by Patrick Ross, @PatrickRWrites

“The author has certainly gone on an interesting journey, but I’m afraid the tone is too journalistic for our list. I’m looking for more literary and personal accounts of creativity and personal growth.”

That was a rejection my literary agent received on June 2, 2011, to our proposal for The Artist’s Road, a yet-to-be-written nonfiction work that we pitched as a craft book. It would focus on creative lessons I learned from artists I interviewed on a cross-country U.S. road trip for a documentary video series. My encounters with those artists and their authentic approaches to living an art-committed life had transformed me; part of that transformation was a compulsion to write the story of my trip. Yet my background was journalism; I wrote about others, not myself, and the book proposal reflected that.Continue reading