Caution & Confidence

While yesterday’s blog was deeply satisfying as a way to blow off steam, it also prompted me to consider another topic: what place caution deserves when you’re chasing a dream. When is it not enough, when is it too much? How do you know when you’re holding yourself back or overwhelming yourself, and where is that middle ground?

Well, all I can do is offer my own opinions, based on my own experiences of having gone to both extremes. I tend to test each side and decide where on the spectrum I want to wind up in the end. How else can you know where you’re comfortable? By letting other people tell you what’s right? Nah. Not me. I’ll tell you to go find out for yourself and make your own decisions; but at the same time, not to go unarmed into that dark confusion; not to walk alone.

Read. That’s my answer for almost everything. When I discovered, in high school, that a guy I had a major crush on was gay, I went to the library and checked out every book they had on the subject, pro and con. (Come on, I grew up in small New England towns and I wasn’t exactly real sociable; I’d never even encountered the concept before. Yes, I know, very sad.) When I found out a friend had been abused as a child, same thing: big stack of books. When I moved out on my own and had to learn stuff like taking care of my own car: books. Handling my own money: books. Dealing with divorce: books. I read and read and read and read. One of the first things I do after any move is get a library card.

What all that reading does, for me, for you, for anyone, is to supply a nice, wide, flat spot to stand on. It gives you the certain knowledge that any time you have a problem or a question, somewhere out there is an answer. In print, more than likely (unless you’re unfortunate enough to attend a school that’s ditched their library in favor of Kindles).

Reading is where you find that line between overcaution and overconfidence. Writers, with our terrible, fragile egos and our desperate desire to be noticed and praised, are perfect targets for all sorts of scams, especially in the beginning of our careers. I remember an occasion in high school: I was speaking to my English teacher when another student burst in, face lit up like sunrise, and announced that her poetry was being published! She showed him the letter, and he nodded politely, praised her, and watched her bounce back out the door before turning to me with a sad expression. “I couldn’t stand to crush her happiness,” he told me. “But she’s being published by a vanity press. It’s a scam.”  The student’s poem would be one of hundreds stuffed into a thick, attractively bound tome, and she was required to buy at least one copy of this book, if I recall correctly.

I’m really glad I was there that day. It was my first exposure to the notion that publishers might try to screw money out of writers, but not, of course, the last. Anyone who’s heard of the dozens of scams, pyramid schemes, and vanity presses, has heard lots of horror stories about the writing profession. And it’s easy to become frightened, nay, terrorized, by the plethora of perilous proposals on the path to placing your portfolio into proper print.

Leaving absurd alliteration behind (although it was fun while it lasted), here’s the stark reality: there are people out there, in any profession, who are genuinely kind and helpful, and reach out to teach you and lift you to the next level. There are also fakes who take your hand, steal your wallet, and drop you into the shark pit, laughing all the way. How do you know the difference?

Back to my perennial advice: Read. Look up every single company or professional organization you deal with, whether it’s a restaurant you’re going out to dinner at or a publisher making an offer on your writing, until you get a good sense of what the red flags are. Read the lines the scammers use to justify themselves and suck in clientele; learn how to spot them, how to walk away, how to ask someone qualified for advice. Bookmark the Better Business Bureau web site, SCORE, the AAR (Association of Authors Representatives) site. Make a list of ten people in your life whose advice you trust and value, what their specialties are, and use that list appropriately. For example, if you have a family member who’s a criminal lawyer, don’t waste his time asking him for family law advice; ask him instead for the name of a good family lawyer you can talk to.

Assemble a whole pile of information, pro and con. Read it. Shuffle through it. Read it again. Then — make up your own mind. Don’t worry about upsetting anyone; do what you believe is right. Learn from the consequences of that decision. Repeat the whole process with a new question or issue.

Once you’ve run that tedious gauntlet a few times, you’ll have the skills and resources to streamline the process into a couple quick phone calls or browser sessions. And even then, you’ll fall flat on your face a few times; it’s part of life. You can’t succeed if you don’t make mistakes — and you’re even more stuck if you don’t realize they’re mistakes in the first place.

So go forth and read. Read, I say! Read! Read! Read . . . !