If you’re a writer (or person) who struggles with perfectionism, people-pleasing, and low self-esteem, I order you to keep a Derangement Journal in 2024.

Your career, relationships, and TBH also the planet all need you to slow down and flip the fuck out.

If you remember one thing from this newsletter, remember this: when smart people write disappointing books, the underlying issue is most often their own unprocessed psychological bullshit. 

I now have to append several dozen qualifications to what I just said. Imagine me reading this in the voice of the fine-print guy at the end of a pharma commercial: By “smart people,” I mean “people with the kind of platform, drive, and talent that makes it theoretically possible for them to publish the book of their dreams with a major commercial publisher.” By “disappointing books,” I primarily mean “books that don’t click with agents, acquiring editors, reviewers, and/or readers, causing various disappointing outcomes for the author.” And of course, “the underlying issue is most often…” etc. means that sometimes, unprocessed psychological bullshit isn’t the issue at all. 

…Yes, and: this rule is still incredibly important to remember. In my observation, it’s far more common for unprocessed psychological bullshit to be the Daddy Interferent in a theoretically qualified author’s career struggles than for Daddy to be anything else. Even if Daddy is something else–a negligent agent, a narrow-minded publisher, a structurally oppressive industry–unprocessed psychological bullshit is still likely to be a member of the interferent household, so to speak.

Unprocessed psychological bullshit makes people worse at communicating in every meaningful relationship we have, and I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but writers generally have to be rull good at communicating.

Another way of putting it is that commercial success as an author is largely a function of applied empathy for one’s readers. That’s true with regard to your craft, your marketing, your pitches–everything. And alas, empathy is one of the trickiest character traits to cultivate. It requires a great deal of emotional maturity as well as time, space, calm, and an ability to tolerate sustained uncertainty. 

More important than all of the above combined: empathy requires an ability to bear witness in the presence of deep, painful, messy feelings–grief, fear, anger–without freaking out, shutting down, or trying to fix, justify, debate, scold, or intellectualize them back down to a less intimidating size.* This applies to both other people’s feelings as well as your own. 

You might be wondering right now if you are or aren’t a person I’m directly addressing with this letter–if its advice applies to you. It might! It might not!

Here are a few questions that will help you tell: