“Never Boring, Never Easy.” How the Writing Life Goes on Amid the Chaos of Publishing

How lucky, I thought, that spring break at the college at which I teach should be scheduled the week before the launch of my second novel. I wouldn’t have to cancel any classes to make the pre-publication interviews, furious essay-writing, bookstore signings, prep for the upcoming book tour.

Thus far, on my Google calendar for that week: a single podcast, a dermatology appointment, and a reminder to clean the pre-filter on the bedroom air purifier.

My first book, a story collection that won a book prize and was published on a university press, was released to all of the fanfare I expected, which was none, except for the parade I threw it inside my head. But I seem to recall feeling busy to the point of chaos ahead of my first novel six years ago, a not-quite-prolific but, I think, generally acceptable level of production in this peculiar vocation. It doesn’t feel like an entirely different lifetime, but clearly, things have changed. There were parties back then, I’m sure of it, and a rapid accumulation of Delta SkyMiles.

Of course, in that time, we did go through a pandemic that upended all the rules of publishing. Or was it TikTok that upended all the rules of publishing? Or was it AI that upended all the rules of publishing?

Oh, wait: there were never rules of publishing.

It’s easy to romanticize the past, the way I sometimes do my waitressing career, which let me have my best daytime hours to myself but which, I have to remind myself, also made my bones hurt and about which I still have anxiety dreams about being quintuply sat and forgetting how to use the point-of-sale system. But, let’s face it, fuzzy as the memories may be, there must be something inherently sexy and buzzy about debuting that loses its luster once one gets to maintaining.

After all, look at the number of book lists dedicated each season exclusively to the first category of writer, and then try to find one dedicated to sophomores and beyond. I don’t want to be cynical enough to think it has anything to do with the dewiness of the first-time author photo; I wasn’t ever particularly dewy, though at this point, the author photo series does look a little like a longitudinal sociology project on adulthood-to-middle-age. Realistically, I suppose it’s just that one can only be declared a “major new voice” once, when it’s unclear to everyone how aspirational and/or hyperbolic that statement might be. After that, with track records, most authors might be reduced to simply “a voice,” which doesn’t have the same marketing ring to it.

I hate to admit that there’s also a distinct possibility it’s not just the marketing and publicity stamina that’s harder to maintain as a career forges ahead. I genuinely don’t know what powered me through those early stories and dozen drafts of what became my first novel other than a need that had nothing to do with landing a book contract, because publishing a book seemed to me at the time as remote a possibility as moving to Hollywood to be discovered at a soda fountain. Kind of like dating at that age, I didn’t embark on any literary journeys based on general decency or long-term prospects, just vibes and a vague promise of having something to do with my time. And when the journeys disappointed me and I quit writing—which I did many times, because I was tired, and I had laundry to do, and I had no pedigree, and I couldn’t make pretty enough sentences—I came back to it because I genuinely didn’t know any other way to be.

Life was too boring without it, and I was too boring without it, and I didn’t know how else to spend my early mornings and late evenings, the sandwich hours that surrounded those in which I whittled away at my soul to pay for groceries. It bewildered and flattered me that some people wanted to read some of what I produced in those years, but it definitely wasn’t part of any well-executed plan. When, ultimately, enough people had liked what they read that a contract was offered, I might have inadvertently truncated my own future career by declaring that I would never dare dream of needing anything so miraculous to happen to me ever again.

And I guess I wasn’t lying. I don’t actually want to cheapen my memories of that era by forever trying to replicate it. By virtue of experience, and maybe paradoxically, I also simply couldn’t write anything as voicey and feral as my first stories and books again even if I tried. And I’m not trying. I prefer this newfangled belief that I might have gained a little prosaic proficiency at this point, and that my craft maneuvers these days are at least somewhat deliberate, even if, ironically, no single word is less sexy in a press kit than “competent.”

Plus, somewhere along the way I figured out that I also like to ride my bike a lot, and that puts a little crimp in the writing time.

All of this makes me think that maybe my experience putting out a book this time around has at least as much to do with how I’ve changed as how publishing has. And though I’ll probably never again produce the sheer amount of adrenaline as that early work brought me, I don’t necessarily regret that.

In the months ahead of the release of my first novel, for example, after the shock and elation of the contract had faded and the prospect of others bearing witness to my deficiencies emerged, I developed a case of insomnia so severe that, at one point I earnestly considered steering my car into a telephone pole so I could fall into a nice, restful coma. I didn’t follow through, thankfully, and instead got some prescriptions that never really worked, though I kept them anyway just in case I ever put out another book.

And here I am, sleeping soundly, with a car safely in the driveway and the pharmaceuticals untouched on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet.

It’s certainly not easier to be a human at this moment in history, though maybe it’s easier to maintain a reasonable perspective on your book after emerging from a global pandemic straight into a crisis of democracy unlike anything this country has ever seen. Nothing like life-altering cataclysms to make one appreciate what a privilege it is to get to put made-up stories in between pieces of cardboard that even a tiny fraction of humankind might choose to spend their money on despite the ever-rising price of eggs.

But I also like to think that maybe the slightly more seasoned human who appears in this book’s author photo has learned a few things about the process of putting out books after all. Like how my dogs don’t care which “most anticipated” lists I did or didn’t make it onto. Like how the people whose opinions I value the most don’t either. Like how the worst-case post-pub outcomes are at the very least survivable, and in a more generous reading, still odds-defying miracles that twenty-something-year-old me would be astounded at having achieved.

In all the careers I’ve had to subsidize the writing one, the break-in period has generally lasted weeks to months, at which point I’ve felt generally adequate, even proficient, at my job. The downside to that has been the inevitable onset of tedium and ennui, and this has been a good thing to remind myself of when I become exhausted by the seeming impossibility of reaching any kind of equilibrium, never mind momentum, with this whole writing thing. It will never be predictable, which is to say, it will never be boring, and it will never be easy.

I guess I’ll choose to be grateful for that one constant amidst the flux.