What I Learned in My Mid-Career Writing Crisis
They’ve said you’ll never get published, so here’s the question author Anna Mitchael considers: Do you care?
When I was in my 20s (I’m mid-40s now) I was working on a book of vignettes, and the teacher of my night-school writing class told me there was no way I’d ever get them published. Probably she was correct. I was an unpublished writer. A book of vignettes are going to be a faster no. But what she didn’t explain, and what I didn’t think through, was that the ‘no’ on a book was also very likely to come, the pause before the door shut in my face might just be a beat longer.
I put the vignettes away and started learning how to write in the more familiar, and what I thought would be more publishable, form of a novel. I published a collection of essays strung together as a memoir, and then a book of chick lit. All the while, I had the feeling that I was wedged into a too-tight pair of jeans. I thought, “This is how writing is, the lack of oxygen comes with the job.” I didn’t realize the lack of oxygen was from the stress of trying to make myself into something I wasn’t. I love novels, oh how I love them. But I was made to write vignettes.
It’s one thing to wear an alright outfit into public. The jeans look fine, the whole thing is passable. But when you find something that is an extension of yourself—the dress or shirt that screams YOU—other people are the ones who can’t catch their breath. In the very best way, one might go low on oxygen, of course.
Neither of the books I wrote while wearing too-tight denim did well enough to make the industry look twice. What I learned from those years and the mild heartbreak: If you’re going to fail it feels a lot worse to do it while you’re wearing your own clothes. (Pretty Woman viewers, please cheer!)
And so I returned to vignettes. Are they a hard sell? Yes. But in case no one has said this to you yet—if you aren’t a well-established author, or a celebrity with a well-established platform, everything is going to be a hard sell. In the hopes you might skip some of the discomfort of years toiling on stories that aren’t your story, here is the question that helped me through my mid-career writing crisis: Do you want to sell books or do you want to write books?
Fast forward 10 years. Imagine yourself never getting an agent. Never selling a book. Or imagine your self-published book languishing online. Do you still like writing? Do you wake up in the middle of the night with a desire to spend the next day only with your computer? If that’s the case, you probably want to write.
Now imagine yourself selling many, many books in a genre you hate. Do you feel like a sell out or do you feel like the luckiest duck ever? If you feel a quack-quack coming on, selling is probably higher on your radar. (And there is no shame in the game, this is about honing in on your goal.)
If you care more about selling books—then take the advice of my writing teacher. Find the type of novel that you think will be hot in a year, and write until you hit those blessed last two words ‘The End.’ (Which actually means, the beginning of editing, then getting an agent, then finding a publisher, but those are pep talks to be had in other articles.)
If you’re in the game because there’s a story in you that you are going to need to uncover over the process of years, or decades, in a form that maybe isn’t even evident to you yet, welcome to the world of elastic waistbands. We aren’t the most popular crew. We don’t get the most likes. Influencers don’t know our names. But when we do write something that takes someone’s breath away—oh, the feeling of the universe aligning is thorough and complete.
The funny turn in my story is that a book of my vignettes is now getting published in May. Let me be clear that I do not tell you this because I think there’s a formula there such as, “Pursue what you love and publication will come.” This industry is too hard, cold, and cutting for that. But what I’ve described above is a different kind of formula: “Pursue what you love, sit in the comfort of knowing you’re telling your story, and what others think eventually stops mattering.”
Someone asked me not long ago if I wish I’d never taken that teacher's advice and put vignettes away in the first place. My first answer was, “Of course.” But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I couldn’t actually say that. I am grateful for the oxygenless years, the books that weren’t bestsellers, the hard-won years of returning to the desk every day. How can we know what fits until we know what doesn’t? Is the goal to be published or to be real, dimensional people?
Check out Anna Mitchael's They Will Tell You the World Is Yours here:
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