Whatever You Do, Don’t Listen To the Poets.

When my client booked a week at a writing retreat to draft her book, I thought uh oh.

I worried that she would be in community with what I call “Writers” — artsy, creative, dreamy people who aspire to write novels, poetry, plays. People who I feared would give her advice that wasn’t bad, per se, but wasn’t appropriate for her situation.

(My client is writing a book on business finance for Simon & Schuster.)

After checking myself on my (many) assumptions, I told her that it was likely she would be surrounded by fiction authors, poets, and maybe someone writing their life story.

In that conversation, I shared that those authors’ experiences — with writing, with selling books, with their publishers — likely wouldn’t be similar to hers. And, therefore, not really indicative of anything that could or would happen with her book.

Then I said something important and unequivocal.

Whatever you do, don’t listen to the poets.

(Ironic, because we’re both Swifties and we had this conversation literally a week before The Tortured Poets Department came out. IYKYK.)

So often I hear folks saying something like,