On Success, Taylor Swift and Making it Last

"I give myself five seconds a day to be like, Yes, this is happening! And then the rest of the day, I'm trying to figure out how to make it last." Taylor Swift

It’s been terrible weather in Perth this week, and I haven’t been able to go running outside; I’ve had to run inside of the treadmill instead. While I love running outside, I hate running on the treadmill. To motivate myself to get on there and do it, I let myself watch Netflix and what I chose to watch was Miss Americana, a documentary about Taylor Swift.

I think Taylor Swift might be a writer’s songwriter – her songs don’t contain lyrics, but stories. So I was predisposed to like the documentary, but I wasn’t prepared for the way so many of the things she said really resonated with me in a peculiar way. Not that I’m in any way comparing myself to Taylor Swift here!

One of the things she said was that every time something amazing happened she’d take five seconds of her day to celebrate. But then she’d spend the rest of the day trying to figure out how to make that success last.

Ouch.

Those words of Taylor’s made me flinch with recognition, perhaps because I’m working my way through The Artist’s Way at the moment. It’s a hard thing being an ambitious writer — there’s a school of thought that says writers aren’t supposed to be ambitious. We’re supposed to be satisfied with merely being creative. But I can’t feed my kids creativity. Somewhere along the way, if this is my full-time job, I have to be ambitious enough to at least want to make enough money to put food on the table.

But I confess – my ambitions have always been greater than that.

And I’ve been lucky enough to have had some amazing successes: I’ve been a New York Times bestseller, I’ve had the number one bestselling book in Norway, several of my books have hit the USA Today bestseller list, my books have been translated into twenty-one different languages, my last six books have all made the bestseller lists here in Australia for at least a couple of weeks upon their release. So, that’s success, right?

I Did What Taylor Did

But for all of those successes, I did what Taylor did: I spent five seconds saying, Wow! and not just the rest of the day, but probably the rest of the year, trying to figure out how to make it last.

For example, I sort of thought that if one of your books made the New York Times bestseller list, then probably the next one would too. But the New York Times bestseller list is a strange beast: the books that make the list aren’t actually the fifteen bestselling books in the country. Now that’s a whole other post, and I don’t intend to go into it here, but you can read this post and this post if you want to know more about it. My point is that in 2019, my book, The Paris Orphan, hit the New York Times bestseller list two weeks in a row. But in 2020, my next book, The Paris Secret did not. At the time, I took that as a real blow — I hadn’t made “it” last. It had all evaporated.

And yes – I realise many authors never make the list and would be extraordinarily happy with just making it once; I know my perspective was a little skewed, but I’m just being honest about how it felt at the time because I don’t know how many women – especially how many women writers – are able to be honest about this stuff. It’s kind of scary – but I know from conversations I’ve had with lots of other writers that in the often secretive business of publishing, a little bit of honesty goes a long way to making all of us feel better.