April 23, 2019

Scales of success

How do I know when I’ve made it? I recently attended the SCBWI conference in Sydney with almost 400 other writers and/or illustrators. Most of the attendees were unpublished, and of the ones I spoke to, most of them asked what I was doing there, because I was already published. What did I need to learn?

As it turns out, we’re all working at different scales of success. In one view, there’s the ‘beginner to pro’ scale. It looks something like this:

A spectrum going from 'beginner' to 'pro'

At the SCBWI conference, I was seen as the ‘pro’ by all the ‘beginners’. That’s because of the scale that unpublished authors use in their head to categorise things. I think what they really see is this:

A spectrum going from 'published' to 'unpublished'

But in my head, that scale it’s vastly different. It’s not whether I’m published or unpublished. No. I’m playing the long game. An infinite game of art. I’m competing against myself and my own ability. Because of this, my scale looks something like this:

A spectrum going from 'I can't draw anything' to 'producing what I see in my head'

See, for me, success is about making my body use the tools of my medium to render my imagination and communicate my ideas as clearly and accurately as possible. It doesn’t matter whether people choose to stop publishing the work I do, I’ll still keep making it. After all, it’s how I started. I was once unpublished, like the other attendees at that conference. In fact, this might sound strange, but the goal of getting published never entered my head at all. I was simply trying to make the work I could see in my brain. I still am. I’ll never stop attending conferences, talks, and workshops. I’ll never stop reading, studying light, analysing the craft of writing poetry and fiction. It’s a lifelong pursuit. And, if people one day choose to no longer publish that work in a book, that’s OK. I’ll keep trying my hardest to move that arrow in my head to the right, knowing full well that I’ll never get there because no matter what I do, my expectation of what I can do will always exceed the skill I have to reach it.

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