We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ryan Neely a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Ryan, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

I used to say that I don’t believe in regrets, and for the most part this is still true. Regrets are typically misspent creativity. Why spend so much time pining for or wishing for something that cannot be changed? The thing about regret is, it distracts us from what is directly in front of us. More than likely, that thing we wish we could have changed, had we actually changed it, would have found us in a completely different situation than we are in today . . . and I need to be where I am today. That’s the whole point of life, isn’t it? To be present in the moment and to understand that I probably wasn’t ready for what would have come had I done things differently in the past.

With all of that said, I do wish I had started my creative career sooner. That wish though–to have started sooner–is really secondary. It’s tangential to the actual wish, the “regret” that is something I could never have changed anyway.

Sure, starting sooner would have been great. To think back on all of the creative endeavors I “could have” accomplished creates a bitter ulcer in the center of my wellbeing that eats away at me from the inside out. (This is why regret isn’t a good thing.) Again, the wish to have started sooner is secondary. It’s a symptom a larger issue.

That larger issue? My need for certainty.

I’m one of those. I’ve given up the handle of “perfectionist.” I don’t seek perfection (though most personality metrics would beg to differ). What I seek is certainty. Can I be certain that this action or that decision will lead to a specific outcome? No? Then let’s not take that risk. Let’s hold back and hone our craft first until certainty is a foregone conclusion.

That’s the deep rooted center of what I wish I could change: the fundamental elements of my personality.

Had I been brazen enough, had I been willing to lower my own standards, had I understood that certainty can never be a foregone conclusion, I think I would have started taking my creative career as an author more seriously from an earlier age. I would have been working harder to put my work before the eyes of those who “matter” (as if there’s any such group). I would have been working harder to push that writing career to a place that could sustain my family as a primary source of income instead of being a side project that acts like a monetary black hole more often than not.

I could blame outside forces for that. My family have been nothing if not consistent in their messaging that it is better to work yourself like a dog at a dreary day job you hate because at least a day job provides certainty and security when it comes to financial stability. The so-called “gatekeepers” who, from the outside, seem as though their sole job is to keep books from being published. The seemingly insurmountable physical and financial tasks of going it alone as an independent publisher in a way that could, in any way, rival the production value of a traditional publisher.

The thing is, however, that those are just excuses. They are external to me. Sure, I allow those external pressures and ideas to influence my decisions, but in the end, I am the reason things have gone the way they have. My family only wants security for themselves. They aren’t interested in unnecessary risks, but I could certainly have insisted that the risk wasn’t unnecessary and gone ahead anyway. Those “gatekeepers” don’t have the time or the bandwidth to take on every novel that enters their inbox. They’re overrun as it is, so it makes sense that spending time with them, meeting them at conferences and book fairs over and over again would be a thing I “should” have done. Those insurmountable obstacles in being an independent publisher don’t have to be tackled overnight. They should be seen as a long game, and infinite game, where I start with what I can do in the moment and build on from there.

Where I’m going with all of this is: too often we allow ourselves to be persuaded by external forces and then blame those external forces when things aren’t going the way we hoped; too often we take examples from what already exists and expect that our own endeavors meet those same standards of quality with a meager percentage of the capital, manpower, and invested time as those existing endeavors and then we blame “the system.”

I am guilty of that. I blamed my family for not understanding or supporting my passion for writing. I blamed the “gatekeepers” for not seeing my brilliance as an author (note the dripping sarcasm). I blamed my day job and my lack of capital for the paltry trajectory of my independent publishing business, when really it was all just me.

I was afraid that by having a day job I would be taking time and resources away from my creative endeavors. While that is true, the larger truth was that said day job affords me the resources necessary to support my family which, in turn, allows me to support my creative endeavors.

I saw rejection after rejection from literary agents and editors, and I became afraid that I wasn’t good enough to be a professionally published author. The reality was, (in most circumstances) it wasn’t me, it was them. They simply didn’t have the time or the resources to take on more work.

When I finally “bit the bullet” and decide to make a go as an independently published author, I was afraid that my limited time and money wouldn’t be enough to produce a product that would capture the attention of readers. I was expecting an international bestseller with the first novel. That’s ridiculous.

All of this leads me back to starting earlier. Where would I be if I could have changed my personality? Where would I be if, rather than seeking certainty in the work I was doing (being certain that this time there would be no rejection letters, this time the hours and weeks and months spent writing and editing and producing a novel would yield millions of dollars worth of sales) . . . where would I be if, instead, I just started publishing?

I don’t know the answer. Burnout, perhaps. Dissatisfied with the quality of the work to which my name was attached. All of those things.

I don’t know if starting sooner would have been the right move because, in the end, this industry we call publishing, it’s fluid. It moves and shifts without warning or insight. Had I started “back then,” I likely would have been able to ride the wave that was the “golden age” of self-publishing where voracious readers didn’t care about quality, they only wanted quantity. If I had a different personality, I might have been able to be one of those authors who could crank out four or six books a year and really rake in the dough because it’s just a job, after all, and who cares what the final product is as long as it’s selling.

The truth is, though, that isn’t me. I can’t change my personality any more than I cand change the position of the moon.

So, does a part of me wish I had started sooner? Sure. Only because I long for the day when I can do this thing I love and earn a living from it at the same time. However, earning a living from the thing I love means compromising my own internal standards, I’d rather not.

In the end, the only truth is, whatever trajectory my career takes, it’s because of me and me alone. No one else has any influence over the decisions I make. I may concede certain points made by my wife or my peers and decide to shift direction, but ultimately that’s on me and not on them.

At the end of the day, starting sooner my have been a disaster for me, and while it is sometimes painful to admit because I am susceptible to FOMO [the fear of missing out], I am happy with where I am right now and that’s good enough.

Ryan, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’ve always been a storyteller. As a kid, I wrote short stories and poems and even attempted to write a novel or two (without much success). In college, I moved away from the written word as a medium for telling stories and turned to visual storytelling. First with still photography, then with 3D animation and visual effects, and finally with film. In those days, it seemed as if I had a new job every three years that saw me starting over at the bottom of the corporate and financial totem pole. It wasn’t until a stint with cancer forced an impromptu move away from California that I realized I needed to find a career that could move with me wherever I went.

While convalescing after the cancer treatment, I turned my had back to writing. It took about a decade for me to find a space that felt comfortable in that realm. Not only did it take some time for me to develop a style and to hone my craft as an author, but it took that amount of time for me to really understand what it was I was trying to say with my writing.

It isn’t that all writing must have a message or a purpose, or that everything I write has some deeper meaning or lesson that must be teased out of the text. It’s that it took me that much time to understand that everything I wrote had some element of transitional change. It took that much time for me to see the patterns that existed in my writing that helped me to see that no matter what I write, the stories that satisfy me the most are those that illustrate some kind of righting of wrongs or interpersonal growth.

That is what I tend to focus on now: stories about characters who need to set right a wrong or who need some interpersonal growth or change in order to bring about a satisfying resolution to some external problem.

In my book Maxwell Cooper and the Legend of Inini-Makwa, Max wants nothing more than to attend the prestigious boarding school, the Apogee Art Academy. Max’s father, however, doesn’t believe that Max is mature enough to be away from home. The entirety of the novel pits both of those characters together in such a way that Max not only must accept that his father was right–he wasn’t mature enough–but also help Max to grow in such a way that, by the end of the story, he is mature enough. Meanwhile, the same is true for Max’s father. He must go through a transition that forces him to not only accept that he may have been wrong about Max’s level of maturity, but (more importantly) helps him to realize that it wasn’t his place to use Max’s maturity or lack thereof to prevent Max from growing as a person in a way that he (Max) wants to grow. In other words, Max’s father must learn to let go of his control over his son (as all parents must).

I have several novels in the pipeline to complete and publish and the common thread between them all have to do with character growth and change.

That’s what I write about regardless of genre or content. That’s what is important to me. Perpetual improvement, even when (or, perhaps, especially when) attaining the next level in that spectrum is devastatingly painful. I like this quote from Jerry Seinfeld who said, “Pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a void.” That mostly sums up the type of stories I like to tell. Stories about someone who is ignorant–someone who doesn’t yet understand what they don’t know–and who have to push through terrible pain in order to finally work through that ignorance into knowledge or wisdom.

Of course, much of my work is juvenile (at best) so as grandiose as all of the above sounds, it is often wrapped up in easy-to-digest works that aren’t elevated by unapproachable “literature.” I write for everyone and anyone, not academics seeking a deeper understanding of truth. That’s just hubris.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

This is a challenging question because I tend to straddle the fence between these two opposite ends of the spectrum: creatives and non-creatives. I think one of the unfortunate stereotypes of being a creative is this notion that we are all flighty, unfocused people searching for meaning or truth within our own lives from our artistic endeavors. While there may be some truth to this (isn’t every human searching to understand their place in the world and what that means for them?), there are those of us who are both extremely creative while also being grounded in reality.

If I were to pick one thing that I would like someone who isn’t a creative to understand about those of us who are, it would be this: creatives need support to be creative.

That doesn’t mean we need to continually be told how amazing our work is or how awesome we are simply because we have created a thing. That’s just pandering and won’t help anyone.

Imagine this: you’re sitting in front of a blank page or and empty canvas. You’ve been told that the only true way of being successful is to create something that is uniquely familiar. In other words, the thing you need to create must be different enough from every other creative endeavor in existence that it seems fresh and novel while simultaneously conforming to elements from every other creative endeavor in existence to not alienate people with how different it is.

Now, how do you do that?

In my experience, those people who do not work in a creative field seem to believe that creating something from nothing that is both unique while also being familiar is a simple process. It isn’t. It is challenging and difficult and anxiety-inducingly nauseating. Of course, the more time one spends in a creative endeavor, the easier this becomes, but when first starting out this process of creating something from nothing (and doing that well) can take years.

In the world of the non-creative, most everything is a commodity. We’re creating a product to sell or to consume. That’s because our culture is built and designed around consumerism. For the creative, however, (at least in the beginning) the thing being created is more than merely a product to be discarded if it isn’t universally acceptable.

I keep going back to Jerry Seinfeld here. The guy is a genius. As I write this, my mind keeps wandering to the faces he would be pulling simply reading the above, and that’s another nuance in the creative journey. By the time a creative person reaches the level of a Seinfeld–someone who has spent and entire career being creative–the number of iterations of creativity that person has gone through will bring him or her back to the level of the non-creative. It’s all just a commodity.

At the earliest stages of the journey, though, a creative needs room to breathe. Space to explore. To try things. A creative needs enough grace to fail miserably and the support to stand up and try again. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be pressure to work hard, to focus, to continue down that path despite the overburdened slog of producing something that doesn’t work. That’s the unfocused and flighty stereotype. “Well, this didn’t work, so I’ll try that,” or “You just don’t understand my vision.”

I’m not suggesting it isn’t beneficial to try different avenues of creativity or that everyone should fully understand a particular creative endeavor. What I am saying, however, is that a creative type needs support from non-creatives support both in the work they do produce and in helping them continue down their desired path (even if, sometimes, that support comes from a drill sergeant-like friend who doggedly pushes the creative to continue to create even when the work is bad).

The point is: not everything a creative produces should be some saleable commodity. Sometimes art is just art. Sometimes it will speak to you, sometimes it won’t. Sometimes it will be good and sometimes it will be crap, and that’s all part of the journey. That’s what makes being a creative so terrifying and exciting.

That hardest part, though (and I think the thing most non-creatives don’t understand) is that creating something out of nothing is an extremely taxing undertaking. Cynics (Seinfeld included) would suggest that nothing is ever created out of nothing. There’s always some element from the world informing the creative process. While that is true, it is also true that we are all searching for that uniquely familiar thing to create. We don’t want to simply copy what already came before (Hollywood is doing that for us already), and creating that uniquely familiar thing is the challenge and that’s where we need to support.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

I just want to offer three names: Cal Newport, Simon Sinek, and Brené Brown. Each of these three individuals come from different backgrounds and they write books on different subjects. A lot of Brené’s work is in the field of shame resilience, which (in my opinion) falls under the umbrella of personal development. Simon’s work seems mostly to be targeted at entrepreneurs and business leaders, while Cal’s work could be seen as a mixture of both.

These three individuals, however, through their books and TED Talks, and other interviews and videos have helped me change the way I think about what it means to run a small business as an independently published author. They have helped me to understand (or, rather, to re-learn something I once held as a firm belief) why I do what I do and how to do it in such a way that I don’t end up in burnout or overwhelm.

From understanding that it’s okay to be me, to be wholly myself and who I am regardless of how others react (what’s that quote from Jack Nicholson? “I don’t care what you think about me. I don’t think about you at all.”) to understanding why I felt so much FOMO and pressure to do “all of the things” thanks to our current social media-dominated culture (and that it’s not only okay but likely healthier to disconnect from all of that noise), to finally understanding what it means to not simply be in business to make money but to actually focus on what really matters: helping others to help themselves.

For other authors out there, I would be remiss if I didn’t also extoll upon the benefits I have gained from Becca Syme and the Better-Faster Academy. Becca is a bestselling author in her own right, but one of her primary goals is to help other authors create a sustainable career through the use of the Clifton Strengths personality metric and continued coaching in how each of us approaches the concept of what it means to be an author or an independent publisher in a different way.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.simonhargreavesauthor.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/simonhargreavesauthor/

Image Credits
Ryan Neely