightening, but not surprising].

What sort of stuck in my mind was about how when somebody says something intentionally or accidentally nasty to you or in some way makes you upset, how hard it is to get away from it. And one of her statements was: "Who's living rent-free in your head?"

Who indeed?

And that sort of ties into something else. I interviewed Joe Konrath yesterday, and he's turning out to be a successful novelist with his second novel, Bloody Mary, coming out shortly. As part of the interview I asked Joe what his work schedule was like. He said, "Busy. I work 12-14 hours a day." I asked how much of that was writing and he said "30%. The rest is self-promotion and marketing."

Think about that one. I generally despise this aspect of the writing business, though I've been trying very hard to change my attitude about it because if I hate it so much, nobody's forcing me to do it. I mean, most of my income comes from nonfiction, and although I hope more eventually comes from the fiction, if 70% (to use Joe's averages) of my time is going to be spent on something I hate doing, then maybe I should stop doing it and find something else to do. Understand?

So success might indeed be an aspect of your attitude. And I'm vowing to have a better one about marketing my fiction and being a self-promoter, and viewing it as a necessary part of the job that I will enjoy better if I be upbeat and try to find the parts of it that I enjoy.

Best,
Mark Terry