Measure success by things you can control, not by what the world says about you.
Reflections on Cloud Cuckoo Land
You know that secret list of people you’d like to meet—or better yet, interview for your podcast?
The episode you listened to this week, Cloud Cuckoo Land, is a conversation with the person at the top of my list, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anthony Doerr.
Tony has been on my list for decades—even though I’ve met him not once but many times, and I’ve known him since long before he became famous. That’s because when it comes to writing, there’s no one I admire more. The awe and inspiration his writing sparks for me is something I can’t shut up about. What’s more, he’s part of my hall of champions. He’s guided me in subtle but significant ways when I was asking myself not just why I create, but why I keep creating.
Why create fills us with hope and possibility. It’s the question that for many of us, begins our creative journey. But when we start asking why keep creating, it’s often because we’re feeling lost in self-doubt and rejection. Maybe we’ve already given up.
In the 22 years that elapsed between the first time Tony and I met to the episode you listened to this week, I’ve asked that question a dozen different ways. But when I was a college student in my first creative writing workshop with Tony as a teacher, the question was more about how to keep creating—or more specifically, how to write well. That was an important question, one that I’ve spent a lot of time fine-tuning over the years. But it was only in the years after that class with Tony that I started asking in earnest why I was creating—and why I kept creating even when I faced the inevitable rejection and discouragement that all kinds of creators face.
I was shy about reaching out to Tony over the years, always surprised when he wrote me back and remembered me, maybe because as I watched the trajectory of his success, it was increasingly clear to me that it was the trajectory I wanted to be on myself—not just because of the awards and publishing credits he was racking up, but because of the beautiful work he was creating.
But I did occasionally email him over the years, sometimes when I had news to share, but more often to congratulate him on some major accomplishment. Almost always, that question of why I should keep creating found its way into my message, usually in the form of a short update that I had gotten close to some goal I was aiming for—getting into an MFA program, getting an agent, getting a story published—but had fallen short of the mark.
His response was always some version of the same thing: rejection and self-doubt would likely always be part of the creation process, but if I loved writing, then I should keep creating—not for what I could accomplish, but because the creation process itself is a joyful one.
In this reflection, I want to share 3 big principles I learned from Tony—both in this conversation and in the larger context of the time I’ve known him.
3 things I learned from my literary hero
Build a creative life that allows for both consistency and creative experiments
I opened this episode describing a scene with Ron Kuka, another creative writing teacher of mine, who was responsible for bringing Tony to Wisconsin for that fellowship in the first place. I remember talking to Ron a few years after I’d graduated, when Tony was starting to win awards. Ron said, “Tony approaches writing like a professional athlete approaches training; he works eight hours a day and builds his whole life around the work he’s doing”
As a twenty-something just learning to call myself a writer, I was deeply impressed by this statement. I was at Wisconsin on a track scholarship, so I knew firsthand the kind of dedication and drive Ron was describing. Everything from my diet and sleep habits to my social life was organized around that all-important task of running. I learned at an early age to be disciplined, to be singularly focused on a goal and build my life around reaching it.
Tony built his life around writing the way I built my life around running. Underneath all of his awards and publications were decades of discipline. A few of his accolades came to him, but most of them were things he had to apply or submit for. You don’t get published in the Atlantic or the Paris Review—or anywhere for that matter—by wishing or wanting. The way to have work out in the world is to put it out there in the first place. In publishing this means getting rejected a lot. In podcasting, it means being willing to give yourself deadlines, and the permission to publish your episode so you can move onto the next one.
Over the years, I often thought of that 8-hour-a-day writing schedule as the mark I should be aiming for, which was sometimes very frustrating, especially when I had a full-time job that had nothing to do with writing, or endless days changing diapers and spoon-feeding children.
What I wouldn’t understand until many years later was that Tony’s discipline and drive weren’t the whole picture of his creative life. Which brings me to the second thing I learned from Tony.
Follow your curiosity to your creations, and welcome the interruptions and delays as opportunities.
There were whole years where he wasn’t publishing anything. He found jobs on sheep farms and fishing canneries that would give him a chance to live everywhere from Alaska to New Zealand. He moved a lot. For a long time, he made just enough to live off of, but not much more.
There were also years of parenting, when his focus was on his boys. Sometimes that shift in focus found its way into his writing, like when we moved to Rome to write a World War II novel but instead wrote a memoir about Rome, writing, and parenting. Until All the Light We Cannot See hit the bestseller list, Tony’s award-winning books weren’t selling enough copies to pay the bills. For decades, he taught creative writing workshops as his day job, often supplementing those classes with summer workshops or speaking engagements all over the country. He told me in our conversation that for years he worried that he wouldn’t be able to send his twin boys to college, that it was only recently that writing has brought in enough income to release him from that fear.
Part of the reason for the delay on finishing All the Light We Cannot See was that Tony had twin babies, but part of it was also that both the research and the construction of the novel was taking a lot longer than he thought it would. Tony told me once that there were a lot of pages—and even whole characters—who ended up on the cutting room floor before that book was done. For every page that got published, there were many others that never saw the light of day.
I’m sure there were times when Tony wondered if he’d ever finish that book, but even the endless researching and detours in writing ended up serving a purpose. All of that research about walls that Tony did for All the Light ended up being the creative spark he needed to write Cloud Cuckoo Land. His exhaustive and in-depth approach to research meant that he could write with authority and accuracy not just about the walls of Constantinople, but about ancient Greek plays and the art of translation and the advances of technology in everything from gunpowder to virtual reality.
What was consistent through all of those very different seasons of life was that Tony was always reading, always writing, always fine-tuning those creative rhythms so that when he was ready to return to the work in earnest, the creative habits to complete the work were already established.
Which brings me to the third big principle I learned from Tony.
Measure success by metrics you can control (not by dollars, downloads, or what the world says about you)
We all know this, but it’s hard to internalize—even for Tony. I’m not sure I’ll ever fully wean myself from the knee-jerk reaction I have when I see a really great week or month of downloads—or a really bad one. We are, after all, creating our episodes because we hope that people will listen. When I’m feeling discouraged, I will sometimes read the reviews our listeners have written to remind myself that my work has on some small scale made a difference. I try to channel that feeling into motivation to leave reviews for the podcasts I listen to. The discouragement still comes, but at least now I know to expect it as a normal part of the creative process, one that will pass as soon as I get immersed enough in making the next thing to remember that the best part of the process isn’t actually what people say about it, but the satisfaction of completing work I’m proud of.
The day that the episode with came out, I sent a follow-up email to Tony and his publicist with a couple of social media posts and a document I’ve called “How to Share the Podcast (made easy), which I’ve shared with you in this module. Tony’s publicist posted one of the social media posts I provided on Tony’s Instagram profile, and we got as many downloads from that one Instagram story as we normally do in an entire week of downloads.
It doesn’t always work out that way. In my experience, most of the time guests don’t share. Sometimes they don’t even listen to the episode. As with pretty much everything in podcasting, it helps to have the long game in mind. But every now and then you get a guest who really loves what you’ve done—enough to share it widely—and your episode reaches an audience who never would have found you any other way.
But here’s the thing: even though we got that big spike in downloads, and even though Tony’s episode quickly became our most downloaded episode, having someone famous on our show didn’t really change anything. Not in the short run. It gave us an added degree of credibility that we could get a guest of that caliber on our show. Probably it will help when we’re trying to book guests in the future.
But the best part of having Tony as a guest wasn’t what we could get from him. The best part of having Tony as a guest was getting to sit down and talk with my literary hero, to ask him why he keeps creating. It’s the best part of all of this work, that we get to have conversations with people from all over—not just the small talk of everyday life, but conversations where both parties go in knowing that they’re going to share something real and deep and maybe even profound. It’s one of the things that makes podcasting so special, that a certain level of intimacy and transparency is assumed from the start.
As you keep creating, I hope that you’ll take the advice that Tony gave to me all of those years ago about writing. If you end up making money from this work, or if it leads you to connections that can advance your career or teach you something new, wonderful! But I hope that the joy of connecting with other people, of hearing their stories and maybe even telling some of your own, will keep you creating for many years to come. I hope you’ll give yourself permission to let life become a creative experiment, where you are allowed to try new things and be a beginner—even when you’ve become an expert. I hope that you’ll create for all kinds of reasons—to understand others, to understand yourself, to make the world bigger, and to make it smaller, too. I hope that you’ll create because you can, and that in that creating, you’ll find joy and even delight.