The "Failed" Novelist to Substacker Pipeline
It's delicate!
This post is a departure from our Good Neighbor Book Club. The next book we are reading is The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers. IRL meet up and Google Meet up will happen at the end of May!
Turning attention outward…shortly
Let me humble brag for a hot second. I have probably read more novels than your entire block, unless you live in a densely populated college dorm or New York City. And guess what? I think I am burned out on other people’s imaginations.
I have also been calling myself a writer for a decade and…not writing. This is likely due to a few reasons (redacted). I have taken pains to educate myself about how the literary scene works, how to write a query letter, and how to build an audience. I followed favorite authors and analyzed what they posted. I read about their career trajectories and tried to map their 2010 success onto my own possibilities. I was a potential “30 under 30” if I had actually finished a manuscript. Actually edited it and queried it and gotten representation.
Except I…didn’t build an audience. I didn’t publish short stories in literary magazines or get an MFA or write a novel while I was in college and had the luxury of time. I stalled out. My creative writing professor told me I was both “a writer’s writer” and that if I wrote a YA fantasy I would be a “sell out”. I set impossible word counts. Every birthday I would have a panic attack and lose my marbles over not having finished a manuscript by 29, 30, 31. I read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. I tried The Artist’s Way. Then I read this post by Naomi Kanakia.
In that post she links to another of her essays that is now deleted/made private. The gist of it was that it is more valuable to Kanakia’s readers that she write about the Great Books versus pursue a traditional literary writing career. I won’t elaborate further since she did make the post private. But it stuck with me. I thought about it and first decided to shift from reading fantasy/sci-fi to trying out some Great Books myself.
Then it shifted to Well, maybe writing fiction isn’t my calling at this moment in time. I have clung to the identity of “writer” for a decade. But I can be a writer on Substack. (I will be posting short stories on here when I get up the chutzpah.) I thought Well, maybe writing a novel isn’t for me right now. Short stories are just fine. Then Kanakia posted this:
Obviously I am NOT a literary genius. I won a grant for a short story collection in college. I have completed ten short stories, maybe one of them is ready to submit to a speculative fiction mag.
But maybe I needed permission to “just” write short stories. Permission to stop thinking “Oh, I could definitely write the next Fourth Wing and achieve commercial success, writing about dragons seems like a lot of fun!” I know the point of the post about Ted Chiang was that he has made a career of sci-fi short stories that are commercially successful and at the same time isn’t striving for MORE. His day job is fine. My day job is giving me grey hairs in my early thirties, but it is also fine.
It is okay for a dream to shift and change. What dreams/aspirations have you had shift or change shape?
Figuring out the rest of it
So what next? I will continue to run Good Neighbor Book Club and throw in a few essays and possibly some short stories. FOR FUN. The novel will happen later. I could technically write a novel, butt in chair, 500 words a day….but the brain isn’t letting that happen right now.
In the introduction to his nonfiction work The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green writes about his sudden onset of labyrinthitis and how it affected his ability to read, watch TV, or play with his kids. All he could do for weeks was rest and think. He writes;
“The writer Allegra Goodman was once asked “Whom would you like to write your life story?” She answered, “I seem to be writing it myself, but since I’m a novelist, it’s all in code. For me, it had started to feel like some people thought they knew the code. They would assume I shared the worldview of a book’s protagonists or they’d ask me questions as if I were the protagonist. One famous interviewer asked me if I also, like the narrator of Turtles All the Way Down, experience panic attacks while kissing…As I talked, I felt distant from myself – like my self wasn’t really mine, but instead something I was selling or at the very least renting out in exchange for good press. As I recovered from labyrinthitis, I realized I didn’t want to write in code anymore.”
Now, I am not John Green, famous author and Youtube vlogger extraordinaire. But perhaps it is time to stop daydreaming about writing in code via novels.
Chat soon!
Heya. Really appreciated this. I missed it somehow and just found it. And it was exactly what i needed too. Thank you for making me think. You’re amazing.