How to take yourself less seriously...

...in order to take yourself more seriously

So I find myself back in that place where I’m sending my work out into the world again. I currently have 5 submissions “In Progress” on Submittable, the most I’ve had in years. I’m also querying agents in a haphazard sort of way, which feels a lot like launching a rocket into the deepest depths of space. Maybe someone out there will get the message. Maybe not.

It’s all very exciting. And also, horrible. I mean, I’ve been here before. In the game of chutes and ladders that is a publishing life, I had an agent. Lost the agent. Published a couple books traditionally. Published my young adult novel myself after I think almost two years of querying over a hundred agents with no success.

So there’s a lot of feels as I find myself in this situation again and I’m trying to figure out how to manage the real emotional ups and downs, hopefully in a way that’s a little better for my overall mental health. I think part of the answer is to take myself a lot less seriously.

At the beginning of this year, I went to a writer’s conference and was part of a short story workshop led by Stewart O’Nan. There’s a lot to learn from workshopping with writers you admire. Stewart had all kinds of great things to say about craft. But there’s also something to be learned about how to live a writing life and that’s the thing I’ve been chewing on for the past month or so.

If you’re a fan of Stewart O’Nan’s work you’ll know he’s pretty eclectic. He’s written a short story collection. A very short novel in the second person about a doctor and a plague. A book about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s time in Hollywood. The story of the last night at a Red Lobster. Several nonfiction books. And what his wife calls his Big Boring Book, Wish You Were Here, in which, as Stewart himself says, nothing happens. Only, also, everything happens.  

All of this is to say Stewart does not have a brand. He does not stay in his lane and write the same kind of book over and over again. He writes what he wants to write. In this publishing world, there are consequences for that. But, so what?

One of the things Stewart emphasized in workshop was that the only thing we have control over as writers is the writing. We can sit down in front of the machine or not. That’s about it. All the rest of it? Not important. The contracts. The size of the advance. The awards. The sales figures. The Netflix deals. None of it matters. You either do the work or you don’t. That’s it.

There’s a certain amount of privilege in this attitude, to be sure. It works if you are not trying to support yourself or your family with your writing. But as someone who is lucky enough to have an actual, decent, stable, full-time job, I can afford it. There are various times when I’ve referred to my ‘writing career’ and my husband has always balked at this description. “You already have a career,” he says. Which is not to say that my writing isn’t something I should take seriously. The writing is the serious part. Everything else is, well, sort of stupid.

Everything else is, let’s just admit it, a bit of a farce. I mean, a few lucky people turn writing into a career. Kudos to them. For the rest of us, it’s less like a career and more like a mostly horrifying and not very enjoyable roller coaster ride. Very good writers sometimes have great publishing success. So do many okay or, sorry, not-so-great writers. And many very good writers don’t have great publishing success because shit just doesn’t work out for them. As I’ve said before, the world’s not fair and publishing is no exception.

Photo by Justin on Unsplash

But, again, so what? So what that publishing is a big, gross, sort of, don’t-look-too-closely mess? Big whoop. I have a job that pays my bills and will hopefully allow me to retire early and that is also, you know, interesting. I have a job that’s fun, even, in moments. And I have enough autonomy in that job that if I want to go to a writer’s conference in Florida for a week in the middle of the semester, I can.

I also have a husband who does almost all the dishes and has never once said, “Should you maybe spend less time on this writing thing?” I have a daughter who might find it the slightest bit cool that her mom writes books (I know her girlfriend does, which is one of the many things reasons she’s a keeper). I have friends and a community that support me and my writing.

Against all that backdrop, who cares if I can’t get an agent? Who cares if this newsletter stalls out and never adds one single additional subscriber? Who cares if one literary magazine after another rejects my stories? I mean, I know my stories are great. Rejection doesn’t change that.

Because here’s the other thing that I learned from Stewart O’Nan and, for that matter, also Liz Strout in workshop last year. It’s wise to remind ourselves that the business of publishing is designed to treat our words as commodities. Our books are something that they are trying to sell in order to make money. There’s nothing wrong with that. I am happy to make money from my writing when it’s possible. But seeing writing as a commodity necessarily means that what’s most important is not beauty or meaning or passion, but whether or not they believe it will sell.

Evaluating my writing as marketable or not is not what I want my default setting to be. My writing has to be, for me, something more than a commodity. I have to remind myself that each rejection is a collision between what I believe to be important in my writing and what someone else values. In some ways, that’s all a rejection is. Every now and then, those two things match. Most of the time, they don’t.

Shrug. No big deal. Who cares, right?

That’s where I want to be. I want to take everything outside of my actual writing less seriously because I think it creates the space to be serious about the one thing I have control over—my writing. Will I get there? I have no idea. But at least it’s a goalpost I can aim myself toward.

Maybe if I can take all that stuff less seriously, it becomes a little less horrible. A little less dispiriting. A little less terrifying. Maybe it comes close to, you know, fun, like an actual roller coaster ride.

If you would like to read the lovely

Tom Cox

saying about the same thing as I just said in maybe a slightly funnier way:

Why It's VITAL To Remember That Big Publishers And Their Sales Departments Always Know Best