So I wrote a manuscript in which a prematurely menopausal thirty-eight-year-old is navigating a world in which her partner has left her in the wake of their lost pregnancy. Infertile in a culture that values fertility, the protagonist feels discarded and unseen. I think these issues are important—this state of being is important—but what I ended up with was three hundred pages of a woman feeling things about events that had happened in the past, which is slow-going content for a narrative.
This novel wanted to be a personal essay from the get-go, but I had to write it as fiction—and watch it fail as fiction—to realize this was so. It was a difficult lesson, but an important one: just because something moves us does not mean that it has the engine to power an entire book.
Are you scared?
Of course you’re scared. You’re a writer! If you’re not terrified, I’d like to know what herbal supplements you’re on. But all too often, our fear keeps us from writing what we actually need to write. This is especially true for memoirists whose writing can estrange friends or relatives, or even put their careers at risk if they tell the truth.
Unfortunately, the truth is usually the best path to the story. There are two outcomes when you’re scared of what you’re writing: either you cave in to the fear and you write something superficial that probably won’t sell, or you write something brave and vital that might. Your writing can be private for as long as you need it to be. So why not write the thing you’re scared of? The worst-case scenario is also the best one: you write something so courageous that an editor wants to pay you to share it with the world. You don’t have to say yes.
Does the scope of your project align with the free time that you have?
Let’s say you are waking up at five thirty in the morning to adjunct at one college, skipping lunch to teach at another, and traveling to yet a third school to teach an evening class. As an adjunct, you don’t have an office, and your shared apartment makes it hard to write at home. Is this the time to be working on your great American novel? Well, sure. Is this the time to be working on your great American novel that features a main character who is a shipbuilder during the Great Depression who falls in love with a migrant farmworker, an epic you plan to write from five different characters’ points of view? That sounds like a project that needs a lot of research, and research is tough to do without a desk.
You’ll have a lot of story ideas over the course of your career; you don’t have to write them all, and you don’t have to write them in order. Maybe hold on to the Great American Doorstopper until you have some peace, quiet, and enough time to eat lunch.
Is there a market for your project?
Market trends illuminate what readers are hungry for, which topics are salable, what genres are popular. Knowing that market trends exist can be detrimental to your writing, and you should not account for them if you’re feeling good about your project. But it can be helpful to gauge the potential interest in your subject if you’re feeling uninspired by your work. If you’re killing yourself to write a book that is going to receive a hundred “We’ve published too many memoirs on this topic” notes from agents and editors, maybe it’s time to put that project down for a while to either find a new way into it, or to work on something else.
Again—you should only use market trends to provide you with an excuse to pause a project that you’re not getting any joy from. If you believe in your book’s angle even though everyone is saying that vampires/motherhood memoirs/reproductive dystopias are “done,” write on. Market trends make no room for exceptional exceptions. In other words, they’re often wrong.
Do you lack experience?
I don’t want to use the ageist card, because of course there are twenty-two-year-olds who can write convincingly from the point of a view of an eighty-year-old veteran who has a grandkid with leukemia, but there are also a lot of twenty-two-year-olds who should write delightful, weird, flawed stories about what it’s like to be twenty-two.
Obviously, you should write what your heart tells you to write. It is good to be ambitious, and it can be deeply satisfying to undertake projects that require a lot of research. But your writing career will hopefully be a long one, and as you age, you are going to learn so many beautiful and ghastly things about the world; don’t feel like you have to rush yourself to a mature voice and an “aching” point of view in order to be taken seriously by others—and yourself. This might feel revolutionary to consider, but you can have fun writing. Enjoying what you’re writing is usually proof that you are writing the right thing. (And on this note: if you’re “cheating” on your project with something on the sidelines, maybe that passion project should be the main event?)
There is a huge difference between writing, and writing to be read. Attempting to get your work published necessitates strategic thinking (where would this piece fit well?), honesty (is the work actually ready yet?), and some seriously thick skin (what does “We have to pass on this” even mean?! It’s not a dish of broccoli, for goodness’ sake!). These considerations intensify when you start to query agents, and just when you feel you have mastered the revise, submit, and wait game, you’ll go through the same process when you and your agent send your manuscript to editors.
So what are the best practices for submitting and for pitching? Are there any residences or fellowships available for writers in the early stages of their careers? It’s been twenty-four hours since you submitted a short story to The Famous Magazine. Will the editors think you’re pushy if you follow up today? (The answer to this last question, dear and hopeful writer, is a resounding yes.)
The logline and the project summary as (potential) writing tools
A logline summarizes your project in a sentence. It comes in handy when someone has the indecency to inquire what you write about. Here’s an example of a solid logline:
Kim Kardashian’s Selfish is a coffee table book filled with intimate, never-before-seen selfies from one of the most recognizable celebrities in the world.
Depending on whether you’re Team Kim or not, this description might not make you want to read this book, but it’s pretty clear what it’s about.
Another helpful tool is the project summary: This is a rundown of your book’s major characters and themes, and the writing of one will force you to acknowledge the places where your manuscript needs work. If you have a great setting but no plot, the summary will shake its head at you; if there’s nothing at stake for your characters, the summary will point at a character whose motivations need finessing; if your story lacks a climax, the summary will sigh.
For fun (or at least for the good of your manuscript), try writing a pitch letter for your project well before it’s done. If you can summarize, in three sentences or less, what the main themes, conundrums, and character arcs are, stop reading this and get to finishing that book because it’s going to be great. If your pitch letter is seven pages long and splattered with disclaimers, defensiveness, and tears, your manuscript needs you to stop writing it and start thinking more strategically about its wants and needs.
Why you should keep submitting work, regardless of rejection
Publishing is an industry that is powered by rejection: regardless of the level that you are playing at, you are going to hear “no” more often than “yes” throughout most of your career.
Accordingly, you must make friends with rejection in order to survive a professional