The Little Red Hen, The Sequel
There once was an author called The Little Red Hen. After the publication of a very successful first book, the Little Red Hen and her editor Tonto spent several years experimenting with a number of follow-up book ideas and a couple of failed overtures to literary agents. In one rejection letter, an agent told the Little Red Hen that if she didn't have a million followers on social media, she can forget getting a publisher to even look at her.
So the Little Red Hen tacked. (She was also a very able seaman.)
To boost her presence on social media, she hired a
videographer and produced a series of videos to share on sites like Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram, and other outlets she didn’t even read or have accounts for yet. Her
readership did not exactly skyrocket immediately, but it was a start. People seemed to like them.
She polled her readers and, with Tonto, set plans in motion to create a second
batch of videos on topics her readers suggested.
LRH met with a new producer and worked with Tonto to craft video
objectives, score original music, and other important preproduction tasks. But
then, just as shooting was about to begin, that project stalled unexpectedly
due to a cancellation, divine intervention, and a ridiculously high project
estimate. The videos would need to give LRH a lot of traction to justify the
expense… and to get traction, someone would need to spend a lot of time on
social media promoting the heck out of the videos. Ew.
“Who will help me post things on Tumblr, Twitter, and Flickr?”
said the Little Red Hen.
“Not I,” said the sleepy cat.
“Not I,” said the noisy yellow duck.
“Not I,” said the lazy dog.
Frankly, it didn't sound very fun to the Little Red Hen or
Tonto, either. It turns out that neither the Little Red Hen nor her trusty sidekick
gave a flying foofie about promoting videos on social media.
So, the Little Red Hen and Tonto tacked again. Well,
actually they simply pulled down the sails and drifted peaceably near the
equator, trailing their fingers along behind them in the warm sea while
contemplating their futures and chatting idly about how to remove salt stains
from leather shoes.
The Little Red Hen decided that maybe the real problem was
that she wasn’t passionate enough about her ideas so far. Tonto thought that the
topic wasn’t the issue, and that perhaps LRH was so focused on the
product—scoring another big hit—that it was impeding her process. Tonto, who was a gifted Freudian psychoanalyst as well as
crack editor, offered her diagnosis: Debilitating performance anxiety. A focus
on the product, not the process, had created excessive anxiety and cloudy
thinking. The patient is left feeling incomplete. Anxious. Impotent. Without an
inspiring book topic.
The tragedy of untimely death is not the sadness of a failure
to live but rather the resounding echo of unfulfilled promise. Parallel tragedy
occurs when fulfillment is solely projected on the goal, and one misses the satisfaction
gifted to us daily when we remember to enjoy the process of reaching toward it.
Readers, when the Little Red Hen was not planting seeds,
cutting wheat, baking bread, or shopping for black and white oxford loafers at Cole
Haan, she loved to write. Excuse me; not “loved.” Loves. Writing makes her feel alive. Fulfilled. She doesn't really
care about social media. And yes, she likes books. She does. But books are the
product. Writing is the practice. And
the practice is what will make her feel complete. So says Tonto.
In a rare moment of New Year’s Day clarity, Tonto asked the
Little Red Hen, “How about if you just write, and [expletive] everything else?
The fulfillment of the writing life may be something so simple as doing it
every day. Yes, the published work is the crowning achievement, and we’ll get
to that… but the amulet to ward off writer’s malaise: daily practice. Everything
comes back to this. So simple.”
The Little Red Hen didn't write back.
She did, however, send Tonto some really nice soap in the
shape of Buddha’s head. Stop by. It smells great; she’s keeping it in the guest
bathroom.
~~~~~~~
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