We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jonathan Goff. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jonathan below.
Jonathan, so great to have you with us and we want to jump right into a really important question. In recent years, it’s become so clear that we’re living through a time where so many folks are lacking self-confidence and self-esteem. So, we’d love to hear about your journey and how you developed your self-confidence and self-esteem.
Like most people, I came out of the womb brimming with confidence! We all do. We have an unquenchable optimism that a cry will bring comfort, or end our hunger, or get us a fresh diaper. As time passes, we learn to stand, falling a thousand times or more, but we never fail to get up again. And then we put a foot forward, and fall, and that happens over and over a thousand times more. We might pout a little, shed a tear or two, but then we’re on our feet, tottering and teetering toward outstretched hands eager to swoop us up, or some shiny bauble that catches our attention; always with that same unquenchable confidence, even though we’re helpless, inept, and terrible at everything we try! And yet, everyone of us learned to walk, and finally to run.
And then we forgot all those triumphs, those impossible achievements, and became self-conscious. Watch a baby when it falls down. It doesn’t look around in embarrassment, but when we’re grown adults who slip on the ice, our first reaction is embarrassment, and we look to see if anyone witnessed that we’re still vulnerable to gravity. Why?
We forgot that falling down is part of standing up. That stumbling every now and again is the price of walking, and that falling face first and skinning our hands and knees is as much a part of running as breathing. Life is stumbling, falling, and getting hurt as we move through its chaos and beauty.
Only when we remember that, when we stop being afraid of falling, of looking foolish, of getting hurt… well, that’s when life gets really fun!
This was the lesson my father taught me, who forced me to do hard things without his help. Let me clarify that when I asked for help, he didn’t refuse, but he only did what I could not, and sometimes not even that. He pushed me to do the difficult things, knowing I would fail, I would fall. I would get hurt and be embarrassed, but then he’d make me do them again, and again, until I fell less often. And then, not to his surprise, but certainly mine, I finally succeeded.
I used to get angry that he didn’t help me the way I wanted, but what I didn’t realize was that he was helping me in a much more important way. He was teaching me the lesson of “I can.…” My father hated the phrase, “I can’t…” and we weren’t allowed to say those words without receiving a firm rebuke, “there’s no such thing as I can’t,” he’d say. Before long before we stopped uttering those words, and when you can’t say “I can’t…” (and yes, I am aware of the irony), you find yourself saying, “I can.”
This lesson was embodied in the things he pushed me to do, hard things that I wasn’t capable of doing, and then, when I failed, showing me where to find the answers, or how to think through the problem and identify why I’d failed. It made me a problem solver, which, when you consider the challenges of life, they all involve solving problems.
This is the single greatest thing my father gave me as a young man. He helped me understand I could figure out the answers on my own. That I could do something hard, and even though I might fail a dozen times, that I would eventually figure out what I was doing wrong, and as a result, with persistence and hard work, and a willingness to learn from my failures, that I CAN succeed at anything.
Confidence comes from doing hard things and succeeding, seldom at first, but with more frequency. I learned how to solve problems and overcome obstacles. I came to understand how capable I was, not in spite of my failings, but because of them, I had the capacity to learn and grow beyond who I was, with purpose and intent. That knowledge he gave me is far more valuable than love of self, which is unhealthy narcissism.
Some would say he was cruel by refusing to help me to my feet when I fell, but I know how it hurt him to watch me fail and fall. He loved me enough to let me do that, so that I could learn that when life hit me below the knees, and threw me down, that I can always get back up.
Thanks, so before we move on, maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I began my career as a writer, telling fantastic stories of entirely fictional substance, when I was in the sixth grade and didn’t do my homework, which was to read a book and write a book report. When the assignment came due, and I still hadn’t read the book, I just made-up characters and a story about a cowboy hunting a mad man who liked to hang his victims with barbed wire.
That’s all I remember of the story, characters, plot, and motivation. Other than while escaping the law, my villain fell off his horse and got tangled in a barbed wire fence, dying the same way he’d killed so many others. And that’s what I wrote my book report on.
I got an A.
This was before the Internet, so my teacher couldn’t google the book to see if it even existed. I’ve often toyed with writing that story as it was my first attempt at fiction, and technically first successful “sale.”
Years later, after having a moderately successful side career writing computer articles, I decided to try my hand at long form fiction. I’d written a few short stories over the years, but a full-length novel seemed intimidating. Impossible.
But I believe that as the circumstances of our lives change, things that were once impossible become possible, even ordinary. So I sat down and began writing.
I made three rules and followed them religiously:
- I am not allowed to rewrite anything until the first draft is done.
- I am not allowed to reread anything I’d written.
- I am allowed to make mistakes.
And then I wrote the book in about four weeks. It was long, repetitive, and not very good, but I saw the glimmer of a potential gem in it, and so, after numerous rewrites, I sent it off to get published. Long story short, that didn’t happen, but it came awfully close, making it all the way to the desk of Betsy Wolheim at DAW,
By this time, I’d lost my job, and I was running out of money. I believed in my book, I didn’t have time to shop it around to another publisher, so I put The Rune that Binds up on Amazon because I needed money. Its sales kept the rent paid and the lights on for the next eleven months. And I knew I wanted to do this for the rest of my life.
So here I am, an author, but I was a reader first. I’ve loved reading since I was a little boy. Reading is the ultimate form of play. We tend to think that the realm of make-believe is the exclusive realm of children, but it is also the realm of writers and readers. Children own it more wholly than adults. For us, make believe is an escape. It might be cos play at a comic con, but we know it’s not real. But for a child, make-believe simply IS. When children make-believe, they’re not pretending to be something they’re not. They BECOME what they play at. They ARE Spiderman or Harry Potter. For them, the iteration of imagination is absolute.
They do not play to escape the drudgery of life, as adults do. We have forgotten how to imagine with our whole being, as a child does. The rare exception to that is a book. When we read books, it is with our whole imagination. When we open a book, we can shut out the world and imagine the way we did when we were children.
I prefer to make-believe the way children do. It’s how I write, and it’s how I hope people will read my stories.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
One, be a reader. A love of reading is essential to being a writer, but I think it’s even more important to being alive. Reading is a joint creation between author and reader, where the author hands us the script, and we build the stage, create the effects, rig the lighting, cast the characters, and bring the author’s words to life.
If there is magic in this world, it happens when someone opens a book and lends their imagination to a writer. I believe you cannot write books that stir the imagination unless you also love to read.
Two, develop the skills it takes to be a writer. I’m talking spelling, grammar, the rudimentary skills. Writing is the one discipline that everyone thinks they can do because they can read and write. They’re wrong. Too many would be writers are eager to tell their story, but do not want to learn the basics of grammar and spelling. That is like wanting to play an instrument, but never learning the notes and chords, and fingering of the instrument you want to play. Grammar and punctuation may be tedious things to learn, but mastery of them makes you an effective writer, and you must be good before you can be great.
Third, learn the business. You don’t become a financial advisor without learning about stocks and other investment instruments. Be very selective about the books you read on writing. Read books on that rather than books on how to write. When I was first starting out as an aspiring author, I made a lot of mistakes, and one of them was buying books on writing. One day, as I was reading one of these books, the author contradicted something another author had said in another book, and I thought, “do I know or have I read ANYTHING by any of these authors?” And the answer was “no.”
I didn’t know who they were. I’d never heard of them, or read anything by them other than their books on how to write books.
After that, I stopped reading those books and focused on studying the authors I liked. I’d read with a notepad by my side, and when something happened in the book that made me excited or turn pages quickly, or cry, or laugh, I stopped and thought about how they did it, and I’d take notes. I made them my teachers, because I knew their work. My advice to new writers is to forget books about writing, and just study the books you love. Learn from your idols, do what they did, and eventually you will find your own voice.
The only exception to all the books on writing? Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Buy it, Read it. Study it. It is indispensable. That and books on the business, advertising, how the industry works, about the different paths to publication, etc. Know the business you’re getting into.
I’m going to add a fourth thing, if you don’t mind. Find readers you trust, who will be honest with you. You need honest feedback about how bad your writing is. Where it’s confusing, where the mistakes are, where it drags. Believe, an honest reader is more precious than gold.
Alright, so before we go we want to ask you to take a moment to reflect and share what you think you would do if you somehow knew you only had a decade of life left?
There are only two things you take out of life. What you know and who you are. Those are the only two things you actually own. Everything else can be taken from you, so invest in those above everything else. You’re leaving everything else behind.
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