Advice to myself
I wanted to be published so badly. I could taste it. Or rather, I couldn’t. I couldn’t taste it. I couldn’t even see it. I could imagine it, but I couldn’t see it.
I wanted it more than almost anything in my life at the time and I knew it wasn’t a sure thing, by any stretch. I was the downer in my SCBWI critique group. I was the one that made sure no one forgot that we could all be doing this forever and never make it.
“There’s no guarantee,” I would say, just in case anyone had forgotten. “It’s not like you stand in line until your turn comes up.”
They practically kicked me out.
And I was the one at the NJ SCBWI who spoke up when one of our guest speakers, a NY editor, told his eager audience that we shouldn’t be writing to be published. We should do it just because we love it.
“I doubt you would say that to a room full of men,” I countered. “Would you tell a class of medical students they should just be doing it for the love of being a doctor?”
Nothing to do with my outspokenness (I don’t think) or my negativity but I wouldn’t be published for nine years. Five years of writing adult short fiction and sending it off to The Atlantic and The Paris Review (whatever was I thinking?) and then five more writing for children. I made all sorts of secret promises to the forces that be. One of those bargains with the universe was that if I could only publish one novel I would never ask for anything else. Ever again.
Just one.
Just this one.
Please, let me just publish once.
Then in 2000, I sold my first novel to Little, Brown and for a while I kept my word to myself. I felt completely validated. This was enough. More than enough. Just sitting at my son’s basketball game, high up in the bleachers, completely anonymous, my manuscript bought but a year from publication, I was content within myself. Now I was truly a writer.
Then, the inevitable. I just wanted to be able to write a second book. One more. Just to prove to myself that it wasn’t a fluke. That I wasn’t a fraud and fake. Just a second book. Two published books. Two books, that’s all I ask.
I struggled with that second book, for all the reasons of self-doubt and insecurity I just outlined. And then I met Patricia Reilly Giff who assured me that me the second book is always the hardest. She understood completely and validated my fears. I published my second book in 2003.
It’s 2013. I have ten published novels. Subway Love will be my 11th in May, 2014 and every time, I am terrified. I’m terrified I can never do it again. I will run out of ideas. I’ll be too old. My brain will rot. I won’t sell enough and no one will offer me a contract again. I’ll get such bad reviews no one will want to publish me again. It really was a fluke after all. I am fraud and fake and it’s just a matter of time before everyone figures it out.
Still, I keep writing.
And keep making my deals with the writing gods:
Just keep me in it for the long haul and I won’t ask for anything else.
Just let me keep writing because I love to write.
I find peace when I write. I find meaning in my life. I feel validated and alive. So–
Let me sell, at least well enough, to stay in good favor with my publishers which is something I have no control over. Let me remember what I do have control over: To always be appreciative. Always listen the advice of my agents. Listen the suggestions of my editors because after the shock and ego-busting of seeing all those comments and marks it’s just a process. It’s all in the process.
Always be grateful. Don’t be a pain in the ass. Remember to accept the business of my business and know that the marketing people and the publicity people are doing the best they can. They have many, many titles and the work they do is often not seen or obvious. Thank everyone. This is a privilege not a right. Handle bad reviews graciously. Handle good reviews graciously.
Then I put everything and everyone else out of my head and try, once again, to write the best book I possibly can.
Nora Raleigh Baskin started writing in the 5th grade and never stopped either telling stories or believing in the power of words. In 2010 her novel Anything But Typical won the Schneider Family Book Award along with numerous other honors. Her most recent books, the young adult Surfacing and the middle grade Runt were both published this year, and her next, Subway Love, will be out in 2014.
Previous Writing for the Long Haul Posts – Sean Williams on unpredictability and luck – Deborah J. Ross on writing through crisis – Sharon Shinn on managing time – Marge Pellegrino on feeding the restless yearning to write – Sarah Zettel on embracing ignorance and writing your passions – Uma Krishnaswami on honoring unreasonable exuberance – Jennifer J. Stewart on finding community and support – Sherwood Smith on keeping inspiration alive – Mette Ivie Harrison on defining success – Jeffrey J. Mariotte on why we write – Judith Tarr on reinventing ourselves – Kathi Appelt on the power of story – Cynthia Leitich Smith on balancing business and creativity
This year is one of great significance to me. Half a lifetime ago–that is, exactly half my life–I dropped out of university to pursue a career as a writer, not knowing whether I’d fail utterly or succeed beyond my wildest dreams. I dreamed of the latter, hoped for something in the middle, and planned for the former. If I hadn’t sold a book within ten years, I promised myself, I would give up and go back to my studies. (Economics–ugh. That was a massive incentive.)
As I write this, 23 years and 38 published novels later, I’m sitting in London waiting for my new book (
Suddenly I was writing just as hard as I ever had but earning much, much less, barely enough to service my credit card and tax debts, let alone live the high life. How did that happen? I’m still not sure. The Australian dollar got stronger and US advances didn’t go up to compensate: that was definitely part of it. When most of your income is pinned to the antics of a foreign currency, you’re vulnerable to market forces far beyond your control. But that wasn’t the whole story. I felt that there had to be a reason why things were suddenly so crappy. Something I could fix, and fast–before I developed scurvy or rickets or went insane in some appropriately Gothic way. Or declared the exercise a failure and went back to university.
Eventually, through hard experience (and listening to other writers), I realized that the secret of my sudden lack of success probably wasn’t a bad agent, or a bad publisher, or even bad writing. It was bad luck. Sometimes books tap into the zeitgeist, or they don’t. Sometimes books stand out among a sea of other covers, or they don’t. Sometimes Oprah loves them, or she doesn’t (disclosure: Oprah has never even noticed my books). These aren’t things you can plan for. These are effects you can’t cause. It’s just plain luck, good and bad.
If you look at a graph of my income from 1990 to 2000, it shows an almost perfect hyperbolic curve upwards, then after 2001 a straight line down. I’m still reeling from the shock of that sudden turn. There’s no formula to explain it and no way to prevent it from happening again. There was just an ongoing slog in the hope of creeping back up to where I had once been, praying for the opposite kind of luck to come my way. Eventually it did, after a long, hard slog, and I was able to eat properly again. And now I know to ignore the graph and avoid any kind of complacency.
What’s that old saying? “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” There’s some truth to that–but no one ever tells you that the luck goes both ways. Publish 38 novels in 17 years and some of them are bound to do well, but some of them are bound to do badly as well. There’s no way to avoid it, even if you’re a massive bestseller (which I am not). You might be lucky enough to sell six million copies in one year, then only three million the next. That’s a huge drop. You feel it just as much as if you divide the numbers by a thousand, because luck is a relative thing. Up is up. Down is down.
In my case it wasn’t the worst possible luck. I was still selling books; I was still being published. The internal devil’s advocate said: So what if I had to work like a slave to earn little more than minimum wage? I remained in a position that most writers dreamed of at the beginning of their careers. What right did I have to complain?
Everyone whose career takes a dive is allowed to complain, I think–although never to readers, since it’s right and proper that they should care little about your suffering so long as the books keep coming. Complaining to other writers might lead you to coping strategies or support networks that will guide you through the tough years, but it won’t change actually anything. It didn’t change anything for me, as I slaved away for years, earning less than I had as a student despite writing three books a year. The only antidote to bad luck is good luck, and the only way to get that is keep rolling the dice.
It’s a natural law that careers go up and down. When I started out, up was the only way my career could go. Now, it could go either way, which is the curse of being even remotely successful. As I type this in London, just days away from rolling the dice for the 39th time, I know it’s entirely out of my hands. All I can do is sit back and watch, and hope, and know that if it doesn’t work this time, maybe it will next time, or the time after, or . . .
#1 New York Times bestselling 
For much of my early career, I used to joke that I couldn’t afford writer’s block. I began writing professionally when my first child was a baby and I learned to use very small amounts of time. This involved “pre-writing,” going over the next scene in my mind (while doing stuff like washing the dishes) until I knew exactly how I wanted it to go. Then when I’d get a few minutes at the typewriter (no home computers yet), I’d write like mad. I always had a backlog of scenes and stories and whole books, screaming at me to be written. The bottleneck was the time in which to work on them.
I kept writing through all sorts of life events, some happy, others really awful and traumatic. Like many other writers, I used my work as escape, as solace, as a way of working through difficult situations and complex feelings. I shrouded myself with a sense of invulnerability: I could write my way through anything life threw at me!
Unfortunately, I was wrong.
I hit an immovable wall. My mother had been raped and murdered when my younger daughter was but a wee babe. The DA accepted a plea bargain and so, 9 years later, the perpetrator had his first parole hearing. I put on my psychological armor, marched into San Quentin, and spoke at that hearing. A year later, I found myself in a full-blown post-traumatic crisis. I kept having waking nightmares of both terror and revenge. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t stop crying.
Also, I couldn’t write fiction. Stream-of-consciousness journaling helped me get through the darkest days, but the creation of an actual story was beyond me. That creative paralysis added another dimension to the meltdown. If I couldn’t write, who was I? Where were my secret worlds, my journeys of spirit and heart where people healed and things got better? Gone…and I didn’t know if I’d ever get them back.
I was fortunate to have a lot of help during those dark weeks and months, some of it from fellow writers. No pep talks, just friendship, constant and true. Eventually, I was able to return to fiction writing as well, although by then, I found myself a single working mom and had a new set of demands on my time. I was able to draw on two models for personal writing success — the first being the technique of “pre-writing” (during my lunchtime walks at work) and to use small amounts of time. I carved those out by getting up 10 minutes early, opening a file on my computer, and adding something – if only a couple of words – to the current work. I earmarked part of weekends and holidays for writing time, which worked because that younger daughter was old enough to have her own interests. More than that, however, having recovered this precious part of my life, my writing, gave me the determination to never lose it again. That was essential on those mornings when I’d rather sleep in, or sunny days when the beach was calling. I had to find a new balance in my life, and it was up to me to give writing the priority I wanted it to have.
Writers stop writing for all kinds of reasons. In my case, it was personal and emotional, part of a larger crisis. Other times, however, the well runs dry when the rest of life is going smoothly. Quite a few years ago, I ran into a writer I greatly admired (I think it was at an American Booksellers Association convention way back when my publisher would send various authors, including me), and I’d not seen anything from this writer in quite a few years. I introduced myself and asked when the next book would be coming out. Only when I saw the change in the writer’s expression did I realize how difficult the subject was. I was probably the hundredth person that weekend to ask. (Eventually this writer did come out with several new books; I wonder now if the appearance at the ABA wasn’t a way of trying to get the head back into writerly-space.)
I don’t think it’s at all helpful to try to “cheer up” a writer in the middle of a dry period. The specific reasons — creative paralysis, personal crisis, discouragement — vary so much, I think it’s safe to say that each of us has to find our own way through. For me, it’s helped immensely to know I’m not the only one to go through it. That’s the operational term, to “go through it.” To come out the other side. To talk and write about what happened, in the hopes of being the light in the darkness for someone else.
I don’t know what lies ahead for me. Just because there are no thunderclouds on the horizon doesn’t mean unexpected tragedy cannot strike. I know that no matter how strong I am, I can be overwhelmed. However — and this is the big point — I’m the only one who can make me stop writing permanently. I have the ability to recover from no matter what crisis. To build my life, to return to the work I love. So perhaps instead of talking about Writing Through Crisis, I can reframe the concept as Writing Aroundabout Crisis. Remaining true to what’s important to me, knowing it’s waiting for me at the other side of the storm.
– Long-haul writing careers have ups and downs: Many writers have discussed, in various ways, the uneven terrain of their long-haul careers, and many readers have found this the most useful part of the series. Writers don’t talk about setbacks much in public, so I’m not sure many new writers especially understand that setbacks are normal. A bad year (or five, or ten) is not failure. It’s just a bad year or five or ten. It’s easy for a career to look like it’s on a straightforward upward success trajectory over the short haul. Over the long haul, with occasional exceptions, things get more complicated.
– Sales figures are not a long-haul writer’s primary inspiration: Every journey shared here has been different, but no one has said they woke up every morning inspired to write by their sales figures. Poor sales may or may not stop a writer, depending, but either way good sales aren’t enough to keep going. The motivation and even the ability to keep writing are far more complicated than that, and continuing to write isn’t about reaching some magic sales threshold that inspires us or gives us permission to do so. Motivation comes from somewhere deeper, even if where exactly varies from writer to writer.
– Long-haul writers are flexible: Often the first book a long-haul writer published was in a very different genre than their most recent book. Some writers work in multiple genres at the same time. Long-haul writers may not be writing to market (like so much else, that depends on the writer), but they are able to shift their focus and the sorts of projects they’re working on over time.
– Long-haul careers are highly individual: For anything I’ve said above, you can probably find a series contributor who’s an exception, because no two writing journeys are quite alike. It’s writers more experienced than me who encouraged me, in the early years of my career, to honor my own process. Reading these posts, I think that’s because our processes become more and more individual as time goes on. The comparison game is always dangerous, but it’s also less meaningful the more time that passes. There may be specific roadmaps and techniques (though even those vary) for how to break in as a writer, but sooner or later the templates get left behind, and your career is your career, and not anyone else’s.
The writing for the long haul series is going to take a hiatus until fall, while I meet some of my own short-term writing commitments (translation: I need to hunker down and finish my book), but I do want to continue the conversation, so please share your own thoughts in comments.
While being a published writer remains the COOLEST THING EVER, it hasn’t exactly been the most stress-free segment of my life. Because I continue to hold down a full-time job, being a published writer means that I have become absolutely and relentlessly focused on time. There is never enough of it for me to accomplish all the things I have to do.
Even before I sold my first book, I was pretty obsessive about writing. Once I started a book—really started it, committed to it in my heart, wasn’t just jotting down a few unconnected scenes or some great lines of dialogue—I finished it, even though I didn’t have a high expectation of selling it. I wasn’t on my current pace of at least a book a year, though, so I could be kind of mellow about how much progress I made on a daily basis. If I came home from work and felt lazy, I could hang out with friends or watch TV and not feel too guilty about not producing any pages for the evening. Or the weekend. I remember one particularly busy spring when I had so much going on that I went an entire month without writing a word on my current novel, leaving my two protagonists facing death at the hands of the ruthless villain.
But now I have contracts. I have deadlines. And my books are longer. I know that I need to produce between twenty-five and thirty pages a week if I’m going to have time to write, rewrite, receive critiques, and polish a book before sending it off to my editor by the promised date. That means I have to write five pages a day at least five days a week—or six pages each on four days—or—well, you get the picture. I have to write a lot. Even when I’m tired. Even when I’m uninspired. Even when I really don’t feel like it. Writing has become a job, and I can’t choose to skip going into work for the day just because I’m feeling dull.
Even so, there are days that simply offer no time for sitting down at the keyboard and churning out pages. I might be going to dinner with friends. Or entertaining company from out of town. Or traveling to a wedding. I’m not writing on those days, which means I have to make up the pages on some other day.
Which means I always, always, always am aware of time. I try to consolidate time-eating errands: On the evenings I’m going to lose an hour by going to the hair salon, I do my grocery shopping too so I can keep another day free for writing. I DVR every single television program I watch so I can fast-forward through commercials and save myself fifteen minutes per hour. I get twitchy when too many events pile up in a month; sometimes I turn down invitations because I can’t bear to be away from the story for too many days in a row.
But it’s not just the writing itself that takes time, which I discovered after I sold my first book. Sometimes my editor wants rewrites. Copyedited manuscripts always land on my desk at the least convenient times possible, but I know it’s essential to read through them closely—not only to accept or reject the copyeditor’s suggestions, but to take this last chance to catch any errors or awkward bits that have escaped my notice up till now. And then I have to read whole thing again when the page proofs arrive a few weeks later—also, at least in my experience, at some spectacularly inconvenient moment. I’ve brought copyedits and page proofs with me on work trips, on vacations, on visits to hospital rooms. Because I can read on a plane, in a hotel room, or while a sick relative is sleeping.
Here’s something else that started taking up time once I became a published writer: reading books by friends. I’m in a (fabulous) writer’s group and we all critique each other’s manuscripts. I’m grateful for every hour my co-writers have invested in my books, and I gladly return the favor—but I read slowly and thoroughly, so I probably average thirty pages an hour. I’ve also been honored to have authors and publishers approach me, asking for blurbs for their books; I’ve found some of my favorite new writers this way, but, again, the reading process wasn’t a quick one. And since I’ve developed a whole new circle of friends—other published writers—I want to read all their books when they hit the shelves. It’s no surprise that I’m pretty far behind on that goal.
I don’t know how other writers manage to fit all their daily demands into their writing schedules. I tend to think of each day as a great wheel of cheese, and I’m constantly estimating how big a wedge will be required for every task on my list. So on a typical Saturday I might plan three hours to clean the house, another hour to pay bills and balance the checkbook, another hour to catch up on emails. If I start at 9 a.m. and expect to leave for the evening by 6 p.m.—and if I don’t take too long over eating lunch and dressing for dinner—I should have three solid hours in the afternoon. Hey, that’s good for ten pages, right?
It’s kind of a pressured way to live. But to be a published author? Worth all the calculating, the bargaining for another hour. The life might be demanding, but the thrill never gets old.
If you write, you are constantly learning. You’ve got no choice. I don’t care how detailed and careful you are in your outlining. Every new project is a fresh start, and one of the first things you’re going to find as you’re starting is how little you know about the characters, the plot, the setting. You might, if you’re especially lucky, find you don’t even know how to write the damn thing. You don’t know if it’s really a short story with ambitions to be a novel, or a novel that really just wants to be a little novellita of some kind.
This is the joy of writing. This is the terror of writing. This is the single inescapable fact of writing.
It’s also, on the surface, one of the major contradictions, because we’re all told to write what we know. But how can you do that when with each project you’re finding out, yet again, everything you don’t know, and never did?
As I go along, though, I find I’ve become less and less a fan of that bit of advice. First of all, it strikes me as restrictive, because it requires you to start your process of creation by setting your sights no further than the consciously familiar. As someone who grew up in a little ticky-tack, all white suburb, I would have keeled over with boredom if all I did was write about what I thought I knew at the time. Second, it’s impossible. It is only by the process of actually writing that you sort out what you really know about a given project from what you really don’t know. So, hampering yourself from the outset by following a quotation rather than your personal interest is adding unnecessary weight to what it already going to be an intense intellectual and emotional journey.
Instead, I go with another aphorism — follow your passion. Write about what excites you. What do you love now? What do you burn to know more about? What you know will surface, whether you want it to or not. But if you set out to delve into what you’re passionate about, you’re travelling light, not heavy. You’ll move quickly into the hard work, and when you hit the point where you’re bogged down—and you will hit it, trust me—you’re less likely to succumb to the exhaustion that produces writer’s block, and more likely to dive into learning whatever fact or technique is going to get you out to the other side so you’ve got yourself a complete work.
This is not easy, especially when you’re writing with an eye to selling. There is so much advice out there, so much temptation to try to write what appears to be popular and so many really bad books that clearly completely enthralled the author who wrote them. To actually strip it all down to just what you’re interested in, and ignore all that, along with any residual feelings of “nobody else is going to be interested in this” is difficult. And when you get past all that, you’re still going to be confronted by your own ignorance about how exactly this particular project needs to be written.
So what do you do? What I’ve been trying to do—and it is hard—is embrace my own ignorance, and my own learning process. Every book is new. I’ve done this kind of thing before. That is, I’ve written and sold 25 novels. But I’ve never written or sold one in this exact way, not with these characters, and not in this exact setting and maybe not with this editor, if I’m lucky enough to find an editor willing to buy. I’m a different writer at the beginning of this book than I was at the beginning of the last one. At the end of this book, I’ll have changed again. I’ll have learned something about the art and craft writing during the process of creating it. I’ll have tried new techniques. I’ll have learned new facts, about science, history, sociology, travel, something, anything. Everything. The act of creating this work will leave its mark on any future creations. That’s way cool. That’s way scary.
That way’s writing.
When Charles Darwin was puzzling through the intricacies of natural selection and evolution, he wrote, “The sight of a feather in the peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick.” Darwin’s genius lay in the leaps of his imagination, far beyond the thinking of his time. Still, at first he couldn’t understand the sheer lack of functionality in the wild, unreasonable exuberance of color, form, shimmer, rustle that is the peacock’s tail.
Those of us who write must find our own ways to deal with that mental exuberance that can well up so unexpectedly. We may deny it and say that what we do is a job like any other. Show up and the muse will show up too. And that’s all true, but there is that fire that sparks it all. Nabokov called it “A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack…” Not everyone, let’s face it, is obsessed by this fierce longing to render life itself, or some imaginary version of it, with a full and convincing load of sensory and emotional experience, in words.
At some point in our lives, we may give in to the madness without knowing why. I signed up for my first ever writing class at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. That class, taught by the practical, reserved, unflappable Judy Morris, gave me permission to think of myself as a writer. It opened me up to the world of writing for young people.
At times we’re blessed to be able to ride a benevolent tide. That’s what I did while I was trying to crack various forms—the picture book, the short story, the novel. I wrote folk and traditional stories. They were in demand and no one in the North American market had written the ones close to my soul. I did that writing in apprenticeship mode, letting the stories themselves teach me how to plot, pace, layer my narrative.
Early book contracts tend to give a writer hope, but they can also be, like the peacock’s tail, part illusion. When the folk tale market began to thin, and I was no closer to finishing my first novel, I was left questioning the whole endeavor. I had degrees I could fall back on. I could quit and go find saner, more reliable work.
But as Susan Sontag wrote, “Art is a form of nourishment.” It would take many more years, lots more rejection and a few more books, before I understood that my need to write was an emotional hunger. I tried to talk myself out of it. I even applied for jobs. Once I went to an interview for a counseling position—halfway through I realized I was offering them all kinds of reasons for not hiring me. I was sabotaging the interview because the prospect of losing writing time and energy simply made me miserable. This longing to assemble words in order to make meaning is every bit as natural to me as are the eyes to the peacock’s tail. I needed to honor it.
Twenty-four years and twenty books after that first writing class, I know that my work is, to put it in exuberant terms, nothing less than the pursuit of beauty. We like to think that story differentiates us from the animals. I find myself looking not for difference but for what makes me belong in the larger scheme of things. And beauty—now that connects us to the universe. The very beauty that complicated the initial tidiness of Darwin’s search for order is everywhere in nature. Artists like Andy Goldsworthy see this and use it in their work. In a very different way, so do the Madhubani painters of my native India. That’s the kind of illusion I long to create—seemingly effortless, both surprising and inevitable, something that will speak to young readers the way the books I devoured as a child spoke to me. I’m just grateful that I’m allowed to keep trying.
When my first middle grade novel
I became part of a community, both in Arizona and online. And now, I couldn’t imagine managing a writing life without those writer friends.
Here’s the thing: you need to be able to talk to other people who get what you are doing. People who understand that sometimes publishing can be a rollercoaster ride. People you can celebrate with, people you can commiserate with, people to hang with on Fridays at an undisclosed location, where you can vent and laugh and drink coffee, after spending the week holed up in your home office.
I think no one gets through life without a year that sucks like a black hole. Mine happened to be 2011. My mom died unexpectedly, then my developmentally delayed aunt died as I was becoming her guardian, then another aunt was critically injured in a head-on collision, then a cousin, her son, died on Mother’s Day, then we found out that my husband’s job was being eliminated, and finally, I found out my sweet little dog had cancer, and I put him down one morning in September.
Not my little dog, too! I had reached my limit.
I called Janni
Somehow, the experiences of that year put things in perspective. I had been through hell, and I had survived. What did I want to do now?
I had cried enough. I started writing again, racing against my grief. I finished two novels before that horrible year finally ended—one of which needs a lot of work and a very patient editor if it is ever going to see the light of a book contract, and a second which after revision still makes me smile and sometimes laugh out loud. That one is going out on submission.
Whether that manuscript gets accepted or rejected, I know two things: that if the latter happens, it isn’t the worst thing in the world; and that there are people who’ve got my back.
I can keep writing, knowing that.
Thank you, writer friends. You know who you are.
