Don't Say Yes in 2024
Unless You Really Really Mean It
Friends!
I’ve been making a lot these days! Trips to CVS. Trips to the front door to get packages. Soups. And charts! Thursday is my annual YEAR IN CHARTS post, for paid subscribers, and you won’t want to miss it. In it you will see pie charts that breakdown the genres I sold this year. What percentage of my income was advances vs royalties. How many total deals I did, as compared to the last FIVE YEARS of data! I love charts! Subscribe now to read on Thursday!
BUT, in the meantime, while my eyes adjust to looking at text instead of tiny boxes on a spreadsheet, I want to give you a piece of advice to chew on as we head into a new year. Consider it a corollary to the previous post about goal planning. It goes hand in hand, even if it doesn’t look like it at first.
My advice for 2024 is, as you may have guessed from the header up there: Don’t Say Yes. This is subtly different than Say No. How? I’ll explain.
If you are an author (or an editor or an agent, honestly it applies to all of us), you are waiting, longing, for the yeses. Yes, I’ll be your agent. Yes, I’ll buy your book. Yes, you won the award. Yes, you can write the next one. We dread the nos, which I don’t need to enumerate for you here. We know the nos. We are used to the nos. We’ve heard a lot of nos. So, in response to all those nos, we are dying to say yes. Yes, I accept your offer of representation. Yes, I accept this book deal. Yes, I accept this award. Yes, I’ll write that thing, whatever it is, just please let this be a yes and not another no.
It’s that last bit I want to talk more about, but it applies to all the yeses, too. If someone is asking you to write (draw, script, color, collaborate, organize) something and your first response isn’t an enthusiastic yes, take a couple beats before you respond. Sometimes our enthusiasm grows as we learn more about something, but often, it wanes. Yes, you want to write that thing—but for that money on that schedule? Yes, you want to do that project—but on top of everything else you have on your plate? We don’t have to love every job we have, every project we do. Jobs will not love us back. We can preform labor for the exchange of money purely for the exchange of money. That’s fine.
But make sure you aren’t saying yes because you’re afraid it’ll be the last offer you get. Do not say yes out of fear. If you do not have the time to do the thing someone is asking you to do, if doing it will cost you more than money, but your physical or mental health, or even just your ability to enjoy some weekends, don’t say yes. You might have to say yes for financial reasons, but if you do not have to say yes for financial reasons, please don’t. Imagine yourself actually doing this work—writing those pages, reading those books, editing those words. Imagine doing that tomorrow, or next week, or in the summer when school’s out. Can you do it? Does imagining doing it raise your blood pressure or make you sweat? Can you only think of having done it and not the actual doing of it?
If it raises your blood pressure or the thought of doing it bores you to tears, don’t say yes. Saying no once will not close all doors forever. And if you find yourself saying no more than once, then the person asking you to do it is barking up the wrong tree. You can say no. Saying yes doesn’t make people like you more. Saying yes doesn’t make you a better person or more capable or more successful. It can actually make you a worse one of all those things! Saying yes too much can make you an over-worked, crabby, tired person making less money because you’re late on everything because you said yes too much! This is not to shame you if you’ve found yourself in a state of too much yes. Sometimes we don’t know what’s too much until it’s too late. But next year, remember you don’t have to say yes. You can say no.
Here are some scripts you can use if saying the opposite of yes is hard for you!
“Oh, that sounds like a great opportunity, but I don’t have room on my plate for it.”
“Wow, that seems like fun, but my rate for that is much higher than what you’ve quoted.”
“Cool! Thanks for the offer, but I wouldn’t be able to turn it around on that schedule.”
These replies could leave the door open for the other person to adjust their ask! Maybe they can give you more time or money, and then maybe it will be an enthusiastic yes! But if you want to close the door, just say “Thanks! I can’t do this, but I appreciate you thinking of me.” And writers with agents, your agent will always say no for you if you don’t want to. That’s totally part of our jobs.
If you’re not a writer, or not a writer getting asked to write things out of the blue, this still applies to you. Getting weird vibes from that agent who approached you? You don’t have to say yes. If you’re an agent or editor—feeling pressured to take on a project because you’re afraid you’re missing out? You don’t have to say yes. Are you deep in a project that you know is not working? You don’t have to say yes to that either. Your yes can turn into a no! You can write something else. Say yes because it’s yes, not because you’re afraid you’ll never have a chance to say a yes again.
Happy Holidays, y’all. I hope yours is full of light, books, and warmth.
OXOXOXOX,
Kate
Also: EB White’s “I must decline, for secret reasons.”
Fun (maybe) fact: when we think about ourselves in the future, the same area of the brain lights up as when we think about strangers, which is a different region when we think about ourselves. So it can be really easy to say YES when the decision affects us far in the future because we literally don't consider that future person to be us.