There’s a lot of talk in the publishing world today, at least in some quarters, about finding a sustainable way to create your author career. I’m all for that! I am one hundred percent behind sustainability as a path to being an author today. But in order to create the sustainable writing career I think we all crave, we need to know how our brain works. Or, in other words, what our creative neurotype is.
What is a sustainable writing career?
The sustainable writing career is one that supports us physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually without driving us toward burnout. That’s a tall order. There are a lot of variables when it comes to the physicality of being supported–income being a big one. My focus is on the mental, emotional, and spiritual side. Why? Because a writing career which supports us on the mental, emotional, and spiritual level is one that will sustain us through the lean times as well as the good ones. And if there’s one thing we know about being an author, it’s that nothing stays the same for long.
Why know your neurotype?
I’m passionate about helping people see themselves not as having deficits, as the medical model of disability would like us to believe, but rather as someone with strengths and abilities that may be different from others. I’m not alone if I say that it’s taken me years, decades even, to fully understand myself, the way my brain works, and how best to work with it so that I’m not fighting it and the mojo is flowing. That’s part of being a late diagnosed neurodivergent person, and like I said, I’m so not alone in this.
Finding my neurotype (I’m “a thinker” by the way, with a second helping of being “a feeler” these days) has been like unlocking a door I never knew existed. Now that I know how my brain works, and how I can channel those energies into something productive for all aspects of being an author, not just drafting page after page of prose, but actually polishing, editing it, and doing all the “author business” stuff, too, I can see the change in my business. More importantly, I can see the change in how I look at my author business and how I feel about it.
Remember, I said I was a feeler, so feeling good about what I’m doing, that I’m on the right path, that the future looks bright, that’s important to keep me sustained and moving forward as I rebuild my author business after a very long hiatus.
As authors we spend a lot of time looking at our characters and seeing how they spend time in their world. It’s time we also started paying that close attention to our inner world as well.
