No, no, no, no, no
Hello, friends!
It's been a busy couple of weeks over here. While squarely in the middle of working on The Dark Age, the copyedits for my ghostwritten novel arrived. Not much, just 3,000 or so notes that needed my approval, rejection, or correction. As with most things publishing-related, the deadline for such things is tight. (Two weeks, in this instance.) Happily, these revisions are nearly done.
One of my favorite things to read about is artists protecting their time from fanciful distractions. (To be sure, copyedits are not fanciful distractions.)
A classic example is this reply, written by E.B. White in response to an invitation to join a committee:
Dear Mr. Adams,
Thanks for your letter inviting me to join the committee of the Arts and Sciences for Eisenhower.
I must decline, for secret reasons.
Sincerely, E.B.White
In a 2005 New Yorker essay about White, Roger Angell offered some context as to why the man—who happened to be Angell's stepfather, as well as a celebrated writer—might have avoided such public obligations:
Public gatherings—and most private ones, as well—made him jumpy. For years he had passed up family weddings and graduations, town meetings, dedications and book awards, cocktail bashes and boat gams and garden parties. As his literary reputation widened when he was in his forties and fifties, he did make it to a few select universities to receive honorary degrees, but despite prearranged infusions of sherry or Scotch he found the ceremonials excruciating.
Angell recounts an event that White attended at Dartmouth, where he was being honored, among other recipients. To White's horror, he was made to wear a hood—"white, quite big, and shaped like a loose-fitting horse collar"—which quickly was tangled up with the person sitting beside him, flipping the hood over White's face.
Andy’s worst dreams come true. “When I got seated the thing was up over my face, as in falconry,” he continues. “A fully masked Doctor of Letters, a headless poet.”
Subsequently, Angell continues, White more or less declined every invitation:
After that, he stayed home, even passing up an invitation in 1963 to go to Washington and receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson; the deed was consummated instead by a stand-in, Maine’s Senator Edmund Muskie, in the office of the president of Colby College. Andy also skipped his wife’s private burial in the Brooklin Cemetery, in July, 1977. None of us in the family expected otherwise or held this against him. And when his own memorial came, eight years later, I took the chance to remark, “If Andy White could be with us today he would not be with us today.”
The author Ryan Holiday is direct about his reasons for declining invitations to meetings or events:
I want as absolutely little in my calendar as possible. I’m meticulous about it. Whatever the least amount possible I can have in my calendar without killing my career—that’s what I want.
Paul Graham talks about the "manager's schedule" versus the "maker's schedule" when he writes about time. The manager, he says, divides a day into hour-long blocks; you change what you're doing frequently. Conversely, meetings are disastrous to a maker, who thrives on uninterrupted, unchallenged time.
I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own case. Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don't. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.
Saying no can be difficult, though. Should you go to that meeting, to that conference, appear at that event? Should you take on that work, give that interview, collaborate with that other person?
Recently I found a pretty terrific resource: How to say no, a collection of templates, readymade for you to decline any invitation. They're designed for easy use in Gmail, but honestly, you could borrow from these and use them however you wish.
This template is all about turning down new work:
Hello [Name],
Thanks for thinking of me for [project]. However, I’m going to have to turn this down.
I want to ensure I continue to do my best with my existing workload and my plate’s a little too full for me to be able to take this on right now.
Sorry I can’t be of more help!
Best, [Your Name]
There are a few dozen examples on that site; I'm going to keep them around for reference, because I always feel better having said no, but I often find saying no more difficult than it should be.
With practice we can all get good at saying no—without coming off like an asshole, if that's our preference. I like to cite this reply I received from the author Jonathan Lethem many years ago, when I cold-emailed him with a few compliments and a request for a blurb:
Hello, Jason, congratulations on Eleanor and thanks for all you say about my work — it means a lot. Alas, I've reached the point where I just don't blurb anything anymore — the social and ethical blowback was becoming outrageous and unmanageable — so after many years of hard labor I've abandoned the blurb mines — mixed metaphors all over the place here. I'm sure you understand (or if not, you will!) All my best wishes for your publication, JL
Pretty classy, as nos go, no? Which I appreciated muchly, given how completely uncomfortable the process of blurb-hunting can be for a new author. (Well, maybe for an author at any stage of their career.)
Haruki Murakami's take on saying no is one of my favorites:
People are offended when you repeatedly turn down their invitations. But, at that point, I felt that the indispensable relationship I should build in my life was not with a specific person but with an unspecified number of readers. My readers would welcome whatever lifestyle I chose, as long as I made sure that each new work was an improvement over the last. And shouldn’t that be my duty—and my top priority—as a novelist? I don’t see my readers’ faces, so in a sense my relationship with them is a conceptual one, but I’ve consistently considered it the most important thing in my life.
Protect your time, do the work that matters most, and say no to anything that interferes, even if it's difficult.
Or try, at least.
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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