I Am Pavlov and I Am the Dog
A refreshingly honest conversation about escaping your "shoulds," embracing healthy delusion, and why a centimeter of ambition is sometimes the perfect amount.
This post is a companion piece to Thursday’s letter, about a hilarious new book and the story that inspired it. You needn’t have read it to enjoy this one, but I do recommend checking it out.
Is there anything more wonderful than feeling seen, or understood, or to recognize a part of yourself in another? I’ve found vulnerability to be a two-way street — when someone shares a tender part of themself, it creates the space for each party’s humanity to pass through.
To that end, I’m excited to share a conversation I found healing and inspiring — as a writer, but mostly as a person. I hope you enjoy it.
Sally Franson is the author of A Lady’s Guide to Selling Out and Big in Sweden, a hilarious new novel inspired by her experience on a Swedish reality show. (For more on the novel, the show, and how it all came to be, check out part one of our chat.)
Here, she talks about fears and failures, escaping your “shoulds,” and embracing rewards, big and small.
From the outside, we often look at other people and assume they’re having an easy go of it, especially novelists, where we just see the finished product and none of the struggle that may have preceded it. Would you be willing to share about the times when projects haven’t gone according to plan?
No medium hides failures so skillfully as a book. The first [unpublished] novel I wrote was in grad school. It was a sad, turgid multi-generational family saga. People would meet me, then read my book, and their reaction was always that the two things didn’t match.
In my grad program, we read these devastating, spare, mostly male writers. And I thought, ‘I guess to be taken seriously I’m gonna have to write like this.’ It made me write stuff that was bad because it wasn’t true to my voice.
As for my other failed novel, I did what no writer should do. I said, “My sophomore novel is going to be my magnum opus. It will be a treatise on America. It will involve elements of magical realism, Mormonism, regional food culture, elements of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it will all take place within 24 hours, and there will be fainting goats.” This is not an exaggeration. This is factual.
I’m laughing partly because of your delivery, but also because you just described what I do to myself on a daily basis. I’m sure a lot of people can relate.
I know what it’s like when you’re not having a good time — by ‘good time’ I mean a flow state, not that you have to be laughing at your desk. I set this enormous trap for myself that I could not get out of. The scope was so big, and my ambitions were so big, that it was no longer about characters, it was about ideas.
When I’m putting myself in that trap, it always comes from my ‘shoulds.’ For me, they often boil down to: You should be more serious.
So, how have you managed to escape your shoulds?