Last
summer around the lower fjords of Norway, I asked too many questions of a
friend engaged in a program mentoring novelists. Without asking questions of
her own, Laurel simply told me I needed an accountability buddy. When I
returned to Seattle, I began sending Laurel my weekly writing goals.
My first weekly
goal was a low bar easily reached: average half an hour of writing a day. Four
months later, the goal was the same. But by then, by Thanksgiving, while
teaching high school, I had written over 110,000 words and completed the first
draft of a novel I called “Evening’s Gratitude.”
I started
in August with one-off diary entries and observational essays. But I also had a
dream about a coach telling his players to “stand there and go to sleep”—about
trusting not intervening, I understood—and the dream was so weird and funny and
the theme so resonant with my teaching that I started to make an exercise of
it. I devised a sport, imagined a family, and considered small-bore conflicts to
test trust-versus-intervention.
Along
with my stated thirty-minute daily average, which I always exceeded, I had a
couple other personal goals: One, allow the story’s marriage to be good and stick
to the drama of the ordinary. Two, reach 100,000 words. A writing exercise.
But by
the time I hit my word count, character arcs were strong, themes were clear,
and an ending, an enemies’ banquet, seemed a satisfying way to close. I had
completed the exercise, yes, but somehow, I had also written a proud, coherent novel:
A tender boy confronting bullies shows the grip of violence in masculine rites
of passage. A philosophically-minded girl meets escalating dares to demonstrate
the perilous vitality of moral development. And parents’ conflicting approaches
to these crises, to protect or to trust (to “sleep”) in the face of danger, ring
clearly through every storyline.
I came to
the end energized, and I revised over and over with equal joy. I loved my
story, I loved the process, escaped job and political turmoil, and I was
liberated to discover after years of excuses that I could teach high school and
write a novel at the same time.
Then I
started pitching to agents.
I met a
literary agent in New York who claimed social media algorithms changed reading
and readers so much that writers were either hitmakers or hobbyists. I learned agents
earn through commission and publishers sell on consignment and risk tolerance
is low. For your first novel, you get one risk. For your pitch, assert This
famous story meets That.
I returned
with a book pitch so trade and breezy that Stephanie said, But this doesn’t
sound like your book. Or you.
In New
York, I learned the difference between writers and authors is writers write; authors
market themselves as writers. As someone who had a door-to-door sales job for two
days and ended up hiding for hours in a random woman’s house until I could be
picked up again, over three decades later I can still say my whole being
resists. I don’t want to call novels properties. I don’t want my engagement
with world to be called a platform. I don’t want a third job.
I’m
ready to be a writer. I have a way to go to be an author.
