The most meaningful gift we can give each other before we start collaborating on your book project is the truth about who we are
Conflicts among authors, agents, and editors most often arise as a function of interpersonal misreading vs. professional malpractice. One solution: an up-front personality crash course.
There are a lot of silences in publishing—long silences.
There’s the silence when you’re waiting for a response to a submission. The silence when you’re waiting for an editor or agent’s notes on your material. The silent “?” in your brain and your agent’s face when you wonder when on Earth you’re ever going to have a book or book proposal in submittable shape.
There’s the silence between delivering your manuscript and waiting for the publication plans to get underway. The silence as you wait for those Goodreads reviews to start trickling in. The silence between whatever publicity hits and events you book, followed by the eventual silence of interstellar space—the time between books.
There are silences when you ache for a “you can check this off your list,” a “you’re doing it right,” or a “you can relax now.” Silences in which those words never arrive. Alas: in publishing, if you wait for certain and external approval to declare to yourself that it’s safe to relax, you’re never going to relax again.
If you love imagining all the terrible things that could possibly be about to come in and fill a silence—rejection, neglect, abandonment, rage—and obsessively planning how you might defend yourself against them, even if in actuality there’s no such need, then boy, have I got good news for you!! Publishing presents literally endless opportunity for catastrophizing.
The majority of interpersonal conflict—and just about all the preventable conflict—in publishing festers in these silences.
And as with moist, shadowy areas in a forest, a lot of toxic fungal nonsense tends to grow in the silences of a working relationship: assumptions, projections, resentments, impatience, anxiety, mistrust, and fear.
There is alas no way to eradicate these silences from our working relationships—at least not in this industry. Our jobs require a great deal of deep work, creative experimentation, and uncertainty to do right, and if we prioritize constantly pantomiming this for each other over email to soothe our anxieties— “I’m still noodling!” “Still noodling!” “Still noodling!”—we’ll never accomplish the deep work that’s kind of the whole point here.
What we can do, however, is prime the ground so that whatever grows in these silences, it’s much more likely to be a morel or whatever than a “Phantom Thread” poison vomit ‘shroom—or worse. Metaphorically.
The way to do that is twofold: 1. give grace, assuming good intentions and best efforts always, even if there’s also a real issue that needs resolving; and 2. make every effort to understand each other’s needs, boundaries, and work styles before the silences start happening in the first place.
For years—years—I’ve thought about starting a thing with my clients and coworkers in which I send them an up-front primer on my personality and ask for the same in return.
But I haven’t done it yet, and here’s why.
When I was younger, I was too insecure. I thought an exercise like this would be unnecessary, self-indulgent, “millennial,” weird—if it wasn’t, after all, wouldn’t more people be doing it? I thought, just be reliable and not insane, and no one you work with will need a primer on your personality or workstyle.
By the time I hit my mid-30s, I wasn’t so much insecure as convinced this was something only neurodivergent people like me wanted or could benefit from. I thought I was missing whatever skillset “normal” people had that enabled them to read other people’s intentions and legibly perform their own 100% of the time.
WRONG. WRONG. WRONG.