Shutting the Drawer: What Happens When a Book Doesn’t Sell?

Essays Notable Articles
August 23, 2011 | 1 book mentioned 73 4 min read

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In May, after my novel manuscript had been read and rejected by a healthy number of editors, my husband rewrote my author bio. It read as follows:

Edan Lepucki was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1981. He currently lives in East Bushwick.

As an American woman living in an uncool neighborhood in Los Angeles, I thought this hilarious. I also wondered — not entirely seriously, and not entirely in jest — if the revision might help my situation. My situation being that my agent had begun submitting my book nine months prior (not that I was keeping track), and it remained unsold. Admittedly, there had been close calls with two different editors, but, as everyone knows, almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. I was in the same place I’d been back in September. That is, unpublished. The waiting game was starting to char my soul; if you drew a finger across it and put that finger to your tongue, it would taste bitter. Joking with my husband (“Now that I’m nursing, I’ll send them a new author photo, cleavage and all!”) was one of the few coping mechanisms I had left in me.

Now that it’s almost September (“If anyone in publishing actually worked in the summer, I would’ve sold my book by now!”), the jokes aren’t as funny. The truth is, my novel isn’t selling, and it probably won’t. There, I’ve said it. Eventually, a writer must accept rejection, accept the death of her first true darling, and move on. Can I face that sobering reality? Can I put my first book into the drawer, and shut it?

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Others have done it before me. There’s a long and rich history of successful writers whose first (second, third…) books didn’t see the light of day. I remember when Myla Goldberg came to speak to the Creative Writing Department at Oberlin. She explained that Bee Season was actually her second novel. “My first,” she told us wide-eyed undergraduates, “you’ll never read.” At twenty, I thought this terribly tragic. In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Dan Kois wrote about novelists who abandoned books for one reason or another: Michael Chabon‘s infamously unfinished tome, Fountain City, for instance, and the burned pages of Gogol and Waugh. But the differences between these authors and myself are important. Firstly, they all had dazzling careers, failed book or not. I can’t (yet…) say the same for myself. Secondly, these authors decided to kill their books, whereas my darling was murdered.

Just let me be dramatic for a moment, okay? Murdered! My book was murdered!

Or was she? A friend pointed out that I was waiting to sell my book to publishers, when I could sell it to readers, all by myself. That’s true, of course. Self-publishing is as easy as it’s ever been, and if done well, it can even be lucrative. But, in most cases, self-published authors spend money, not make it, and they have to be their own editor, copy editor, publicist, and book cover designer (which can lead to this and this and this). I certainly could self-publish my novel, but I don’t have the cash, time, or talent to do it successfully. Plus,  there’s still a stigma to publishing your own writing. Though this is changing, I’ve never been an early adopter. (I used my AOL email account well into the new millennium, y’all; I leave the experiments to the innovative types.) The truth is, I want a reputable publishing house standing behind my book; I want them to tell you it’s good so that I don’t have to.

So, okay, I’m willing to let my book die, if that’s to be its fate. With all my talk of murder and barbecued souls, I’ll be the first to admit I’m letting myself wallow. But can you blame me? I’m grieving nearly five years of hard work. I’m mourning sentences, characters, and scenes that I’m still proud of. Letting go hurts. A lot. A friend of mine once said she didn’t want to write a novel because she couldn’t stand the idea of working for years on a project that might fail. One of my writing students recently told me she’s so afraid her book won’t sell that the very thought makes her hyperventilate. Another friend said she might die if her novel wasn’t published. I identified with all of these confessions. I felt them myself. Not-selling my novel was my biggest fear, and it’s happening. It happened.

(I was in natural, unmedicated labor with my child for 36 hours. For 24 of these hours, my cervix remained only 5 centimeters dilated. No matter how relaxed I remained, how deeply I breathed, there was no progress. None. More than once during the process, I thought, “This is like trying to sell a fucking novel!”)

(There’s a moment, right before a newborn baby breaks into a wail, when his face wrinkles up, collapses in on itself like an imploding building, and sorrow, pure and clean sorrow, sweeps heavy across his features. I know this feeling.)

Goodbye, goodbye, Novel #1.

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The thing is, rejection is instructive. Over the past year I’ve learned that hearing “no” doesn’t get easier if the stakes are higher. Reject my piddling short stories and I will barely flinch; mess with my dear book and I’m rendered immediately vulnerable: “immobilized, apologetic,” as Alice Munro writes in her masterful story “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You.” I urge my students to go for it and send out their work, that they have to get used to a life of disappointment if they want to be writers. As if one can get used to such a thing.

I’ve also learned, however, that a thoughtful rejection is a valuable one, especially coming from an overworked, underpaid editor. To have taken the time to read my work, and written feedback — that’s something I appreciate. This is called relationship-building, I am told. I have more than one friend who sold books to editors who rejected their previous one(s).

Lastly, these months of rejection have taught me the difference between being tenacious and being stubborn — and being stubborn and being desperate. My agent can continue to shop my novel around, but I have already attended its funeral. I’ve said my eulogy, eaten the casseroles, wept in the shower, screamed into my pillow. I have willed myself to move on. I must, in order to continue my life as a writer. I haven’t lost my tenacity, I’ve simply refocused it on my next book, which I’m more than halfway done with. (This is the upside of a submission process that takes forever). Novel #2 deserves my full attention and care. Without it, my work — and I — will suffer.

And this new book, it will be published. If it doesn’t, well, I’ll just die.

Image credit: Flickr/nachoeuropa.

is a staff writer and contributing editor for The Millions. She is the author of the novella If You're Not Yet Like Me, the New York Times bestselling novel, California, and Woman No. 17. She is the editor of Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers As We Never Saw Them.

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Essays

Confessions of a Cat Lady

Essays
June 6, 2007 | 1 book mentioned 3 8 min read

The reviewer would like to confront, at the start of her first review, the occasionally embarrassing fact that at some point in the recent past she was considering – never mind with what degree of seriousness – a dissertation on eighteenth-century cats and their literary and cultural significance. Having been told by the advisor seemingly most inclined to support such a project (this advisor being an animal fancier herself: her dog, on occasion, had been permitted to attend office hours and sometimes lectures), that “That way madness lies,” this reviewer abandoned her cat dissertation. The advisor’s statement may have been a jest – serious and interesting scholarly work, as the advisor knew, had been done on animals in literature and culture. The suspicion, however, arose in the reviewer’s mind (perhaps accompanied by a phantom waft of cat-box and spinsterhood) that whether you collect literal or literary felines, you are in some sense embarking down the path to the marginal and strange land of cat-lady-hood, and so she retreated by laying the project aside. And yet literary cats – in footnotes, illustrations, casual mentions in books long forgotten – continue to entrance her. They are, as Tristram Shandy would have said, her hobby-horse (or cat).This is not to say that I (formerly known as “the reviewer”) renounce the legitimacy of the eighteenth-century cats dissertation: By no means. Late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England was the birthplace of the fashionable lap-dog and the sentimentalization of animals generally. Who could forget the perpetual throng of spaniels at the feet of Charles II? Pepys complains in his diary of his wife’s dog pissing on the floor and recounts with horrified amazement his first encounter with cock-fighting; Hogarth’s best-known self-portrait includes his dog Trump, and his “First Stage of Cruelty” depicts boys and men doing hideous things to dogs and cats. The “Second Stage of Cruelty” depicts work-animals driven to death and a warning verse beneath:The tender Lamb o’re drove and faint,Amidst expiring Throws;Bleats forth it’s innocent complaintAnd dies beneath the Blows.The final stanza pronounces the perpetrators of these cruelties “inhuman” and so suggests – long before there was anything like an animal rights movement – that there is a moral aspect to our relations with animals, integral to our humanity. Robinson Crusoe, once settled in isolation on his island refers to his dog, cat, goat and parrot as his “family.” A recent show at the Huntington Library, entitled “Sensation and Sensibility,” displayed several rustic scenes of cottage life by eighteenth-century artists, chiefly Gainsborough, in which animals seemed to be family members. One particularly sentimental inclusion depicted the sale of a poor cottage family’s lamb: the buyer leads the lamb away as the family’s many children cry or press their faces into their mother’s skirts. Francis Coventry’s 1751 book entitled, The History of Pompey the Little: Or, The Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog, gave voice to a living fashion accessory that is still with us. Eighteenth-century animals were memorialized in images, allowed to speak in memoirs, integral members of families, and extensions of human identity that still function today (as testified by the tiny dogs of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, as well as Queen Elizabeth II’s troop of corgis).And this is just the beginning: The prominent historian Robert Darnton’s book The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History describes a massacre of cats in Paris in the late 1730s by several disgruntled apprentices as a symbolic revenge on their bourgeois master and mistress, who coddled and pampered their feline pets while treating their human apprentices “like animals.” So cats become a means of expressing class tensions as well. And Darnton’s essay goes on to offer a survey of the symbolic and ritual values assigned to cats in pre-modern and quasi-modern Europe, particularly France. Cats were associated (as they still are – if only in the linguistic sediment of the slang word ‘pussy’) with female sexuality, for example. From the 15th century the stroking of cats was supposed to increase a man’s success with women, as manifested in such proverbs as “He who takes good care of cats will have a pretty wife.” Darnton also details associations between cats and the occult: Caterwauling was considered an indicator of the casting of spells, or, if under a specific man’s window, a sign of his wife’s infidelity, his own cuckolding; and a cat on the bed of a dying person might be Satan waiting to carry his soul to hell. Stranger still are the magical folk-remedies and beliefs Darton inventories: a cat buried alive in field could clear it of weeds; blood from a cat’s ear mixed with red wine could cure pneumonia; the brain of a freshly killed cat, if still hot, could make one invisible.My favorite eighteenth-century cat (the cat who started it all), however, is not of the Satanic variety. Christopher Smart’s Jeoffry, whom Smart immortalized in his strange and difficult poem (written sometime in the late 1750s or early 1760’s) “Jubilate Agno” or “Rejoice The Lamb,” was a divine cat. “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry,” Smart begins, “For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.” Smart’s description of Jeoffry’s particular habits has a striking intimacy of detail, and these mundane details of feline existence become emanations of divine order and a recognition of Jeoffry as an instrument of divinity:For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbor.For If he meets another cat her will kiss her in kindness.For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallyingFor he purrs in thankfulness when God tells him he’s a good Cat.For he is an instrument for the children to learn gentleness upon.The profound strangeness of this poem in the context of the rigorously metered rhyming couplets that form the bulk of eighteenth-century poetry is, I hope, hardly less than its trans-historical strangeness. Even now, in the days of feline and canine clothes, braces, birthday parties, and marriages, Smart’s contemplation of the mundanely named Jeoffry as a being embodying, manifesting, and teaching the ways of God to men is still, I think, equally strange, arresting, and moving.Much of the rest of “Jubilate Agno” is an odd mystical taxonomy that pairs people, (both biblical and historical persons as well as Smart’s contemporaries) with specific animals and plants: “Let Mephibosheth with the Cricket praise the God of chearfulness, hospitality, and gratitude…Let Micah rejoice with the spotted Spider, who counterfeits death to effect his purposes…Let Anna rejoice with the Porpus, who is a joyus fish and of good omen…Let Ross, house of Ross rejoice with the Great Flabber Dabber Flat Clapping Fish with hands…Let Balsam, house of Balsam rejoice with Chenomycon an herb the sight of which terrifies a goose.” The explanations for these pairings are cryptic, brief, and/or nonexistent (you can understand why the poem was initially thought to be the product of a stint in Bedlam), but the purpose seems to be to assign to specific people a beast or a mineral or botanical variety expressive of some essential quality of their beings – that one man’s soul is expressive of blue daisie, juniper, jasper or onyx, while another’s is of the hawk, Pegasus, porcupine, or crocodile.Of course Smart was not the first or the last to imagine a correspondence between the variety of human natures and the rest of the natural world. The ancient Roman Aelian’s (AD 170-230) multivolume On The Characteristics of Animals is not so explicit as Smart’s poem in drawing correspondences between the souls of humans and the natures of animals, but the language of Aelian’s descriptions blurs the distinction between human and animal, making his animal subjects seem human in their motivations and behaviors:The Owl is a wily creature and resembles a witch. And when captured, it begins by capturing its hunters. And so they carry it about like a pet or (I declare) like a charm on their shoulders. By night it keeps watch for them and with its call that sounds like some incantation it diffuses a subtle, soothing enchantment, thereby attracting birds to settle near it. And even in the daytime it dangles before the birds another kind of lure to make fools of them, putting on a different expression at different times; and all the birds are spell-bound and remain stupefied and seized with terror, and a mighty terror too, at these transformations. (47)A more literal fictional imagining of this notion is found in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), which presents human souls externalized and personified as animal “daemons.” These creature-spirits can speak, and in their species are expressive of the particular nature of the human to whom they are attached. There are other examples of this species fusion and confusion – the Chinese animal calendar, Native American religions, the metamorphoses of Greek and Roman mythology, the animaguses of Harry Potter, for starters: But what does it all mean – if anything – and how does it relate to cat dissertations?A facile assessment of the desire to find correspondences between human souls and animal species might end in something similar to an exclamation I heard in a lecture on “The Grand Armada” chapter of Moby-Dick. This chapter describes the birthing and nursing of baby sperm whales in a calm, sheltered underwater room created by the rest of the pod with their bodies. Ishmael tenderly compares the expressions and motions of the whale calves to newborn human babies and such descriptions inspired a professor I once knew to exclaim excitedly, “Whales are people too!” Everyone laughed. But he did mean it, in a way. Suddenly, there is a break from the contemplation of whale as prey, enemy, alien “other,” and instead, a contemplation of these creatures in acts and attitudes of such mutual care and tenderness that the only way they can be described, even by their hunter, is “as human infants.” The willingness to confuse human and animal categories might imply a willingness to take a more expansive view of “humanity” or “personhood” that might include non-humans. This view would contend that animals are capable of seemingly human responses (tenderness, affection, care, curiosity, urgency, terror, etc.) that force us, as they forced Ishmael, to see ourselves in them and so – to some extend and however briefly – to respond to them and their behaviors as human – to treat them or imagine them as one of our own.But if animals, to whatever degree, gain humanity, humans gain something of the creaturely as well. The notion of particular animal species as expressive of human souls suggests that we are not all the same kind of human, and that no single theory of human nature quite gets the whole story: Fox-souled people are like this, cat-souled people, like that, giraffe- and marmot-souled people, other things entirely. Smart, Pullman, and Aelian recognize the totemic power of animals in slightly different ways, but all see in them sacred and mystical types that can help to illuminate aspects of the human – our varieties, vagaries, and eccentricities. In the case of Jeoffry, animals also offer models of holiness: Jeoffry’s sacred “compleat”-ness as Smart describes it – his exuberant, joyful catness – seems a portrait of being-wholeness one could never attempt with a human as the object of contemplation. Jeoffry is a cat in a way that I, or you, or anyone else will never be human – and perhaps this is because we are capable of such variety that we need the whole rest of the animal, vegetable, and mineral world to help us signify the essences of our beings. And we are also too self-conscious, self-fashioning, proud and fond of progress to simply to be human and do human-ish things they way Jeoffry does cat-ish things (bathing himself, hunting mice, stretching, napping in the sun) – What would those things be, anyway – what activities are particularly expressive of the human (Playing video games? Farming? Starting wars? Knitting? Writing blog articles? Bobsledding? Vacuuming?)?In the end, perhaps I should have stayed among the cats (and the canines, and the monkeys, and the pigs… there are so many more! Gulliver’s Houhynyms, E.T.A Hoffmann’s The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr, Pierre-Jules Hetzel’s Scenes from the Public and Private Life of Animals…). Perhaps it is a better place – or perhaps, more simply, I am philosophically a misanthrope, of the school of John Wilmot, Lord Rochester (1647-1680). The best-known portrait of Rochester (Johnny Depp’s The Libertine excepted) depicts him standing beside a monkey perched on a marble pedestal; the monkey is tearing pages from a book while Rochester crown him with a laurel wreath. I leave you in the earl’s dangerously capable hands, with the first stanza of his “Satire Against Reason and Mankind”:Were I – who to my cost already amOne of those strange, prodigious creatures, man – A spirit free to choose for my own shareWhat sort of flesh and blood I pleased to wear,I’d be a dog, a monkey, or a bear,Or anything but that vain animal,Who is so proud of being rational.

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 3 8 min read
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73 comments:

  1. You call the book your darling… so you love it. Of course you love it, you wrote it. And an agent must have loved it (especially in this day and age) to for them to take it on. What about your husband? Your friends?

    If everyone loves the book, then there’s something there.

    And you can’t put it in a drawer.

    Yes, self-publishing isn’t easy. Yes, it’s a steep learning curve. But, here’s the thing: for the most it’s everything you need to do as a traditionally published author anyway… Every author needs to learn how to create platform and use that platform to tell people who they are. Every author, traditional and, especially, self.

    The great news is that there are so many tools at your fingertips. Social media, message boards, open mic nights, you name it! The audience is out there and they are looking for you. You just have to find them. It’s by no means easy. But you’ll meet a lot of great people on the way.

    And you might just find a publisher. There are a lot of publishers who are watching self-publishers to see who can create a platform, who will buy what books, and who has the drive. Look at all the recent success stories of self-pub to traditional: Hocking, Locke, Michael J Sullivan, and many, many others.

    At this point, going self-pub cant hurt you. So what’s to loose?

  2. Sometimes, the timing isn’t wrong. There seems to be a different trend, or there are books on similar topics on the list. When I worked in publishing, we faced this several times. As a reviewer, I get cycles of 14 books in a row where the theme is “I’m a mess because my mother is crazy and it’s all her fault” — one stops being able to care after awhile, as much as one wants to fall in love with every new book that arrives on the doorstep.

    As a full-time,working writer, I’ve found that some books aren’t timed right. I put them away. Take what I learned and write other work. Publish it. Take out the older work with fresh eyes. Fix it or decide it stands well as it and try again.

    Eventually, everything finds a home.

    it’s like dating. It’s highly unlikely you will find your soul mate the first time out. You have to date around a bit. Here, you’re trying to find the soul mate for your book.

    Remember, as writers, nothing is ever wasted. Every word we put down gets us somewhere we couldn’t be without it.

  3. A wonderful blog. As writers, there are many projects that never get off the ground despite the fact that we may love them. Sadly, even if editors love them in return, many decisions in publishing today are predicated on numbers and marketing. Luckily, it is a changing environment in that there are more opportunities for being able to get your work to the public without losing thousands. Thanks for sharing your writing experience.

  4. at least you managed to attract an agent. i can’t even do that. i’ve written three novels, and two of them are actually good. it’s a much worse feeling when you can’t even find a publishing professional to at least advocate for your book.

    i’m not saying you’re not right to feel upset or hurt that your agent hasn’t sold your book yet. but it could be much worse, and you ought to know that.

    i truly dread querying with the new novel i’ve completed. in fact, i’m seriously thinking of giving up on writing. at all. as much as i love to write, love to tell stories, this is what i’ve come to: i’ve battered my head against the stone wall of agents and come away empty and hurting. maybe it’s time to put away this dream before it kills me.

  5. Pingback: General Writing: When Is It Time To Say Enough? « What Did You Learn?

  6. I relate to the personification: novel as a friend, novel (implicitly) as a baby, novel as someone you love, someone you talk too: “Goodbye, goodbye, novel #1”
    I’m struck by two competing thoughts. On the on hand, there is a certain liberation in letting something go, once and for all, when you realize that it’s just not working, and no matter what you try, you just can’t fix it.
    The hard thing about this post is that’s not what’s happening here. You clearly still love, believe in, even cherish this novel. It’s not you that has determined it’s not working — it’s the system, and the system can be capricious and arbitrary.
    Your raw feeling about the book really comes through, which makes me wonder if it still might have a faint pulse afterall. And the very good news is you have another novel coming on its heels, which makes me hope, perhaps, this might prove to be a case of the queen is dead, long live the queen.

  7. This is a heartfelt, brave, well-written piece. My first novel is in a drawer. I have published three novels since. I have yet another novel that is in a drawer–that I wrote, and it left me/died on me when I was 400 pages into it. I find that for me, the key is to remember is that just because a book is in a drawer does not mean that it can’t someday rise out of that. It doesn’t mean it will. But it doesn’t mean it won’t. It doesn’t mean you have to push through it now and make it happen, unless that is what you feel led to do. Sometimes you can go back and strip-mine those pieces, those passages and pages, that still have life, that you can’t bear to lose, torque the details, and transmute them to the page, and let them take a different kind of life in a new story. And sometimes you just need to leave the integrity of those pages intact, in that drawer, and trust that there may be a time for them to resurface down the road. I loved this piece. It was honest and it moved me. Well-done.

  8. I do like it when writers are brave enough to write something like this and I thank you for this essay. Reading your bio, with your list of stellar credits, that your stories have been published in a number of well respected journals, that you’ve had a novella published and that an excerpt of your current novel won a prize and, lastly, that your MFA is from the number one MFA program in the country — the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I can imagine the pressure you feel to get your novel published.

    But you’ve also had great success and I guess you need to concentrate on the positive. In this crazy world of publishing (which is getting crazier by the minute), there is always something we’re not getting. Whether it’s not being able to get an agent, or when the book *is* published not being able to get reviewed in the NY Times (or reviewed at all), or not getting a good advertising budget from the publisher or the book not selling well or getting a hardcover deal but no paperback release or *only* a release in trade paper, there are just, well, so many other things to look forward to. :-) So I guess we all have to just keep writing. My “debut” novel, by the way, was the *fifth* I’d written.

    You could, though, self-publish on the platform of an Iowa MFA grad who puts out the e-book of the novel she couldn’t sell traditionally. That might not be a bad way to go. :-) Best of luck to you!

  9. Almost all writers who take their craft seriously have a novel in a drawer somewhere. And that’s okay. Because sometimes these “failed efforts” become Lazarus novels, works that were declared dead, perhaps for decades, and then somehow arose.
    Right now my agent is helping me edit a novel that I wrote in 1986. That is not a misprint. I was a young mother, sometime between the birth of my children who are now 26 and 22 and I got this wild idea for a novel about Jack the Ripper. There was no Internet in those days so I researched it in the local library with my baby strapped to my chest.
    Of course it didn’t sell.
    Fast forward a quarter of a century. I now have an agent who says to me one day, in an offhand way ,”I’m looking for a mystery.” I said “Really?” and that night I rose up out of a deep sleep at 3 am and thought “Wait a minute. Didn’t I once write a mystery?”
    And I walked into my garage, opened one of those big tupperware containers where I keep old work and it was right on top. Looked like the frigging dead sea scrolls – paper turned yellow, typing barely legible, and it had been printed on a dot matrix printer so the edges of the pages were bumpy and serated.
    But the story was pretty good.
    Pretty good. I could see why it didn’t sell. I’m a far better writer than I was 25 years ago so I set to work on an eviserating re-write. Changed more than I kept. The resultant book is very good. I think my agent will be able to sell it.
    I’ve heard of other writers who went back to early work, cannibalized or culled from it, and created whole new things that had the kernel of the original book.
    So maybe your darling isn’t dead. This is a fairy tale industry. Try to think of her as sleeping.

  10. This is a very brave and moving piece. If it makes you feel any better, I endured two (2) years of maddening “we loved it but we have no idea how to market it because it’s weird that it’s two genres at once” rejection letters before my first novel finally sold. I’d long since given up on it and had almost finished my second novel by the time the phone call came.

  11. My paradigm has already shifted, apparently, because when I read the title of this post I thought you were saying that your published novel wasn’t selling in the marketplace – lol! When I got an agent with my third novel I thought, “And it took Nicholas Sparks 4 novels to get an agent.” – lol! Unfortunately, my agent didn’t sell it so I pubbed it myself and with the digital world, it is still selling in the marketplace.

    Like Wendy said, with so many things that can go wrong, we must celebrate what is going right!

    Let us know which way you go…

  12. I published a book which, due to various factors beyond the book’s control, sank like a stone. My second book, which I guess I’d subconsciously thought would be published, wasn’t, and that hit hard.

    Reading your piece reminded me of what I went through, but I can say, now that distance has deadened the initial panic, that it made me a stronger writer, even, perhaps, a stronger person. I no longer wrote to publish but wrote, as I originally did, as we all should, for fun. If you think something might not be published, if you write without that expectation and hope that it will one day be published–a hope which, I think, every young writer who enters into a workshop harbors, to some degree–then you are writing first and foremost for the story itself, and it will be a better story because of it. Easy to say, hard to implement. And rejection hurts like a bitch. I still haven’t published another book, might never again. Probably not a day will pass when some kind of anger wells up inside. What if my agent sent it out for one more week? What if I changed the title? And you’ll probably write yourself into circles for a while. But when you break through–when you really shed the shell of writing-for-publishing–you will do something that surprises you, that pushes the boundaries not only of your own imagination but our collective imagination. And that, I have to believe, will find its way out into the world somehow.

    Long before any of my own publishing hard knocks, I wrote to one of my favorite writers, DeLillo, and to my surprise he wrote back. His advice applied to what happened to me after my first book came out, and it still applies to everything I do. “Don’t place all your hopes on one book. The ones that follow, in the long scheme of a writer’s life, will eventually count for more. Keep going, keep reading, keep learning.”

  14. First of all, thank you for sharing this. It’s an act of courage to be so honest and raw and vulnerable. Secondly, I’m so sorry to hear that it’s been so hard. As an aspiring writer, I can totally feel this angst for and with you. Lastly, I can only imagine that nine months seems endless…but I do think there is still MUCH to hope for! I don’t think it’s time to cash out the chips and mourn the loss yet.

    Back in December, Natalie Whipple wrote very bravely about being out on sub for 15 months (and that was 8 months ago!) and sure enough, a few weeks ago, her book sold! Even though I’ve never met her (only read her blog), I was absolutely THRILLED for her. And I hold out the same hope for you.

    Good luck!!

  15. “There’s a moment, right before a newborn baby breaks into a wail…” If you can can write like THAT, the fault’s gotta be on them, not you….

    I heard somewhere that when Robert DeNiro was a struggling actor going to auditions he never worried about them, or about getting parts- in fact, he’d apparantly fall fast asleep in his chair, right in front of the directors! He said rejection never bothered him because its was so impersonal- they didn’t know him for more than 5 mins, so why feel rejected?

    I’d like to second (or third) the comments which remark what a brave and moving piece this is- I really enjoyed reading it, it resonated with me, and I hope that you self-publish your novel at least, because I for one (and I’m probably not alone in this) would love to read it!

  16. The best thing you can do is write another book. Then after that, another. With three manuscripts take the world by storm and self-publish. Success in self-publishing is down to two things…a terrific book, followed by others. Approach the situation from a place of empowerment, not fear. And watch the magic.

  17. I happily shelved my first novel. I just couldn’t live with it anymore. (I’ve always thought first novels held more instructional value than actual value anyway.) But, I’m with you – I’d be pretty devastated if my second didn’t sell. Good luck with darling #2.

  18. Traditional publishing is on its last legs.

    Self-publish it as an ebook.

    I sold eight books to big houses, and I’ve made more in the last six months on ebooks than I made in the previous ten years with the Big 6.

  19. The comments here show such an outpouring of empathy and support from other writers. Puts the lie to all those stories about competitive snarky writers. But it is also interesting how the major reaction to the true emotions you have so honestly revealed is to tell you how you should/could feel about your situation. Though this is obviously well meant my reaction was, wow, I really get how you feel. Over the past few days I have been accepting that a cherished dream of mine is quite probably not going to happen. It is a dream I have been pursuing for 40 years. It hurts like hell in all the ways a feeling of failure can hurt. Someone very close to me was giving me “understanding” and “moral support” by pointing out how it was just the way things go, I didn’t do anything wrong, it might be for the best, blah, blah, blah. Last thing I wanted to hear and no, I didn’t want a hug either. So Edan, I will just say it again. I really get how you feel. And thanks for putting your experience into words.

  20. Condolences, and congratulations. Thanks for a great blog memorializing the season and the sentiment.

    Give yourself permission to enjoy burping the baby, show those incongruous boobs to the man who imagines you as a man, and see if in time the first book becomes the “previously unpublished!” book spanning books four and five when your readership and the reviewers are clamoring for more, and you need a break from success. Cheers!

  21. Pingback: Don't Shut Your First Book in The Drawer: Saving Your First Novel The Branding Yourself Book blog

  22. Edan,

    I felt so bad for you, I wrote a new blog post about how you COULD self-publish your first book with a minimal cost, and some extra marketing effort (which you would have to do anyway).

    You can read “Don’t Shut Your First Book in The Drawer: Saving Your First Novel” at http://bit.ly/opZzCI .

  23. I can’t imagine that self-publishing your novel as an ebook on Amazon.com, for example, could be prohibitively expensive. There isn’t much design work involved, but you should get a proof-reader (didn’t you say you had a husband?). Several writers used their success at ebook publishing to get themselves book deals at major publishers. On the flip side, many big-name authors are abandoning the publishing houses to self publish.

    If you don’t feel like promoting the book, isn’t it still better to have it available to readers to stumble upon (and hopefully do the promotion work for you afterwards) than to let it languish un-read in a drawer or computer file?

  25. Love this post. I’m just beginning my first novel. And the confidence building it took just to get brave enough to say that is staggering. To find myself on the other side of all that work having to bravely “kiss it goodbye” is hard to imagine. Thank you so much for sharing this. Because the only thing I’d hate more than NOT getting my first novel published is letting that rejection stop me from writing the next. Kudos to you for sharing!!!

    And p.s. kudos for finding the most horrible self-publishing disasters imaginable. The last one was just sad. The first one made me laugh out loud. And the third one?Pretty sure I threw up in my mouth a little. Thanks for that. :)

  26. I had consigned my baby to death, too. But a friend of mine suggested, “Publish it on Smashwords. What the hell? Give it a chance to live before nailing it into a coffin.” I felt just like you about self-publishing (I’m a writer not a copy-editor, PR agent, promoter, designer, etc.) and the stigmas attached (yeah, a lot of dreck out there but a surprising amount of good work, too).

    But I did it. It’s taken some time, no money, and it’s not flying off the ether-shelves but it’s gotten very good reviews. That is tremendously gratifying and encouraging. This way I’ve at least given my kid a chance. It’s out there in the world. An 18-year old with car keys. I’ll help where I can, but now she is in Fate’s hands.

    Hope to see you on Smashwords someday.

    Baxter Clare Trautman, author The River Within

  27. Thank you, everyone, for your perspectives, encouragement and/or support. I went out on a limb and wrote as honestly as I could about the process, and it’s lovely to have received all this feedback. Thanks for not trolling me, trolls.

    I have many more opinions on self-publishing, which I don’t have time to outline here (see: newborn baby). However, I appreciate all the opinions, and I am never one to rule out an option forever and ever (Except jeggings. You will never ever see me in jeggings ever). Perhaps I will write more extensively about self-publishing and its perceived drawbacks and wondrousness in a later essay.

    Thanks for reading, and happy writing to all!

  28. I know how you feel. The worst of it is that I’ve shelved that first novel myself. I got to the end of it and knew it wasn’t working. (That process took a few months, tears etc. etc.) It was hard, it was painful and it felt as if I was gnawing my own arm off. But I did it.

    I am making good progress with my second novel and am tucking my chin in and going for it. Best wishes with your project. I am looking forward to reading it. :)

  29. It could be worse – you could be one of those writers who does get published but who is then forced to watch in dismay as the marketing team gives it an inappropriate cover and the sales team fails to get it in shops or reviewed, so that after six months you’ve sold almost no copies and effectively advertised to the whole industry that “nobody wants to read your books”. It happens. Publication can kill dreams just as easily as not being published – only more comprehensively. It’s more difficult to pick yourself up after that. believe me.

  30. Pingback: What happens when a novel doesn’t sell? « Against Dumb

  31. Beautifully written and honest post, Edan. It doesn’t really help to know that others have had similar experiences, but as has been said many times, if you have faith in your novel, eventually it will see the light of day and be read given this new world of self-publishing. Hang in there, best of luck with book 2, and congrats on the newborn!

  32. Edan,

    I suppose I’m curious about your “failed book” sentiment. Is your novel failed because it didn’t sell or is it failed because you’ve finally come to realize that you’ve written a failed novel? Because I think there’s a difference. And, as Caridad pointed out, you and your novel might simply fall outside the current marketing trend. I’ve seen bona fide failed novels published because the author and the material were “hot” and probably wouldn’t have been published otherwise…

  33. Like so many other authors I have three manuscripts sitting in a drawer, books 4 & 5 are published via a small publisher. I needed that validation, but I’ll venture into self-publishing soon.

    Keep writing, and listen to Mr. Konrath!

  34. I loved reading your tale of woe, and your comparison of selling the novel and childbirth labor was too true. The whole business of selling is mysterious.

  35. While I think you’re correct that there remains a certain stigma regarding self-published books (one that I share to a degree), I’m bothered that you appear comfortable mocking self-published books. By posting the links you did, presumably these books represent your idea that self-publishing is for “bad” writers.

    Criticism is one thing, but I’m never comfortable when one writer bad-mouths the work of another. Stephen King did that to the author of the “Twilight” novels. Literary merits aside, Mr. King’s dismissal of her work reflected poorly on him, not her work. (And frankly, Stephen King is a genre fiction writer; surely “literary” types dismiss his work too.)

    I’ve read some excellent self-published books, and I’ve read some horrible self-published novels, just as I’ve read horrible literary fiction and excellent genre work.

    As a copy editor by trade, I can certainly commiserate with poorly copy edited books. However, sloppy copy editing is not just found in self-published books; examples abound in the “real” publishing world.

  36. Why is the book dead to you, though? Is a book dead because it is unpublished? Perhaps the question one should ask in times like your last months seem to have been, is this: Why did you write. Publication, of course, and all that it entails. But, is it there, and only there, that writing is “alive” for you? (And: if the honest answer is yes, perhaps you shouldn’t try a second time –not worth the effort, too much at stake.)

  37. Regretably my first book’s manuscript got lost in the move between one house and another and I never saw it again. Oh, yes it went a round of rejection notices and praise-while-not-being-a-fit letters. But its cannibalized soul has been shared between three new books, so I can’t say it’s gone forever. But here’s something I will say to the idea of shelving a book which has not sold:
    “Never give up; never surrender.” Because it never sold in the promotion phase means nothing. People would rather see that the physical exists before they buy, so preordering is nice but not an accurate guage of how well the actual book will do. And there is nothing wrong with tinkering with the thing until it works. Self-publishing is the only way to be sure your book will see print, so don’t be afraid to try it out. Since I started out on my own I have published 14 books, one of them now out of print, and I have never looked back since. It is refreshing to know that you have total control over all aspects of publishing, so that your book looks the way you want it to, you can offer different formats of the content, and so on. Sometimes being traditionally published is not the end to the means, so dust off that thing and republish yourself.

  39. The trick to making a mint in self-publishing is the same trick used in commercial publishing: write a boring thriller.

    I bet our author hasn’t done that.

  40. Take a look at the IsoLibris website, if you believe in your book enough to take a chance, and put up with being edited send it to me, I’m not saying I’ll take it, but I’ll read it.

  41. “I’ve said my eulogy, eaten the casseroles, wept in the shower, screamed into my pillow. I have willed myself to move on. I must, in order to continue my life as a writer.”

    Too perfect. The entire writing process is such a humbling experience. Thank you for a story that all writers can, unfortunately, relate to.

    Onward I say, ever onward :)

  42. I had a neighbor once who had been in the same writing program as Chabon and was bitter because, yes, she got her first novel published, but it didn’t sell like Chabon’s.
    I kept thinking: “For Pete’s sake, you got PUBLISHED.”
    You have an agent – a step up the ladder of success that many never reach.
    There are of course frustrations at every step of the process, but it’s important to register the successes as well.
    Certainly I think the basic idea that the first novel is just part of a larger process is an important one. Maybe if the next one sells, they’ll want to see that first one. Though that’s not always a great idea; I adore “Geek Love” but her first novel looks unreadable. Never mind the novel that came before “A Confederacy of Dunces”. (I only saw the film, mind you, but it didn’t make me want to read the book.)

    This said, I think you have some strange ideas on self-publishing. Print on demand costs the cost of a proof copy; ebooks cost nothing at all. And if you’re afraid self-pubilshing will hurt your image, do what authors have done for centuries: use a pen name. Either way, if the book sells, people will be interested in the author and you can decide whether to “decloak”; if it doesn’t, the question is moot.
    No, this is not as satisfying as having a publisher stand up for your work, but it beats burying your baby forever. And maybe getting it “off your plate” so you can focus on the next one.
    Personally, I have a few “traditional” publishing credits in various collections, but I’ve made thousands of dollars from self-publication.

    Meanwhile, think of all those fillmakers who spend years trying to get financing, struggle to pull together the actual production and then… watch the end result sink like a stone in a few days.
    Fiction writers have it easy when you think about it.

  43. As a thoroughly unemployed copy editor/compositor, I would be happy to edit and lay out your book for e-publication and take a small percentage of the sales. I’ve done this with several other authors. Their books weren’t terribly successful, but they didn’t owe me much money, either :)

  44. Several big-selling authors are good and long-time personal friends of mine, Edan, and most didn’t make it on ms #1. You might be heartened to hear, though, that one of them wrote twenty-seven full novels before he cracked it and immediately became a huge hit … and ALL twenty-seven earlier books on his rejected pile have since been published on the back of continued success and all have done well.

    It’s not the luck of the draw, it’s talent, practice and, mostly, perseverance born of faith in your work that wins the day.

    And there is a middle route you might consider. Several smaller but seriously selective and pro publishers will look at unsolicited submissions that don’t necessarily have agency representation. I’m talking ‘true’ publishers here who will ask for no financial contribution or anything else from an author other than the raw ms and reasonable cooperation through the editorial process, but who freely offer sound professional editing, professional text design and cover art, and everything else they can.

    Their pockets are shallower than those of the big boys, so you should not realistically expect overnight fame and fortune backed by a huge promotion and marketing budget. But you can expect fair but rigorous selectivity of an ms, professional and warm treatment, experience to be gained and respectable publication if your book is accepted.

    I’m afraid our own wee house is closed to new subs until Jan 1 to clear a backlog of releases scheduled for this year and early next (with only a small editorial team we’re limited to a release schedule of between a dozen and twenty new titles a year).

    Meantime, though, if you pop into the ‘For Authors’ section of our website, you’ll find a warts-n-all piece about what a small press can and cannot do for an author. And the submissions guidelines there give a pretty good idea of what a smaller house will need from an unsolicited source. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to post an actual URL in this section, but if you Google my name, you’ll very easily home in.

    If you don’t get a bit by then and decide to give us a whirl, Edan, please feel free to send your sub (synopsis and first two chapters) direct to my own desk (address on site) and remind me of this piece. Even if we can’t go with the book, we should be able to offer sound and helpful advice.

    Good luck and very best wishes. Neil Marr

    PS: And remember what Yogi Bear told his discouraged and hungry wee pal Booboo after yet another picnic basket raid had been foiled by Ranger Smith:: “Cheer up, Booboo. It’s impossible to fail if you don’t stop trying.” Wise advice from a cartoon character, eh? N

  45. PS: Typo apology. I did, of course, mean in the last paragraph before by signature, ‘if you don’t get a BITE by then … ‘ A quick re-read suggested something altogether different because of a finger-slip on the keyboard in a rush. Sorry, Edan, but I must admit to a chuckle at my own wee blooper. Neil

  46. I’ve been an editor for almost 10 years, and I’d really like to read your book and give you some feedback. If you got as far as getting an agent, there had to be some merit to the book. He or she thought it could sell. It might have been something as simple as the book was too long or too short or didn’t have a clear enough genre that made publishers pass because they couldn’t take it as is.

    Also a smaller traditional publisher might not be attractive to your agent, but would be very attractive to you. Smaller presses give smaller advances and 15% of small is pretty damn small, so why would an agent bother? You however could resurrect your baby from the ashes.

    Don’t give up quite yet. Please send it to me.
    Candice

  47. Pingback: These Months of Rejection | Grierson Huffman
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  50. Pingback: What Happens When a Book Doesn’t Sell? » Adad Press

  51. I have to agree with Raymond. I don’t think you can really put the book you love away for GOOD. Maybe put it on a time out for a while as you work on other projects. This book may not be ready to sell now, but who says it won’t if you publish something else?

    I have two book projects. One is my baby and I’m not writing it at the moment. I’m not because I recognize it’s a much, much harder sell. It doesn’t make me love it any less, but I decided to dedicate my time to the one that I think has a better chance. I won’t ever give up on that first book. I’ll go to the grave first.

    You shouldn’t give up on yours either. Maybe a much earned break is what it needs. :)

    Great post though! I’m right there with you on the self-publishing!

  52. My experience with my agent and ‘almost getting there’ charred my soul too. this is a powerful piece and the writing within must be indicative of your style, your reading tastes, and your love of language. Alice Munro is my hero in many ways and I can see by how you write here, that she must influence you too.

    Self Publishing through ebooks has restored some of the flesh beneath the char.

    I’m so glad I read this. You touched me deeply.

    thankyou

  53. If you consider your novel truly dead and you’ve given up on traditional publishing, post it to Kindle & Nookbooks. Use a pseudonym if you want to keep your real name for the traditional publishing. No cost to post and believe me, it feels good to see the sales.

    Your second novel, third novel, fourth novel–Keep sending those to the publishing houses. In the meanwhile, your first book will give you an audience that you can later (if you choose) tie to your publishing company.

    An “Almost Book” is a book worth publishing. The fact that your agent, a professional in the field, likes it and thinks it worth selling, means that someone on Kindle will, too.

  54. Pingback: Industry News-August 28 » RWA-WF

  55. It saddens me to see you giving up on your story. No writer should ever let the gatekeepers of the traditional publishing machine stop her from sharing her story and reaching her readers. When it comes down to it, the readers have always been and will always be the REAL gatekeepers to publishing success.

    Listen to J.A. Konrath: “Traditional publishing is on its last legs. Self-publish it as an ebook. I sold eight books to big houses, and I’ve made more in the last six months on ebooks than I made in the previous ten years with the Big 6.” The man knows what he’s talking about.

    You don’t need permission anymore. Technology has completely changed the publishing industry playing field. Evolve or perish.

  56. Is it possible, and I know I’m going to be criticized here … but is it possible that it isn’t good enough for publication? I think agents and editors are cruel in their ability to spot the flaws and weaknesses of a substandard MS and clearly they didn’t think yours was ready for primetime. This will make you better.

  57. Pingback: Friday Finds: Rejection, Abandonment & Persistence
  59. Pingback: Kill the First Novel? Are You Insane? «

  60. Late to the party as usual–sorry about that!

    I just wanted to say I have a novel in a drawer, and not listening to those people who wanted me to keep going, but instead listening to myself and putting it aside, was both one of the hardest and best things I’ve done as a writer.

    You are right to make grief analogies. It’s absolutely grief. In my case the book was one I had worked on for over eight years, through two babies. It was going to prove to the world that I had a brain, that I wasn’t just a mommy. Only it didn’t. So I put it aside and had another baby, and eventually wrote another book, which was published traditionally, and am working on my next one (for which I already have a contract, hallelujah).

    About self-pubbing: I have nothing snarky to say, but if you don’t want to go that route then don’t. There are lots of very good reasons not to. I didn’t want to either. There is a lot of honor in saying this book didn’t make it, and I’m accepting it and moving on.

    Best of luck to you–I am sure you are going to make it.

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  68. Hang in there! I wrote my first novel at 29. Not published and never will be….thank God. Last year, aged 39, I sold my second novel…and my third. Currently, I am in negotiations to sell my fourth. This is probably depressing for you in a…oh my god, I will slash my wrists if I have to wait another decade. Don’t worry, you won’t have to. I waited nearly 9 years to write the second novel. Get working on yours now and enjoy! A.

  69. This is a very moving article that will stay with me for a long time. I applied for a writing workshop and only knew I was rejected after the dates had pst. I kept hoping I would be reached–I never was. It is your choice eventually, to go self publishing under a pseudonym and a (possible) sex change or to le your baby die. You still love your baby and so did your agent, the idea of it not being good enough is bogus. For books, goodness is in the mind of your readers. I think you should a least let them read it, for a fee or free.

    Congratulations on your new baby, I’ll be rooting for you which ever way you go.

  70. sounds like to me your buying into the publishing system. If your book doesn’t sell, get a new agent and try and sell it again.

  71. Pingback: Weekly Lines: A Write Disappointment – The Foundling
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  73. Whoa. I am an old hack. I’ve had over 12 novels published (Avon Books, Zebra Books, Simon and Schuster) AND I’ve had a zillion (<–meaning a devastating and incalculable number) rejections. I often come SO close. My six or seven scripts have been optioned by academy award winning producers, Warner Bros., Paramount, Julian Krainin Productions over 25 times, which has to be some kind of record. They have won awards, even a Nicholl Fellowship runner up (back when they had a runner up.) So I get rejection. I think the MAIN reason for rejection has nothing to do with writing and everything to do with story. The vast majority of stories are, like, okay, especially for the writer. Just okay is not enough anymore at all. Unless you have a STRONG literary talent, like Toni Morrison or Ocean Vuong, your story has to be one that when you share it with a totally stranger they say these words, "Wow. That is a great story." This is what it takes these days. Unless you have that, it won't matter if you do get it published. You won't have any readers and this is the problem of a vast majority of published writers.

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● ●
Essays

Happy Belated Birthday James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – November 30, 1987)

Essays
August 6, 2008 | 1 book mentioned 5 min read

Buzz Poole, the managing editor of Mark Batty Publisher, has written for numerous publications, and is an infrequent contributor to The Millions. Keep up with him and his adventures in surprising iconography at the Madonna of the Toast blog.The first time I encountered James Baldwin, when I read Another Country, his work resonated immediately. With his ability to render an educated, upper-middle class white woman as perceptively as an ignored, begging-for-attention black musician who hurls himself off the George Washington Bridge, Baldwin revealed to me the problem with the race problem: no one really wants to talk about it. In America, it seems preferable to avoid the problem, or ignore its magnitude all together. Nothing in any of Baldwin’s writing seems dated today. The reason for this is simple (and disheartening): he understood America because it had made such an indelible and problematic impression on him, the people he grew up around and lived amongst, black and white.In identifying the central issue of racial tension in America as America’s unwillingness to accept the fact that it doesn’t have the faintest clue how to endeavor the Herculean feat of resolving the problem, Baldwin proselytizes the faith of the individual, investing in every single person the power to enact change.In the March 31, 2008, issue of the New Yorker, George Packer wrote a piece titled “Native Son,” a response to Senator Barack Obama’s, “rap on race” (to borrow another title from Baldwin, and Margaret Mead) at the US Constitution Center in Philadelphia on March 18. With the exception of some random comments in blog posts, this article marks the only searchable connection that has been made between these two figures.Packer accurately characterized Obama’s Philadelphia speech as one of “moral and intellectual intricacy,” likening it to Baldwin’s essay “Notes of a Native Son,” which is framed by the death of Baldwin’s father, “the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas.” The essay wrestles with Baldwin’s realization of why his father had become so full of hate, for everyone, and how that hatred was really Baldwin’s only inheritance. Baldwin’s father’s attitude about the world at large was a symptom of a rage that “can wreck more important things than race relations… [and] one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it.”Packer wrote of Baldwin’s essay that it is “about the distorting power of rage, the charge to acknowledge the inheritance of racism without being defined by it.” These last five words – “without being defined by it” – undercut one of the revelatory tenets of Baldwin’s entire body of work, however. For Baldwin, it was not the fact that he was black that caused him consternation, but what it meant to be black in America. It was racism that defined his country and his place within it.To be sure, at the heart of all of Baldwin’s writings, fiction and nonfiction, the issue of race throbs. It cannot be denied that issues of race formed America, and continue to do so today. What Baldwin urged readers to do is accept this fact and from acceptance create a dialogue that permits true communication. In his seminal essay, “The Discovery of What it Means to Be an American,” Baldwin declared, “The time has come, God knows, for us to examine ourselves, but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here.” Perpetuated by entities such as the government, media, corporations and the church, the American myth has always been very powerful, but also very misleading. Baldwin recognized this contradiction and spent a lifetime attempting to defeat the deception, or if nothing else to confront it head-on. For all of the constrictive structures Baldwin dealt with in his writing, both social and physical, he ultimately laid the responsibility for change in the only place change can really occur: with the individual. In the essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” he wrote, “[O]ur humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult – that is, accept it.”The essay “A Stranger in the Village,” from the collection of essays Notes of a Native Son, exemplifies this notion of acceptance in his dissection of how the residents of a small, isolated Swiss mountain village react to his presence, which includes shouts from children of “Neger! Neger!,” the children oblivious to the “echoes this sound raises in [Baldwin].” Such reactions, in light of the setting – namely, not America – did not offend Baldwin so much as magnify for him what it takes to approach an understanding of who we are as individuals defined by characteristics that only account for a portion of our identities: “No one, after all, can be liked whose human weight and complexity cannot be, or has not been, admitted.” Baldwin wrote of African Americans looking to trace their ancestry back to Africa, that “to go back so far [they] will find [their] journey through time abruptly arrested by the signature of the bill of sale which served as the entrance paper for [their] ancestor.” According to Baldwin, it is a lack of history, the newness of America, that damns us all, black and white, should we not tare the scales of understanding to compensate for the void of an American history that pre-dates the arrival of African slaves in an unnamed America.The issue is not black and white, or even the concept of racism; racism is human and not particular to America. It is an issue of defining what it means to be an American, and by default, an issue of defining America as an entity that can freight such a definition. Beyond citizenship, defining an American seems damn near impossible. We certainly do not all speak English as a first language; our geographies vary greatly, as do our incomes, values and priorities. How then do we reconcile the past and present to best forge our future?In “Notes of a Native Son,” Baldwin announced, “nothing is ever escaped.” Baldwin knew he needed to define his home in order to cope with it, even when he lived abroad. It was his time observing the Old World that illuminated for him the intricacies of the New World. His definition of Americans relied on the intimate relationship between black Americans and white ones, as described in “Stranger in the Village”: “He is not a visitor to the West, but a citizen there, an American; as American as the Americans who despise him, the Americans who fear him, the Americans who love him – the Americans who became less than themselves, or rose to be greater than themselves by virtue of the fact that the challenge he represented was inescapable.” As Baldwin saw it, the only way we could arrive at any sort of cogent definition for us as citizens of a single nation is when we accept what it means to be as inexorably linked to our African and European (and Asian and South American and Australian) pasts as we are severed from them by this magnificently unwieldy country that we all now call home.Baldwin biographer W.J. Weatherby wrote of how accusations by one of Baldwin’s most outspoken critics, Eldridge Cleaver, were framed as “a politician’s, not a writer’s, a would-be spokesperson, not a witness.'” This is not intended to be a political piece, yet in this political season, where there is so much talk about what it does mean to be an American, the ideas that define Baldwin’s work signpost a path that might just lead us out of the labyrinth of pundits, spin doctors and politicians because of his ability to relate his life’s hardships and epiphanies, resulting in his readers being provided a perspective they may not have otherwise had.If nothing else, if you pick up one of these collections of essays, or Another Country, or Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone or Giovanni’s Room, all of which exude Baldwin’s constant demands for individual empowerment, and what happens when these demands are ignored or repressed, you can realize that Baldwin’s need to plumb these difficult depths was because they were all too often the barriers that prohibited what Baldwin believed was the essence of life: the apotheosis of love through human communion.Happy belated birthday, James Baldwin, you would have been 84 years old. I don’t think much has changed since you left us, though it certainly isn’t because you didn’t supply us with enough ideas to think about and discuss.

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 5 min read
Essays

The Artist and the Fly

Essays
August 14, 2013 | 1 book mentioned 5 7 min read

Put yourself in her shoes. She is a performer. She is slim and poised and recondite insofar as her comportment seems to withdraw her from the rest of us, who are mortal and dim in contrast. I am fixated on a shred of almond skin wedged between my teeth. I am worried about a flap of cuticle come loose from my nailbed. I am in the audience at the New York Public Library for a celebration of the director Robert Wilson’s 70th birthday. The performer is joined by other luminaries — Rufus Wainwright and Lou Reed. Each has something hagiographic to say about Wilson. Lou Reed previews his collaboration with Metallica, citing Wilson as its impetus. Wainwright is forced to sing a cappella when the audio system craps out, proving that his voice really is that good. The performer recites a passage from Wilson’s collaborative opera with Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach. She has the text in front of her, but she does not need it; she’s had this part memorized for years. Her recital is lovely, and the lilt and cadence of her voice are mesmerizing. But then halfway through, something happens that gets me thinking about artistry and solipsism and the fallout of one marrying up with the other.

What happens is: A giant fly begins to circle the performer’s face. She is wearing a bone microphone, which amplifies the buzz as this fly alights on her forehead. Her nose. Her eye and even on the microphone head, itself. The buzzing is so loud, it feels like this fly is in my own ear canal. So. Put yourself in her shoes and what would you do? Swat the fly. Ten out of ten of you swats the fly. Gets up. Stops reciting. What none of you do is carry on as if unaware of the fly. As if possessed of such composure, you are the most unflappable person on earth. The very essence of the show must go on. Lucinda Childs finished reciting without having acknowledged the fly in any way. The library might have caught on fire — hell, the entire city might have caught on fire — but Childs would carry on. Unperturbed. Impregnable.

I have thought about this moment in the library with pathological intensity since then. I have told the story of the Artist and the Fly many times, but always with the same awe. Awe and anxiety because the degree of professionalism on display in Childs’s refusal to admit the fly into her dispatch of Einstein on the Beach seemed to encroach on a category of behavior that doesn’t, for instance, concede the fly exists at all.

Now, I am not claiming that Childs is, herself, a solipsist (if you watch the video, you can see her flinch ever so slightly) but that she performed a brand of solipsism that is anathema to what art does so well, which is to engage, however obliquely, with the fraught stuff of our lives. Art that does not do this — art that cannot see past itself — is gospel. Propaganda. It is removed and distant and wholly ineffective when it comes to providing us with a chance to take shelter in each other’s humanity.

I left the library feeling uncomfortable. And a little depressed. After all, Childs was just doing her job. Childs was just doing what most of us artists are taught to do, which is to preserve what John Gardner has famously called the “fictional dream” — the sustained and vivid universe of a novel or story that is successful only if it resists puncture. The “fictional dream” does not acknowledge itself; it does not acknowledge us. Ninety percent of fiction operates with the “fictional dream” in mind. My fiction operates with the “fictional dream” in mind. So what, exactly, is the problem?

Well, okay, perhaps I can best answer this by thinking through our romance with bloopers. Turns out I have a friend who watches blooper reels with some frequency. On YouTube, where a search for “bloopers” turns up 11,900,000 results while a search for “cats” — and who doesn’t love a cat video? — turns up a mere 11,400,000 results. Bloopers appeal to people because they are genuine. And more importantly, they are genuine precisely because they break form. They expose artistry as a sham and, in so doing, relieve the anxiety of distance that attends all our experiences of art. My friend watches bloopers when he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He says they orient him. That they remind him people are real and he is real, which is by way of tethering us to each other.

Naturally, then, many artists have decided that one solution to the problem of art and artifice is to recreate the effect of a blooper. Hence the long tradition in the arts of breaking the fourth wall on purpose. Shakespeare did it with aplomb. I’m thinking of Henry V (and of course a Midsummer Night’s Dream) where Henry and Puck, respectively, apologize for the plays’ shortcomings or at least beg for our indulgence. I’m thinking of Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote, which are overtly aware of themselves as art. I’m thinking of the Muppets, whose “Pigs in Space” skit always had the astro-swine shocked whenever the skit’s theme music played (which trope was picked up and amplified by the lyrics of the theme song for “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show”: “This is the theme to Garry’s show, the opening theme to Garry’s show, this is the music that you hear as you watch the credits.”) I’m thinking of the many many novels that toy with themselves as novels, which is all by way of foregrounding how deficient art must be when it comes to representation.

More recently, I am reminded of House of Cards, which I watched obsessively over three days a couple months ago. Do the math, that is four+ shows a night. Kevin Spacey, whom I last saw play Richard III at BAM, plays Francis Underwood, who is Richard’s equal for monomania and malice. And just like Richard, Underwood frequently breaks the action to soliloquize the audience. He tells us what he’s thinking. He tells us who everyone is. He makes us accomplice to his plans just for being privy to them. To start his first address to the audience in episode one, he looks at the camera and says, “Oh!” as if startled to find us there watching him or perhaps startled to have forgotten we were there. The gambit is designed to immerse us more completely in his universe, though it actually has the opposite effect of reminding me that his universe is not real.

You’d think, given my reservations about the fictional dream, that I’d find comfort in these metafictions. That I’d feel closer to these works for being acknowledged by them. But I don’t. On the contrary, I generally find them ridiculous. Whenever Francis soliloquizes the screen, it seems ridiculous! When Shakespeare enacts what the academics call “medium awareness,” it feels too clever by half. And if I read one more novel that pokes fun at its being a novel, I might cry. Look at me, I am art! I am foregrounding problems of representation! Work like this often feels more egocentric and solipsistic than art that just leaves it alone.

My friend who watches bloopers thinks the problem here is about responsibility and distance. The fictional dream allows us to abdicate responsibility: we can turn ourselves over to a knowing authority and check our incredulities at the door. But the dream, for being a dream, can also distance us from the very thing the dream depicts, no matter how seamlessly it is done. Alternately, the bloopers reel and self-reflexive fiction feel intimate though perhaps onerous for burdening us with evidence that our lives are real, and that real life is hard.

And so, a problem that can be recast as a debate about the efficacy of art. One the one hand: art has an asymptotic relationship with “truth,” with the world, so that to be an artist necessarily means to be a failure. Always and only a failure. On the other hand is an idea advanced by Tim O’Brien, who is endlessly quoted in this context — “Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth” — and hailed for his notion that “story truth” is a highly manipulated version of the real deal that equals and often exceeds the real deal’s power of effect.<

O’Brien neuters the problem of artifice and remove by recasting them as assets in the project of isolating and dramatizing what is powerful in our experience of life. Who needs to see someone swat madly at a fly when you can better experience its pathos (e.g., an elegant woman accosted by the humdrum) in a play or novel that will do it better? Such, at least, is what Tim O’Brien might say.

And what I say, too, thanks to the following experience I had at the Metropolitan Opera, where I saw Don Carlo a few months ago. In the first act, Don Carlo and his betrothed sing of their love. They are in a forest and Don Carlo, being the gentleman that he is, makes a fire. A real fire, on a flammable stage at the Met. Ten minutes later, a man in jeans and T-shirt marched onstage with a fire extinguisher. He didn’t look at the audience, he even seemed bored, but in front of a full house, while the singers were performing, he blasted the fire and walked off. At first, I thought he was part of the production. Don Carlo finds out his fiancée is actually intended for his father (ah, opera), at which point some guy destroys the emblem of their love. It seemed apt. Quickly, though, I realized this was not part of the plan. The audience started to laugh. I was sitting three rows from the pit, so I could see the conductor (full disclosure, the conductor was Lorin Maazel, who is my father) carry on as if nothing had happened. Meantime, the stagehand, whose intentions were good, did not actually manage to put out the fire. Instead, he left it smoldering, so that the stage began to fill with smoke. How can you sing when your lungs are filled with smoke? But the performers sang on, though the soprano had to turn her back to the audience (possibly to stifle a laugh) while the tenor seemed less than committed to the moment. They did not swat the fly but they did acknowledge the world’s intrusion on their art.

The upshot? I felt badly for the singers. I felt badly for my dad. And I felt somewhat self-conscious about being at the opera, whose pretensions and artifice were made uppermost thanks to the stagehand. But mostly, for that moment, I felt cheated of the magic that is Don Carlo. A three-hour disquisition in song on the big, human feelings: love, grief, rage, despair. Which is when I began to feel good about art that refuses to concede I am alive.

From Einstein on the Beach: “These are the days my friends and these are my days my friends.” So long as art continues to record those days, why should it have to acknowledge my days in particular? I don’t need to be noticed in the moment, just in the main. I am, after all, but a fly. One among many. So, yeah, don’t mind me. Carry on.

Image via Ali Arsh/Flickr

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 5 7 min read
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