Surviving the Publishing Industry: Advice From a Late Bloomer

You wanted to be a published novelist by age 35: Young enough to burst onto the literary scene, old enough to have mastered the craft. Now you find yourself at 58, with a novel coming out this year, your ‘debut’ in the mainstream fiction space. You remind yourself 58 means that you have just embarked on your 59th year. Okay, fine, you have a bad habit of rounding off, but you are close to 60.

(Why the Soundtrack to Your Book Could Make All the Difference.)

How did this happen?  Where did the years go? And when people ask you how you have survived as a writer for all this time, what lessons can you extract from the messiness of your life?

There are few things in life that you control. Any person approaching 60 has learned that lesson.

When it comes to writing fiction, what you control is your commitment to craft, to getting better at telling stories, to writing regularly. What you do not control is the publishing marketplace. Having a novel accepted for publication is not just about the quality of your book, but how it fits into the marketplace. You might be writing gritty realistic fiction and the marketplace may want dragons and vampires right now. Or romantasy. Or one of the many trends that come and go. You cannot control this. Being rejected by the marketplace feels personal, but it is not.

Your book is just another product (like soap) and what the marketplace might tell you is that it thinks there is just no demand for your product right now (you are making bar soap, and body wash is selling). 

You have learned that the marketplace is fickle, and so your tendency may be to say, “To heck with it, I’m just going to write what I want to write.”

If you do this, you run the risk of ignoring important information, because while the marketplace is fickle, and hard to game (by the time your vampire novel gets written, vampires may be over), it does tell you the mood of readers right now. And here things get tricky. Because at age almost-60, you have begun to believe in archetypes, which are certain plots and characters that we carry in our collective unconscious (thank you, Carl Jung) and which gain and lose power at certain moments.

Notice there was a time when books with ‘tiger’ or ‘orphan’ or ‘train’ in the title were of great interest. Notice the trend of books with ‘girl’ in the title is over. Notice that many thrillers now have names like ‘the accountant’ or ‘the consultant.’ Notice the interest in books about rich people behaving badly. You would be well advised to be interested in why this is so, and to align your writing with the prevailing winds.

You do not want to hear this—but learning to write a novel takes years.

You may be talented beyond belief, but you’re going to have to write three, four, five manuscripts that do not sell—your practice books—in order to figure out how to construct a novel. Your family is going to think that you are crazy, sitting alone in your room, or in your car, or in the neighborhood coffee shop. Who do you think you are? There is nothing more humiliating than saying, “I’m a writer,” and hearing, “Oh yeah, have you published anything?”

So: You hide. You get a job that pays the bills. Or some of the bills, if you have an obliging partner. In your case, you worked as an architect for 15 years while you wrote early in the morning and took adult writing classes at night. Your day job subsidized your development as a writer. And later, you started teaching creative writing to adult students, which led to developmental editing jobs and manuscript consultations. 

Writers are weirdos, for sure. Your fellow writers can be solitary, thin skinned, egotistical, competitive.

Still, you cannot survive without a community of fellow writers. Because only they will understand your craft problems (you are good at plot, lousy at dialogue), keep you company during the years it takes to draft a novel (it once took you six years), talk you down from that high ledge when you get rejected from that writing residency (the one that everyone else got into), and hold the torch when you want to quit.

In your case, you found evening writing classes, which are held in almost every city of a certain size: Grubstreet in Boston, the Bethesda Writer’s Workshop in Washington, DC, Story Studio in Chicago. Some of these places you took classes, some of these places you taught classes, but in either case, you ended up meeting talented writers who became your friends. Some of them became bestselling writers, some are still struggling to publish, but it doesn’t matter. When you workshop a vulnerable, early draft of your latest project, your work is in the hands of people you trust. They will kindly—but firmly—tell you that your POV isn’t working. And you will curse a little, but then go back and rewrite your whole novel. Who else will do that for you?

Writing is, these days, like yoga or meditation. Everybody is kind of a writer, wants to be a writer, says they are a writer. But then they send that novel out there, and it gets rejected, and they quit.

Writers who survive go beyond the shame of rejection. They are curious about why they failed, they take that information and get better. In your case, you wrote two thrillers 10 years ago that got published, but that barely anybody read, and that vanished without a trace. You even received an email from your publisher saying that hundreds of unsold copies of your books were being pulped. Oh, the horror. 

From that experience you learned that you had done everything wrong in the thriller genre: You’d created too many timelines, moved locations from book to book, not understood the genre conventions. You learned that you were not wired to write pure thrillers, that you liked a slower burn, and you then moved into the more mainstream novel space—where, funnily enough, your skill at plot allowed you to write a well-paced narrative, which was much appreciated by editors, and you then sold two new novels.

You know many writers who futz around with the beginnings of their novels for years. They obsess over every single word. They think that the only way to write a novel is to struggle for decades, enduring agonizing periods of writer’s block.

There is another way to approach the writing process. Since all writing is re-writing (it really is), find a way to get a first draft done as quickly as possible. In your case, you like to write scenes on index cards. One scene per index card, sketched out in a few sentences: This is the wedding where Ali gets drunk and blurts out the truth.  In this way, you can quickly generate the entire arc of a novel.

Your early ideas for scenes are often cliched, trite, unoriginal. Still, these early drafts free you up. When confronted by your banality, you say, “Oh, hell no, I’m not going to do that.” You throw out that index card, and in your next pass, you create a more complex scene.

In this way, you eventually end up with a nice stack of index-carded scenes that you are happy with. Now you can sit down and actually write the novel. Of course, you will make discoveries in the actual writing: Characters will emerge. Plots will swerve. Still, you will have a framework within which to operate, and when you get lost in the middle of the novel (which inevitably happens), you will have some sort of a map, and not remain lost for long. 

Your long-suffering writer friends will say that you are “very productive.” They will say this is in a pejorative way. Whatever.

Okay, so at this point of writing an advice piece, you are getting punchy. Clearly, you need to go outside and take a walk.

But what you mean here is: Develop writing rituals. Work regularly. In your case, you have a study on the second floor where you write every morning. Your cat keeps you company. He comes in every few hours and wants his head rubbed. He sniffs at the dark chocolate you eat while writing. (At almost 60, you can only do one espresso a day.) He does not approve of your house music playlist, which you made for this novel, and which you play on repeat. Your cat gives you a disapproving look and leaves, but you keep on going. 

By now you know that writing a novel is like filling up a bucket with water. A few drops every day, and at first you don’t notice anything—but eventually the bucket fills up.

You write without hope, without condemnation. You write on days when your brain is sluggish, and you only get a few paragraphs written. You have negative days, when you delete large sections. (You should save the deleted chunks in another file—just in case.) 

Eventually you will hit a clear run.  

This is why you keep writing, even after a decade of not being published: because there is nothing better than the feeling of the novel coming alive. You will not be conscious of your fingers flying across the keyboard, your characters will do surprising things, and for a couple of mornings you will be transported—beyond success and failure, editors and readers—into a world of your own making.

It is a rare moment, almost a spiritual one.

You forget the limitations of your own body and mind. You are no longer the writer, but the medium through which the story flows, and all you have to do is type fast enough. You lose track of time, and when you emerge, blinking, exhausted, you will have a few pages that feel real, authentic, beautiful even.

And what could be better than that?

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