It’s Not My Job to Understand Agents or the Marketplace. My Job is to Write.

My first book had been something of an accident—two or three short stories that ran together unexpectedly, hit the 25,000-word mark, and found a publisher almost immediately. It happened so fast, I hadn’t really had time to think about what I was doing.

Like a lot of indie presses in 2015, my publisher used print-on-demand technology to keep costs low, allowing them to take big risks and put books out quickly. We did two rounds of edits, settled on a cover design, and suddenly, my book was out in the world.

Then, almost as quickly, it was time to write my next book. For the first time since I started submitting stories to literary journals, I found myself asking: wait…what kind of book do I actually want to write?

It seems like such a simple question—one every writer should have a clear answer for—but trying to figure out how to write a follow-up to Cult of Loretta sent me on a doubt-filled journey that lasted over five years. Journey is a generous word for what I was doing. Mostly, I wrote a bunch of disjointed prose that felt meandering, directionless… even pointless.

I didn’t have writer’s block. The words came easily and felt as good as anything in my first book. But they were just isolated, fictionalized episodes from my youth, scenes without a coherent story arc.

I’d had an amazing experience publishing with a small press, but part of me wondered if I shouldn’t set my sights on the Big Five. To do that, I’d have to get an agent. To get an agent I’d have to write a novel with a coherent “pitch,” but most of my writing revolved around a white guy in his teens and twenties doing drugs, making mistakes, failing with women, and trying to find the meaning of life.

Was there even a book there? And if there was, is that a book anyone other than me and my weird friends wanted to read?

I wasn’t the only one asking these questions. It was the fall of 2017. Donald Trump was president. The #MeToo movement was just gaining traction on Twitter. The toxicity of powerful white men in America had never been more clearly on display.

The message was clear: it was time for other stories, other voices. When I looked down at everything I’d written, I couldn’t help but wonder if my white guy coming-of-age story needed to exist at all.

So, I pivoted and tried to write something totally different. First a sci-fi novel. Then a western. When neither of those seemed to go anywhere, I tried writing a sequel to my debut, this time told from the female lead’s perspective.

In each case, the writing felt contrived and forced. I’m not the best or fastest writer in the world, but one thing I have is a bullshit detector. I can tell when my writing is shit, and everything I was writing was shit. More importantly, I wasn’t enjoying myself. If I didn’t enjoy writing my book, nobody was going to enjoy reading it.

At some point, I did the only thing I know how to do when my writing isn’t working—I put my manuscript aside and returned to the handful of books I read in my early twenties that made me want to be a writer in the first place. Twenty years had passed, but I loved them even more. I understood why they’d spoken so loudly to my younger self. I saw how easy they made it look—writing in a voice that dispensed with literary convention to tell a story with disarming sincerity and urgency.

In particular, I found myself reading and rereading the opening chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, that prologue (identified only in the book as Chapter 1) where Vonnegut tells you how hard it was to write “the war book.” That is…the book you are reading. It’s such a magic trick. Talking about how a book was written inside of the book. Explaining how the sausage got made: smoking Pall Malls and hanging out with war buddies.

I decided to dig a little deeper, so I read a biography of Vonnegut. Apparently, that famous first chapter came about when the author traveled to Dresden, Germany, where, as a young soldier, he’d survived the notorious firebombing of the city. Vonnegut had hoped to find inspiration or clarity in his visit… some kind of meaning. Instead, he found only rubble and chaos.

Vonnegut had been working on the novel for twenty years. The only thing that held it together was that nothing held it together. His breakthrough—if you can call it a breakthrough, was in this: telling the story of his failure to find a meaning for war, letting his scattered fragments remain fragments, not needing to come to a moral or point, but allowing his narrative to be messy on the page. As messy as his experiences in World War II.

It occurred to me that I could take a similar approach with my own writing. I’d tried to write a book that would sell to a big press—one with a coherent narrative, a catchy title, and a hook. I’d tried to find a “literary” message…something more important than a white kid from the suburbs, ignorant of his own privilege, doing drugs, falling in love, trying to figure out the meaning of life.

But every time I got away from my own story, I lost touch with the absurdism, dark comedy, and self-deprecating humor that my readers said they’d connected with so much in my first book.

Suddenly, the two most beautiful words in the English language occurred to me—fuck it. It wasn’t my job to understand agents or the marketplace. It wasn’t my job to figure out if my books had value other than the joy I experienced in writing them.

Something about the work itself… moving closer to truth, to language and characters and scenes that felt like they crackled with energy… that was the closest thing I’d ever experienced to God. My job wasn’t to figure out why. It was to keep pushing closer to that feeling. Even if it meant telling the same story, my story, over and over.

I remembered Thoreau’s quote from Walden: “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.” I looked at my bookshelf and noticed one writer after another, Thoreau and Vonnegut included, who’d written books drawn directly from life, that included all the messiness and didn’t worry whether their story was worth telling but told it in profound language that reached beyond their experience—Frederick Exley, Eve Babitz, Henry Miller, Joan Didion.

After five years of fumbling in the dark, I stopped thinking and returned to the fragments I’d written in 2017. They existed in a nearly identical world to my first book. It didn’t matter. Fuck it. Instead of trying to figure out what the book was about, I just wrote.

I used my actual name instead of the fictional “Nelson.” I removed the drug “screw” and just made the protagonist addicted to making bad decisions. For the first time since Cult of Loretta, I was having fun.

Two months later, I had a finished manuscript. I titled it The Red-Headed Pilgrim and sent it to my favorite publisher, Two Dollar Radio, who have a reputation for publishing bold, offbeat novels that bigger presses might shy away from. They accepted it for publication nine days later.

There’s a passage in the Bhagavad-Gita that I think every writer could benefit from reading. Probably, we should all print it out and put it on our desks:

Your work is your responsibility, not its result.
Never let the fruits of your actions be your motive.
Nor give in to inaction.
Set firmly in yourself, do your work, not attached to anything.
Remain evenminded in success, and in failure.
Evenmindedness is true yoga.
–Bhagavad Gita, 2.47-49

This month, my story collection Horse Girl Fever is coming out from Clash Books. When people read this collection, they’ll recognize moments and characters and language from my first two books. They’ll see similar risk-taking and revelations, people losing themselves in relationships, chasing phantoms, disappearing into drugs, with the ghost of Beaverton, Oregon, always just behind them.

The collection is named for my adolescent preoccupation with the “horse girl”—that strong, no-nonsense grade-schooler (every classroom seemed to have one) whose love for horses was so profound that the rest of the world didn’t exist for her. She wore t-shirts and sweatshirts with horses on them. She wrote book reports about them. The other kids made fun of her, but that just seemed to deepen her love for that beautiful, wild animal.

All these years later, I think I understand why I was so drawn to her. She was the prototype of the artist…the purest kind. Pursuing her truth while everyone around her made fun of her, following her obsession no matter where it led.

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Horse Girl Fever by Kevin Maloney is available via Clash Books.