For most of us, there are at least two components to the success question: personal success, and professional success. And no doubt, I feel professionally successful when I know that I’m making a positive difference in the lives of others. And I’ve felt personally successful for the last 30 years — since the moment I heard the words “I do” from the woman I love.
Professionally, money is always nice; I used to make a ton of money in real estate, but then in 2008, the economy tanked and the housing market collapsed. Even then, I would probably have been fine, but something else happened in 2008: I was hospitalized twice and nearly died. And the best that any doctor could figure, that shock to my system caused Fibromyalgia. Chronic pain has been with me ever since. I tried, but after a while I realized that I just was not physically able to work as hard as I had before. And the money dried up fast.
But money is not what makes me feel successful.
I grew up in a cult. (Details on that soon, for paying subscribers.) We weren’t allowed to own a TV. Bikes were verboten. Movies, too. The other kids and I could not go to public school; instead, we went to the church building five days a week while they pretended to the government that it was a legitimate private school. And college? Hell, no. Again: against the rules of the leader; the self-styled “apostle”. You get the idea: lots of rules, and as little contact with the outside world as possible — especially for the kids. (Yes, I love em dashes and will continue to use them. Fuck AI writing.) When I turned 18, I got the hell out of Dodge.
So it probably won’t come as a surprise to you that personal freedom is one of my most important barometers of success. When I get up in the morning, do I check email before coffee? Do I work in the middle of the night and go to a movie in the middle of the day? Sometimes, yeah. That freedom is very important to me. Yes, I work hard. And a lot. But I choose when I do it. (And a million thanks to the Patreons and Substack subscribers who make it possible.)
This is why I like to ask interviewees this question: I get a different answer every time.
I don’t mean to suggest that my barometer of success and yours should be the same. My wife is a high school teacher, and she’s very passionate about it. She loves it. If we won the lottery tomorrow, I have no doubt that she’d continue to teach. She gets up early every weekday during the school year. Sometimes I get up early, and sometimes I don’t. You get the picture.
If you made it this far, tell me: What does success mean to you?
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I wrote with strict adherence to the five-act structure and classical ideals of storytelling. I always pushed myself towards greater and greater depths of emotional weight. I agonised over sentences, spent entire weekends devoted to single plot-points, refining and refining them so that they could land with maximum impact.
I know I am not alone in this. By definition, creativity is obsessive. To devote oneself to a single pursuit so completely is inherently compulsive. Sometimes, my obsessions even led to breakthroughs. But more often than not, they ended in burnout.
I have now come to realise that this was not a state of balance. A wise person once said, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” And that is precisely the trap into which I fell.
I wanted my work to be perfect. And while that never manifested as procrastination or avoidance of actually releasing my books, it certainly hampered my writing of them. What at first was one of the greatest pleasures of my life eventually became a torture-rack into which I would willingly insert myself, wringing every last ounce of craftsmanship out of my brain, until I was left nothing but a broken, hobbled husk.
What at first was one of the greatest pleasures of my life eventually became a torture-rack into which I would willingly insert myself.
This is the path so many authors take, but in the words of Tolkien, “Are you sure you do not suffer needlessly?” There is another path we might take.
Letting the goblin drive.
The irony of all this is that perfectionism does not just kill the joy of the creative act—it actually dampens your creativity.
If we look at some of the greatest works of literature—truly great works that have stood the test of time, and that are beloved of the people, not just the academics—we see a pattern. A pattern not of perfectionism but of imperfection.
J. R. R. Tolkien famously wrote, in a letter to W. H. Auden dated 1955:
“I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me. Tom Bombadil I knew already but I had never been to Bree. Strider sitting in the corner at the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than had Frodo. The Mines of Moria had been a mere name; and of Lothlorien no word had reached my mortal ears till I came there. Far away I knew there were the Horselords on the confines of an ancient kingdom of Men, but Fangorn Forest was an unforeseen adventure. I had never heard of the House of Eorl nor the Stewarts of Gondor. Most disquieting of all, Saruman had never been revealed to me, and I was as mystified as Frodo at Gandalf’s failure to appear on September 22.”
In other words, he was a “pantser”. The Lord of the Rings was not meticulously worked out—albeit, the languages and ancient lore of the setting might have been—but he was discovering it as a he went along.
You can tell from the wording of the letter that this process of discovery made the work exciting to write. And this excitement of course inevitably translates to the reader. Even after seventy years, reading The Lord of the Rings evokes this feeling of discovery, of newness, that around any corner there might be some new wonder to behold.
We see the same thing in a contemporary example.
In a 2024 interview with GrimDark magazine, Matt Dinniman—author of the smash blockbuster LitRPG series Dungeon Crawler Carl—was asked about how he created some of his zanier characters, including Samantha, a sex-doll head possessed by the spirit of a demon-god. His response was laconic and hilarious:
“I am what some people call a ‘pantser.’ That basically translates to ‘he makes it up as he goes along.’ I never planned on having a reanimated sex doll head a major, important character. But here we are.”
As if that is not enough, in an interview with Maude Garrett, he was asked about whether he knew how the whole DCC series ended. “Not a clue,” he responded, to laughter from the audience.
It would be easy to dismiss pantsing or discovery writing as mere laziness on the part of the writer, but I’ve come to believe it is a crucial part of the creative process. In allowing things to organically emerge, rather than pre-planning them, the creator delegates the work to their unconscious mind, rather than their conscious mind.
Our unconscious mind is scientifically proven to know more, perceive more, and understand more than our conscious minds by quite some margin. It is a pattern recognition machine that may even have access to a human-collective or at the very least DNA-derived intelligence. What our unconscious mind spontaneously produces from its chasmal depths will almost always be more interesting, more mythically charged, more idiosyncratic than anything we can rationally think up staring at a blank page.
On a personal level, I often find my unconscious mind is ahead of me in terms of plotting, meaning the more I trust my spontaneous decisions midway through writing a chapter, the more I see, ten chapters later, how I was actually planting a seed for something much bigger. At the time, I am “mystified,” to quote Tolkien, but in the long-run, it seems that my unconscious brain already grasped the whole tapestry.
The phrase “discovery writing” is very apt indeed, for it hints not that the writer is really creating the work, but that they are uncovering something that already existed, whole and complete. The process of uncovering always necessitates some loss of the original vision, just as archaeological digs cannot succeed in excavating tombs without some material damage. But in essence, to tell a story is not to really make something new, but to dig up a sculpture out of the sands of time.
Letting go of control is one of the hardest things to do in any situation, whether we’re talking about relationships, coping with loss or setbacks, or indeed the creative process. But without abdication to the higher power of the Muse, or our own unconscious intelligence, or however we want to say it, we are doing both our work and ourselves a disservice.
Last year, I made a conscious decision not to plan so meticulously. This was in part due to the fact I was taking on a 15-book series. You can plan a trilogy. You can plan a 5-book series. But you cannot plan 15 books. There has to be room for surprise, subversion, diversion, and general madness. Yes, there is an overarching theme, and a vague idea of the end-point, but the road to get there is by no means already paved. I am laying each stone as I go. And I have to say, I am not sure I can ever go back to planning; this process has revolutionised my writing.
I now sit down to write (three times a week) with an unprecedented sense of excitement. The joy of discovering something new. The thrill of what surprises might lie in store. It is like I am tuning into my favourite TV show of all time. I don’t know how it’s going to turn out—that is the joy.
And yes, of course, there is work to be done in the editing stage to smooth things out. Not every spontaneous decision works out for the best. Neither have I completely abandoned the five-act structure, which is an invaluable tool for noticing where your emotional beats might not be paying off. But the initial act has changed drastically. Where before it was measured, now it is bold and unmapped.
Another way to view this shift is play.
Tolkien was a playful man despite his immense erudition and learning and his position as an Oxford professor. Matt Dinniman, likewise, embodies that childlike energy. His books feel so energetic precisely because they are raw, and chaotic, and bristling with almost too many ideas.
There is a famous quote attributed to Ursula Le Guin, although she subsequently amended the wording: “The creative adult is the child who survived”. I personally think she was bang on the first time.
Children continuously create, continuously play. It is their natural state. Ideas are fecund and spontaneous. Nothing bores them more than some meticulously worked out game with lots of rules. The best games and stories emerge in the moment, co-created, sometimes dazzlingly stupid, but always entertaining and memorable. If we want to write works that speak to the heart, and if we want to fall in love again with our own creativity, then we must learn to play again.
If we want to write works that speak to the heart, and if we want to fall in love again with our own creativity, then we must learn to play again.
So next time you sit down, say to hell with structure, and to hell with genre.
Take your hands off the wheel for a moment and let the wild goblin of your inner child drive.
You might be surprised, not only by how much fun you have, but also by how good the end result is.
Joseph Sale
Joseph is the author of more than 30 books, including The Book of Thrice Dead, Virtue’s End, Dark Hilarity, and The Claw of Craving. He is drawn to the baroque, the spiritual, and the mythic like a moth to flame.
He lives in the south of England with his wonderful family, where he obsesses over table-top RPGs, trading card games, book bindery, esoteric Christianity, and anime.
