Business Musings: Expect Resistance

I’m still making my way (slowly!) through the Emilio Estefan book that I mentioned in an earlier blog.  For those of you who missed that post, the book is called The Rhythm of Success, and it is about ten years old.

I’m bookmarking a number of places where I’m finding material for blog posts later. I’m also bookmarking places that have phrases I want to steal. Leave it to a musician to put ideas into pithy two- and three-word phrases. You’ll see a few of those in the future blog posts.

Even though I had planned to go through this book when I’m done with it (and also to work with the Questlove book I mentioned last week), I have to write this post now before it leaves my head.

You see, Estefan said something in that pithy way of his that won’t stick in my mind. The concept flits away as if it had never been. Which means that part of me wants to ignore it.

And because that part seems to have control of the subconscious brain and wants to let this idea slip by me, I figured writing a blog post about this for all of you will make the concept stick in my mind.

The idea comes in the middle of the book, in a chapter titled “Expect Resistance And Prepare Yourself For It.” I figured I knew what this chapter would be about before I read it. I even figured I would know the anecdote he was going to tell.

One of the most powerful scenes in Get On Your Feet!, the Broadway musical about the Estefans’ lives (he’s married to Gloria Estefan), takes place in a record executive office. The Estefans wanted to play Latin music with English lyrics, and market the songs worldwide (not just to a Latin audience). And (cue sarcastic voice) that lovely record executive told them that they weren’t “back home anymore” so they didn’t get to “make the rules.”

Emilio Estefan got mad, and told the executive, “Look at my face — whether you know it or not, this is what an American looks like.” Because of the horrid climate here in the United States right now, that line got a standing ovation on the night I saw the show (from everyone except the couple sitting next to me, who seemed quite grumpy).

Estefan’s vision was the right vision, and as usual, the executive was wrong. I expected to read a variation of that story in this chapter, and sure enough, the story showed up, but in a longer, more detailed version.

The chapter also included (importantly, I think) this lovely aside:

If you had told me at that point that years later I’d be appointed president of the equivalent company as I was with Sony, I would have asked you what you were smoking. It would have been hard to imagine years later such a different scene in that lobby. “Oh, Mr. Estefan, let me get the elevator for you.” Back then it was, “He’s busy; come back tomorrow.” [The Rhythm of Success: How An Immigrant Produced His Own American Dream, Celebra, 2011, P. 107]

So yes, that story was in the chapter, and it’s an important story with a great comeuppance. Success really is the best revenge. (I have my own stories along this line.)

Estefan says—as anyone who is successful already knows—that meeting resistance is inevitable. The people who become successful power past the resistance, and the people who let one negative comment from someone else derail them never become successful.

But there was more to the chapter than that story and stories like it. He writes,

There are always going to be two forces at work: the internal and the external. Us and them. I don’t say that so that you develop a “me against the world” attitude. I say that so that you always keep in mind what you are up against. The external forces are much harder to control, so let’s look first at you, the internal force. The place to begin is with self-assurance. Your belief in your great idea and your dream has to be rock solid. [[The Rhythm of Success: How An Immigrant Produced His Own American Dream, Celebra, 2011, P 108]

That tripped me up, and it shouldn’t have. I’m still having trouble processing this.

I like to say that writers are a combination of insecurity and ego. We have the ego to believe that what we have to say is valuable and the world will want to hear it. But we’re insecure enough to doubt that we’re actually saying what we want. That’s why writers go to writers’ groups, to refine what they’re talking about, to let other people “validate” them.

I’ve always figured I was just contrary. I get grumpy when people try to make me into something I’m not. I figured it was part of my nature—and it is. I struggled against one of the most critical human beings on the planet (my mother) when I was growing up. So I fought back by deciding that I didn’t care what the neighbors said or what other people thought. I would do what I wanted.

It ended there for me. It was a reaction, not an action.

And what Estefan is discussing here is an action.

He’s telling people to actively defend themselves against their own internal resistance. To believe in themselves, and their ideas, their dreams.

In many ways, that’s revolutionary. It’s not contrary or even part of someone’s nature. He maintains that the attitude—the ability to believe in yourself and what you do—can be trained. As he has before, he boils it down to a single sentence: Don’t be negative or allow others to be negative.

And then he adds this:

Most people don’t like to leave their comfort zone. And because of that they are also afraid of risks. Don’t be one of those people. Be open to your own ideas and those of others. [The Rhythm of Success: How An Immigrant Produced His Own American Dream, Celebra, 2011, P 109]

The key phrase for me here: Be open to your own ideas.

And I realized—I’m still realizing—how much I had learned to edit my own ideas into something “marketable” thanks to my years in traditional publishing. Sure, I’ve fought against that “marketable” word over the years. I told one of my then-agents that the only people who became Big Names were those whose writing bucked trends rather than followed trends.

Dean and I put together Fiction River, the anthology series, so that writers could write in multiple genres, often in the same volume, because I hate the way that short fiction has been forced into narrow confines.

My own writing usually crosses genres and experiments with all kinds of tropes that people said someone who looks like me or has my background can’t write. I started writing science fiction mystery because I read a quote from Isaac Asimov that said sf mysteries were the hardest thing of all to write. So I stretched and tried one, and have been enjoying myself ever since.

But for each mental success story, I had a dozen others—inside my own mind—that I either truncated or ignored or set aside “for later.” I had already been dealing with some of that as I revised my novel FantasyLife for the Storybundle that Allyson Longueira curated. (My preferred version of the novel is available now. You can find out more here.)

I realized how much the failure of that novel—and the way that I got treated by the science fiction “establishment” after I left The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction—destroyed my ability to write fantasy. I did what I usually do when something hurts: I walked away and set the pain aside. (Yeah, not healthy. I’m working on it.)

I hadn’t realized how far away I had put all of that until Dayle Dermatis asked me into the Uncollected Anthology. I started looking at all of the series or story starts that I had abandoned. Many hadn’t been touched for years.

My work met with resistance and instead of defending it, I caved. I let the negativity win.

Now, you can say—and you’d be right—that I was struggling with many other things at the time. My slowly collapsing health. Some financial issues. The complete destruction of genre fiction within traditional publishing itself. And a vicious persona vendetta against me by several people in sf (the leader of which is now dead, which I find disconcerting—because I want that jerk to see my success, and to know it for the revenge that it is. Yeah, I can be vindictive. I just try not to act on it {outside of fiction}).

But those are excuses. Because I let myself be negative, and let their negativity overcome my own love of a certain kind of storytelling. My Kristine Grayson pen name had become a sideways method of keeping the fantasy part of my career alive, but it’s not the same kind of writing as FantasyLife. The Grayson books were a leak, because I had repressed a large part of what I was doing.

I hadn’t entirely realized it—oh, heck, I hadn’t realized it at all—until I read Estefan’s comments about internal resistance. Sure, I can see internal resistance in other writers, especially beginning writers. It’s easy to see when writers revise at the behest of their peer-level writing workshop (taking advice from people who know less than nothing). Or when writers twist themselves into a pretzel trying to please an agent—who is an employee and shouldn’t be hired in the first place. (See my many posts on that subject)

But it’s harder to see when you’ve done something and a continued barrage of negativity wears you down. That’s why so many published writers quit writing after a decade or so. Those writers are (usually) pummeled by the nastiness and negativity and utter destruction of dreams that occurs within traditional publishing, and the writers either fade away, or never get another contract and don’t really try to repair their careers. The pain is simply too great.

It’s really hard to deal with that kind of negativity. My way of doing so usually is trying to see what could go wrong and prepare for it. But that’s not the kind of preparation that Estefan is talking about in this chapter.

He’s not talking about gaming out scenarios for failure and figuring out how to overcome them. He’s talking about changing your own internal attitude so that when those scenarios come to pass, you meet them with strength: I believe in this, and I don’t care what you say. I’m going to make this work.

That’s a hard position to maintain. Especially when your dreams are dying of a thousand cuts.

But if that attitude is essential to who you are, then you won’t have to maintain an artificial position. You will pivot automatically. You believe in yourself and in what you’re doing, so you will find a way to make it work.

As I write this, I’m amusing myself, because I keep switching into second person. Clearly these are concepts that I need to work on, and as I write about them in this blog post, I make them less personal. They’re about “you,” not about me.

A lot of these places where contrary me did not defend herself or her work (wow! Third person now) occurred slowly, over time. I got worn down. I hadn’t anticipated the problems and so had no defenses set up.

I hadn’t practiced keeping the negativity out. I’d practiced battling it—and rebelling against it. To do both of those things, you (by definition) let the negativity in.

The idea that resistance to an idea or a process could be built in, because I hadn’t built a habit of positivity about my own work is a mind-blower for me. I’m clearly still working on it.

And will continue to work on it, now that it’s becoming clearer. I’m pretty sure there are lots of such lost narratives inside me, because I hadn’t sufficiently guarded against the attack on them. I hadn’t built myself up enough.

I’m not sure exactly how to fix that. But I’m going to work on it.

I must say, it’s easier to work on changing these habits of a lifetime now that indie publishing exists. No one will tell me ever again that they can’t publish one of my books because there’s no audience for that stuff. Or because no one likes my writing. Or (as one still-working idiot of an Big Name editor said to me) that they’ll only buy my work because my name is valuable even though my writing stinks.

As I write this, I think about all of those interactions, and dozens of others I haven’t mentioned here, and I realize I never reached deep down and went into the face of those negative folks. I never told them my version of “This is what an American looks like.” Instead, I moved sideways or shut the door myself or tried to find another (narrower) way.

Looks like I’ve got some work to do.

And I suspect that work will be fun.

***

As I write this, we’re getting closer and closer to the Business Master Class.(You will be able to sign up for next year’s shortly.)  I’ll be writing a few more blog posts ahead of that class, and then I’ll start into posts about what I learned this year. I’m really looking forward to it, because it’s even more advanced than it has been in previous years. Plus I get to share my new city. Always fun.

Thank you folks for your positivity and your willingness to back what I do. I cannot tell you how much it means to me.

Thank you all!

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“Business Musings: Expect Resistance,” copyright © 2018 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Image at the top of the blog copyright © Can Stock Photo / Nevenova.