We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ian Kirkpatrick. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ian below.
Ian, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?
Resilience is the thing that keeps any of us going down the path no matter what we see or what we go through or the rocks that’ve been thrown at us.
Honestly, I don’t think it’s that easy at first. It’s so to take anything and everything as a sign that we should stop and maybe try something else. I’ve had more than a couple conversations with myself about how stupid it is to keep going down the same path or keep trying, but then I go, “What else would I do? This is what I was made to do.” It’s easy to get burned out or bent or discouraged from many angles. Failure, fear, criticism, self-consciousness, self-esteem, sometimes it’s just being busy that feels like the universe telling you not to proceed.
The worst of all are failure and personal criticisms. Public failure in particular feels like a sign to stop because no one likes to experience it and maybe it’s just better to not experience it again. Unfortunately, the majority of the situations, if not all situations, where I have learned the most have been public failures.
When I’m at a low, there are a couple of things I go through to bring myself back to my feet and going down the path again.
1. Think of Where You Want To Be
Regardless of whether it’s a personal project, a career, a personal desire, or a vacation, it’s important to think of where you are and where you want to be. Then, make deliberate decisions in that direction. Sometimes it’s harder than others to take those steps, but identifying where you are, where you’re going, and what smalls steps you’re taking in that direction can be enough motivation to get you back on track or to tell if you’re even on the right track.
Identifying the smaller steps to take that might get you closer can also help compartmentalize or break apart a huge adventure or undertaking into something manageable and countable. Also, keeping your eventual goal in mind can help keep you motivated to keep working toward that place.
2. Value Yourself For What YOU Can Do
This sounds easier than it might be in practice, but you can’t look to others to find value in what you do. That’s not to say the opinions of others can’t have value, but don’t do things for the validation of others. If you create your stories or pursue creative work only for the approval of others, you will always lose. For one, you can’t please everyone.
Knowing that your value comes from what you do, from the work you put in and not from what other people think of you will be one of the most empowering things you can learn about yourself. While sure, in writing and the arts in general, you want to find people who like what you do, you will also always have people who will not like what you do and they don’t need to control you. You will find people who just want to rip you apart, or in the worst case scenario now the Generative AI, you will have random people calling you worthless while they gleefully steal your work or the work of your peers to try and turn a profit for themselves, not on what they’ve done, but on the facade of labor and creativity.
Know your value, find your value in what you do and understanding how to get there.
3. Learn Discernment for Criticism
Part of understanding your value and working toward your goal is understanding where you fall short. Just because you’re looking into yourself for value doesn’t mean outsiders don’t have advice or help to offer that is meaningful. In fact, in the creative communities, others can often be the building blocks toward reaching your goals by virtue of valuable feedback, reflections, tutorials, and training that will help you build the skills toward your goals.
However, not all feedback is helpful. Some will want to change your voice into theirs, some will simply not like what you do–such as was the case for Dan Simmons’ Carrion Comfort. When the small press that took his manuscript went bankrupt and was bought out assigned him a new editor for his manuscript, it was a slow role through that editor telling him to change everything until she ultimately told him to throw out the script and start over with a new idea. He eventually raised the money to buy his manuscript rights back from that publisher and published elsewhere.
Also, there will be a point when you put something out into the world and it might not at all be how you meant for something to read. You can’t force people to see art the way you intended, but you can see if it happens more times than not and hopefully that will help adjust accordingly. Also, always prepare yourself for feedback. It’s hard to take when it hits something personal.
4. Determine What Matters To You
This is particularly important in the arts, especially as a writer. There are writers who are profit driven and specifically seek to follow the market or try to make bank. They pick niche genres or try to cheat the system with categories, or attempt to publish a backlog of thoughtless content that they may not have even written in order to have a backlog to sell, some may be looking to make a name for themselves, some may be looking to push their political ideology after getting into a position of power, some might be trying to learn in a public way, and some might be creating art or stories they’re driven to tell.
Determining your motive will help you in a couple major ways. One: it will help you identify others who are in a similar position. Something I’ve learned overtime as an author is that people feeding the market only for money aren’t really looking for critique when they ask for it. No matter how many questions you ask, if you provide feedback that is anything less than praise, it’s not what they were looking for. However, there are also people out there desperate to get feedback on their craft, to improve, and better find the stories they want to tell. There are also those who focus so much on the money, their motivation can be shot if they don’t receive the attention they expect upon publication, and I’ve even seen people fall into depression and delusion thinking they are a visionary and their book will change the fate of the world.
When getting into art, especially public art, it’s important to determine what motivates you, what you want out of what you’re making, and set appropriate expectations. Knowing what matters to you will also help determine what steps to take to get to where you want to be while keeping a level, reasonable head about your circumstances.
5. Give Yourself Time
Starting a new venture (or any venture) is not generally quick. In the current time, so many people are focused on instant results or comparing themselves to finished or well-practiced artists, even when just starting out. It’s been a difficult thing for me to deal with as I’m learning to draw–I have to give myself time and fail and try different things, and find joy and accomplishment in what works out, but not be demotivated when things don’t look the way I want them to. Of course they won’t–because I’m new to what I’m doing.
Novels take time to write, but I see so many people wanting to one-and-done it. Maybe that’s your style, maybe you really ARE that good, but to remain resilient, it’s important to remember you do not have to get something correct the first time or the second time or even the third or fortieth time. you’re figuring the process and story out as you go. The one thing that’s really helped me with novel writing is breaking everything down into multiple processes. Drafting is figuring out the story, revisions are complete rewrites to let me tweak pretty much the story structure as necessary, and then multiple rounds of editing let me cut lines, paragraphs, clarify relationships, fix dialogue, build out characters better, and fix the prose. By not having to focus on doing everything at once, it takes the pressure off it having to be “perfect” the first time. Then, as I work, I know that each round gets me closer to my goal.
6. Don’t Measure Yourself With Someone Else
This goes along with the last thing and has been one of the hardest things for me to cope with, especially as I try to learn and practice drawing. All I can see in what I draw is where I am and how it’s not where I want to be. I compare myself to the people I admire and then I sketch and can’t draw something simple and want to give up. I see other people succeed faster than I do and wonder if I can even reach an okay level. I don’t admire my own art, I admire other peoples and I know I can never be like them because that’s how art works.
Your work is going to bring something that is completely unique to you, styled by you, your experiences, personality, aesthetics, and underlying feelings. Where you are in your writing journey is not the same as the novel at the store–And that’s not even to assume your novel couldn’t be up to that level, but a published novel that you like has been thorugh the process, and your draft 1 isn’t there yet, and that’s okay, don’t compare yourself to someone else, think of where you want to be and work toward that.
7. Be Honest and True
With creative arts, it can be really easy to fall into a trap of trying to be different, trying to stand out, doing things differently specifically to have YOUR style or make yourself different than the other 25 Hades/Persephone YA romances that are coming out this season. It’s easy to try and change who you are or shut your mouth to try and fit in with other people just to get ahead, but I think pretending to be someone you’re not is ultimately going to make you hate yourself and others. It’s going to put you in a position you dread to be in, resenting and fearing everyone finding out you’re not who they think you are.
It’s important to be true to yourself, your vision, and what you believe and bring people to you who see you for you, not because they want something from you, they agree with you politically, or you/they think you can get things from each other economically. That’s not to justify being rude or mean because “that’s just who you are,” but respect yourself for your thoughts and differences and find others who do the same, because they are out there. Being empathetic, understanding, and graceous towards yourself and others will go a long way in resilience because you know even if you disagree or mess up or someone just doesn’t like your book, they still like you and not because you’re pretending to be someone else.
Many of my personal choices were made because I didn’t want to be surrounded by people who only liked me or gave me a chance because I said what they wanted me to say or I was some example of something they believed. It can be scary and hard to go out on your own. You might think there are no other choices. It might even hurt very badly because you’re being earnest and true and someone didn’t understand or took you in a bad way. There’s no way to 100% make everyone like you, no matter what you believe, but know that hwne you are honest and true and kind and respectful, the people who do like you, who like what you do and support you, do so because they like who you really are.
You’re not controlled by trends, you’re not controlled by readers you have to feed fiction you don’t enjoy writing, and you’re not controlled by political friends who only keep you around because you support each other. Having healthy personal and business relationships and artistic friends you can trust is both one of the hardest things to achieve, but also something that will help you the most in your journey.
No artist does this alone, even if we build alone, we got perspective from others, from life, and learned the craft through discipline. Eventually, we want to share those things with others and see the experience we give them through it.
I love art and storytelling for the way it allows other people to share the world and characters they see with me and how I can share what I see with them. It’s a way of handing other people your heart and for others to leave a piece of themselves with you too. Even bad stories. You are the only person who can do what you do, so it’s important that if this is important, never give up.
8. HAVE HOPE.
Most importantly: Always be hopeful. If there’s no hope, then no matter what you do, it won’t matter, so be hopeful that light will come, even in the darkest times. The moment you lose hope that anything will change or that you will ever be able to achieve the thing you want is the day the resilience starts dripping out. You can’t be resilient if you believe everything is futile. Know, that you can still succeed and still find the push to keep going when you feel 99% bad. That 1% will spark into a bigger fire again at some point and then… you’ll make.
And you won’t even believe how you got there.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I’m an author who focuses mostly on telling character stories. Magical elements and casual mythology work their way into my work in the same way you can feel like there’s just something magical about the world. Some weird coincidences, things that shouldn’t happen but do… That’s what I love. What I also love to write about is love, albeit not necessarily love stories. Though people will fall in love in many of them, I also write about found families and friendships. Bodymore is a series about a girl coming form a broken home, discovering a second chance and that she’s not alone. The story I’m looking forward to writing next is a co-authored western trilogy about a family of orphans who have spent the last ten years running from the man who killed their father and now, under just the right circumstances, are learning to open their hearts to love and trust and the future their outlaw of a father was trying to make for them.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
The desire to learn and find information on my own; fierce independence so I didn’t care what people thought of me; an open mind so I wouldn’t write off experiences, thoughts, information, or genres just because and instead would let whatever influence or teach me with what I needed to know to write.
Who has been most helpful in helping you overcome challenges or build and develop the essential skills, qualities or knowledge you needed to be successful?
There are three people in particular who have helped me immensely and continue to help me today.
My mom never stopped encouraging me to pursue the career I wanted and she never dismissed my interest in creativity, whether it was music, writing, theater, or drawing.
My best friend and first longterm creative partner, Sam. He and I met online AGES ago through roleplaying. It was during that time we discovered how well our characters and ideas worked together and we just kept making together until it became 15 years later with so many characters and stories we have together, even if none of them are formally available. I saw him graduate and he saw me graduate. I’m pretty sure he’s near being in my life for half of my life at this point. He’s been with me through so many highs and lows and honestly, I don’t think I would be where I am at all without him. Also, the hours and hours and hours of writing together definitely helped me a lot. He’s always been encouraging, thoughtful, kind, understanding, and sweet, even if he does doubt himself sometimes. Then, he became the incredible artist for my books. I cannot wait to see what he does in the future and I am not just lucky to have him as a friend, but to call him part of my family.
The last person I want to mention is my newest creative partner, M.M. Morris. I met her by chance because of a podcast I was a guest on in 2022. A regular for someone else’s podcast, M.M. Morris came because she was a subscriber of the original host. I mentioned Yu Yu Hakusho, and she decided she wanted to talk to me. Eventually, when I opened a discord, we slowly started talking and after the initial awkwardness… we really hit it off when creating characters together over Yakuza (the game). This turned into plotting and writing and making the next generation of characters, and then continual plotting until we discovered her long term series and mine had crossover and that would be canon, and then we made our western. I’ve only known her for maybe a year and a half, but it feels like so much longer. Being able to work with her has improved my stories, my characters, and given me so many wonderful things to look forward to writing with her. I can’t wait for what we will bring into the world together and really can’t wait to share these characters we’ve made. Also, her talent for visual arts and creativity inspired me to pick up the pen and start drawing again in 2022. So, I just couldn’t be more grateful.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://steakhousebooks.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kirkpattiecake/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/KirkpattieCake
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvZyQi8QoQY5wpNv1ub7eJg
Image Credits
Author Photo by Me Art by Me
