I've been drawn to writing since childhood. It's the only serious dream I've ever had.
And yet, if you'd asked me about my writing ambitions a few years back, I probably would have told you I'd missed my best shot at ever completing a manuscript dr...
If you want masterful instruction on how to be a creatively powerful person in the digital age, look no further than Beyoncé.
When Beyoncé drops an album, news doesn't trickle out to her fans in drips and drabs through promotors, social media or radio stations. Instead, when she's got something like Lemonade in the can, her new music—complete with videos, imagery and a full stage show—smashes down upon the waiting ears of her faithful Beyhive in a powerful tide, complete and fully formed.
Looking back with hindsight at her social media activity prior to the Lemonade launch, it's obvious her plans have been underway for some time. Fans have scoured her archive of Instagram photos, finding visual references and allusions to lemonade and lemons going back for months.
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But there was nothing openly said about the new album or its themes, not by Beyoncé and not by her people. Aside from hints that something was coming a month out from launch, her camp didn't talk about Lemonade until it was ready.
When you consider the massive global interest in her work and the discipline required to adhere to this kind of silence, both by Beyoncé, her collaborators and the other celebrities, such as Serena Williams and Zendaya who appeared in her visual album, her feat becomes even more impressive.
Yet you could argue that Beyoncé became Beyoncé precisely because she possess this kind of exacting discipline.
If you read Elaine (Lainey) Lui's gossip blog as I do, you know Beyoncé is a committed entertainer who laboriously reviews and rehearses her stage shows after each performance, identifying the problems and reworking her material until it is perfect.
After all, this is a woman who can fall in the middle of a set and make it look like a planned move.
Lately, however, Lui has observed that Beyoncé has gone quiet in all kinds of media other than her own: her Instagram posts are often wordless, her "interviews" re-hash past sound bytes and rarely feature new direct quotes and she is tight-lipped on Twitter. The latter particularly impresses me: in the last three years, she's tweeted once—to tell her 14 million fans about Lemonade.
(Readers, I don't think I could resist that temptation. Beyoncé is made of sterner stuff.)
Lui argues this withdrawal from standard public relations and social media is another way in which Beyoncé is declaring her mastery as an artist.
I agree with that analysis. Beyoncé, who once directed her own HBO special and is known to keep an extensive archive of her interviews and media appearances, is increasingly letting her work—meticulously constructed, packaged and presented—to speak for itself.
So if Beyoncé is the Zeus of the music industry, retreating to her proverbial cloud citadel (more likely an island paradise) of a Mount Olympus to create in solitude, her work then becomes Athena, springing fully formed from her head before making its way out into the world to work its wonders among us.
You may be thinking, "Okay, that's nice for her. She's Beyoncé. She's literally in a celebrity class all by herself. What does that have to do with me and being digitally creative?"
Lots.
Social media and platforms like Wattpad are changing authors' relationships to their readers, fans, and publishers, but it's telling to me that Beyoncé, who could command any and all of these places simply by setting up shop, is choosing to conduct her artistic iteration in privacy.
Would I be willing to bet she has a rigorous drafting and feedback process we're not privy too?
Yes, yes, I would.
Beyoncé's global profile means that she no longer has to actively build her audience and shill for the press and do all the promotional things that unknown entities like you or me have to do. But, there are some other points we can take from her example:
1) Pursue excellence above all things. I know it's tempting to publish work as it's written on Wattpad. I'm tempted to do that every day, particularly when I see real-world events that suggest the time is ripe for my story. But I believe my vision will achieve its fullest expression if I perfect it as fully as I can before posting it on Wattpad or anywhere else.
That doesn't mean adhering to perfectionist standards I can never achieve—I've made a deal with myself to see the book through in its current form. My energy for creative work definitely has a clock and I don't want to be in the same holding pattern any longer than I must.
2) Put your energy into creating, not talking about what you're creating. While writing my manuscript draft in 2014-15, I didn't share work in progress. Even my husband didn't know what it was about, just that I was writing.
Furiously.
I've learned the hard way that talking about work in progress greatly decreases my odds of finishing first drafts.
3) Don't launch until your work is fully formed. I had originally planned to launch my book in May 2016. I didn't anticipate that it would grow from one book to three, or that what I thought was an awesome first draft needed such substantive work. It does, and that's fine.
Like a product developer, I've mapped my steps to achieving a beta version. Progress is slow (day job, family, etc.), but I believe I will have a more powerful story when I'm done.
Also, if crowdfunding has taught me anything, it's that you only get one real shot at selling people on your vision. Preparation is everything.
4. Know the difference between sounding boards and audiences. There are three groups people whose feedback I want before I launch my book on Wattpad: 1) close family and friends who read in the genre and aren't shy about calling me out on my misconceptions or boring bits, 2) my writing group whose feedback I trust, and 3) select beta readers who have specific cultural perspective that I lack. They aren't the same people as my future readers, though I hope they share many of the same enthusiasms, and I do my best not to confuse them.
If I was younger, it's possible I'd be more comfortable sharing work in progress. Yet, the more I think about writing, the more it seems analogous to the start-up life I live in my day job. The best success stories I hear only seem like overnight successes because the public isn't privy to the work that went into building to that moment. In a competitive marketplace like modern disrupted publishing, putting in the time and bringing your best game to the launch party seems to count for more and more.
I suspect Beyoncé—artist, entertainer, entrepreneur and ever-expanding business Titan—might agree.
