In a comment on a recent
New York Times editorial, a reader in North Carolina reported noticing that there were no butterflies on her bushes for the first time this year. The spring peepers were growing fainter in the pond, there were few bees, and for the first time, every birds’ nest in her yard had failed, she said. It’s familiar news. Here on the other side of the country, where I am sitting now, there have been fewer hummingbirds at the feeders this year. Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, a biologist conducting a survey of elephants found 36 at a reserve where he’d expected to see 300. It seems that such absences, repeated again and again, are coming to define our time. They are signs of a greater calamity, it’s true, and we often read them as such—failing to register them as events in their own right. But the truth is that our planet is growing lonelier now. Do we remember, for instance, the intimacy we shared with other animals, the ones not kept in zoos? The way bats would start flickering above us as the summer evening grew dim or the childhood bee stings we’d get running barefooted over the lawn? The loss of such small, local experiences are more than just environmental facts but are emotional truths.
We are living in the midst of the worst die-off since the dinosaurs fell victim to an asteroid 65 million years ago, and though certain local effects are noticeable, the scope of the carnage is hard to picture as a whole. In
The Sixth Extinction,
New Yorker staff writer
Elizabeth Kolbert attempts a rough accounting: If global warming continues apace, it’s estimated “that one-third of all reef building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion.” Amphibians, the most vulnerable group, are disappearing at as much as 45,000 times their normal rate, hence the lack of peepers in the pond. “Look around,” one scientist tells Kolbert. “Kill half of what you see…That’s what we could be talking about.” Coral reefs are not expected to make it to mid-century.
The etiology of this crisis is indisputable: Whatever the proximal causes, human beings are the asteroids this time. This is not news; we’ve been aware of our destructive potential for some time, though there are those still who deny it. It’s not quite as clear what we should do with this knowledge, though, and so—whether from guilt, nostalgia, or as a way to put off a reckoning—we tell each other stories about extinction. In fact, Kolbert’s
Sixth Extinction falls into a tradition stretching back at least as far as 1848’s
The Dodo and its Kindred—a genre of ecological “true-crime” that chronicles disappearance and implicates human beings in the mass death of others in our world.
1.
Joel Greenberg’s recent
A Feathered River Across the Sky is an exemplary entrant in the genre. Meticulously researched and almost loving in its level of detail, it tells the story of the passenger pigeon, which was once the most numerous bird in America but now one of our emblems of loss. In 1860, at Fort Mississauga in Ontario,
Major W. Ross King watched a group of passenger pigeons blot out the sun for hours. This flock was later estimated to include 3,717,120,000 individual birds passing over in a single long sheet. In 1895, two flocks were observed in the province: the first made up of 13 birds, the second just 11. By 1910, there were no flocks at all, and all that remained of the passenger pigeon was a bird named Martha, living in a cage at the Cincinnati Zoo; she died four years later. This year marks the hundredth anniversary since the passenger pigeon’s extinction.
Greenburg traces the natural history of the vanished bird like someone trying to describe a phantom, taking care to present its case as faithfully as he can: its diet, breeding habits (as far as they can be guessed at), and tendency to roost in concentrations so great that they could destroy entire forests overnight. Much of the book is dedicated to a condemnatory account of humans’ wholesale slaughter of this abundance of meat in the sky. The pigeons were apparently good eating and easy entertainment; hunters used everything from rifles, nets, and poles to bare hands and even cannons to gather the bounty. As a result, more birds were killed than could be consumed; the rest were used as fertilizer, fed to dogs and pigs, or simply thrown away.
Greenburg’s displeasure at the enthusiasm of 19th century hunters is typical of many extinction narratives. We are meant, as the title of another recent passenger pigeon story has it, to take a “message from Martha.” Self-flagellation is all very well, but knowing—and condemning—the human tendency not to care much for the wellbeing of other species is neither surprising nor especially helpful in terms of effecting change. We have not become better. Greenberg—not just an elegist but an activist as well—points out that similar forms of profligate slaughter continue today, having merely changed venue. On open ocean, seine nets and other modern gadgetry allow commercial fleets to net more than four million tons of tuna—from just four species—every year.
Despite emblematic cases like the passenger pigeon’s, it seems as though we have little real grasp of what extinction really means—for us, for the future of this world of ours, or (though their feelings are rarely considered) for those going extinct. Passionate reports like Greenberg’s have the feeling of histories neatly boxed up and removed from our immediate physical and emotional realities despite their relevance to us now. In such accounts, anxiety over the present alternates with a sort of excited interest in the past— fascination bordering on nostalgia for what amounts to a biological curio.
2. Interest is a primary driver of
The Sixth Extinction, in which Kolbert provides an entertaining, if occasionally troubling, geological and biological history of our moment in the context of die-offs past. The story, laid out in chapters using a single species as a way into a theme, is full of human character, humor, and unexpected facts. Kolbert herself can be seen speaking to scientists and observing animals and fossils in the wild.
Part of her accomplishment is in underlining the scope of the current cataclysm. As research into the previous five major extinction events teaches her, the environment is changing so quickly that survival will be largely a product of chance. Mass extinction happens when the rules of survival are suddenly changed and traits that have been adaptive in the past become no use at all. Still, everything exists today because
something happened to survive before, and the future will be populated by creatures evolved from whatever happens to survive us now. Most likely that will be those hardy invaders whose territory we’ve inadvertently expanded ourselves—probably rats. The biomass of the future will be a human artifact, in other words, like the climate, the course of rivers, the amount of fixed nitrogen, and the variety of habitat, among many other things. And so this moment offers a strange, geological lengthening of time, inscribing our errors onto millions of years of history. Yet as extensive as the changes of the Anthropocene have been,
Homo sapiens were always troublesome beasts. Early humans were responsible for extinctions, too, she finds, from moas to saber tooth tigers and giant ground sloths, as well as some of our own relations, including the Neanderthal, the Denisovians, and the Florensian “hobbit.” (It does seem as though we were bent on being alone; all the great apes that survive today, ourselves excepted, are currently in danger of extinction.) Given this propensity, Kolbert largely chooses not to offer hope. Her conclusion is a troubling one: “With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it…[which] is also the capacity to destroy it…If you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book on your lap.”
Where Kolbert locates the root of our environmental destructiveness in the capacity for symbolic thought, a more common explanation—though no less problematic in its way—is that an attitude of anthropocentrism is to blame. This means not just the firm separation of “human” and “nature,” but the belief that the planet is intended for our use and has meaning to humans alone. Knowing that the human-spread chytrid virus is almost certain to destroy most of the world’s amphibians, I think at once of the eeriness of a quiet spring pond and only later think what that pond was to the frogs. Given new research into animal consciousness and capacity for thought, such oversights become harder and harder to justify.
3. Still, our perspective is human, and excepting a kind of radical empathy, we have no other. It’s the human perspective the poet
Melanie Challenger takes in her book
On Extinction. She examines the question of mankind’s alienation from nature through the lens of cultural loss, grappling with the emotional aspects of extinction by reading it through a progressive human shift away from dependence on the natural world. The loss of distinct, local forms of knowledge based on a relationship to place is “akin to the disappearance of diversity in nature.” Her well-made point is that as we became less dependent on local landscapes, we stopped caring as much for the things that were in them. The environmental devastation that followed then only turned us further away. The problem with Challenger’s argument is that the equivalence of cultural and biological diversity confuses the question. That some Inuit shop at supermarkets rather than hunting on the land is of a different order than the fact that there is no longer a golden toad. Casting human cultural loss in the light of extinction also covers over the need to consider the fact that “human nature” is not solely human at all: not only was it formed through our interaction with other species—from ancient predators, to various microbes, to the creatures we kill and eat—but our very bodies represent a mass of co-existing life forms in themselves. Only 10 percent of the cells in what we consider the “human body” are actually human at all.
Despite this, Challenger does get at a question Kolbert’s work provokes but doesn’t confront: “In the great swathes of time given to the Earth, did it really matter if some forms of life died out?” Is the world worse because there’s no longer such thing as a great auk? Of what value is a dolphin in the end? Pointing the finger human-ward, the answer to this question is not as self-evident as people who care about biodiversity, as a good in itself, might believe. In fact, to return to Kolbert’s broad geologic survey of mass extinctions past, our own is just another blip in the long history of life on earth. Yes, it has taken millions of years for biodiversity to recover after previous extinction events, but it has recovered in the end. “Across these spans of almost imperceptible evolution, other entities always emerged in the place of those that perished,” Challenger writes. The message here is life is pretty sturdy and “nature” or the “wilderness” fairly arbitrary concepts. There is no fixed point in our changing world that we can identify as “natural,” and so the thought of re-wilding becomes quickly absurd: Do we really want billions of passenger pigeons despoiling the crops or giant ground sloths stomping around?
It’s perhaps out of the anxiety such uncertainty generates that extinction books like these are adventure stories of a kind. The author travels the world (Challenger, to her credit, considering her carbon footprint as she does) as a biological tourist of a kind—and the books find themselves solidly embroiled in the same anthropocentric attitudes they pin the crisis on. Despite purportedly addressing a period of mass death, little attention is actually paid to the dead and dying themselves.
And yet, however much human exceptionalism is to blame, part of the lesson of the anthropocene mass extinction is how closely human lives are affected by it, a lesson we are vastly more likely to take to heart than the suffering of any bat or toad; perhaps there is no separation between their suffering and our own. This, in part, is the answer to Challenger’s “so what?” as offered by a new crop of philosophical thinkers, whose work provides a much needed bridge between the humanities and ecological science. If their efforts seem effete in comparison to Kolbert’s vastly more enjoyable narrative, they at least encourage us to step past self-loathing, pity, and the strange excitement those feelings produce. Philosophy, unlike straightforward nonfiction narrative, can hold the kind of uncertainty of which this moment is full.
4. Bill McKibben proclaimed the “end of nature” in the late 1980s, writing that there was no longer anything unaffected by human activity that could be identified as such. In
Hyperobjects, philosopher
Timothy Morton inverts this. In this age of global warming, species loss, and environmental degradation, there is nothing “human” still unaffected by “nature” and so to separate the two becomes absurd. Morton specializes in something called object-oriented ontology, and his book is as difficult as that concept sounds. Still, those able to wade through his occasionally hyperactive prose (the “gigantic coral reef of sparkling things beneath the Heideggerian U-Boat” or “the cupcake aisle of the ontological supermarket”) will find a fairly radical reconsideration of our place in the world. “This is not only a historical age but also a geological one,” Morton writes, echoing Kolbert. “In this period nonhumans make decisive contact with humans, even the ones busy shoring up the differences between humans and the rest.” Notably, by nonhumans Morton means not just animals but things like plutonium, plastics, and atmospheric carbon—what he calls “hyperobjects.” The extension is a little odd, but his demolition of categories leads to a series of forceful points. The end of the world means the end of an idea of a “world” as something other than us. We cannot “get back to nature” because there’s nothing to get back to. Instead, what the environmental crisis makes obvious is that what we called nature and the environment “are in our face—they
are our face.”
In the context of human exceptionalism—as in narratives like Kolbert and Challenger’s—extinction happens “out there” in “nature.” One must travel and seek it out. But if, following Morton, we were to give up the idea of nature altogether—the idea that there is an “elsewhere” that our waste goes to when we toss it down the garbage shoot, an “elsewhere” where the animals die—we can recognize our intimacy not only with the toxic byproducts of our civilization but with the animals that are dying at our hands. Morton calls for an ecology that neither undermines, like Greenberg’s book might be said to do (refusing to see the big picture by focusing on the individual), nor “overmines,” like Kolbert’s at times (burying the individual in its larger system by focusing on the idea survival of “life”). Instead, he writes, what should be considered is our proximity to all of this death and how we can live with it.
5. The ethics of this proximity is the subject Australian environmental philosopher
Thom Van Dooren’s Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. The book is unique among extinction stories for looking less at the phenomenon itself and more at why it might matter in an emotional, moral sense. “What is lost when a species, an evolutionary lineage, a way of life, passes from the world?” he asks. Van Dooren, an academic in the new field of “Extinction Studies,” identifies the “multispecies entanglements” that not only play a role in an animal’s physical evolution but in that of human culture as well. Human culture in India, for instance, has developed in concert with vultures, which are relied on to dispose of cow carcasses and those of humans in certain burial rites. Now that the vultures are dying en masse, the Parsi can no longer “bury” their dead.
Apart from its relevance to human culture, Van Dooren considers non-human animals not just as “life forms” but also as “forms of life,” each with a way of life—what he calls a “flight way”—that generates meaning for that creature itself. (It’s a sign of just how settled we are in ideas of human exceptionalism that this simple claim—not in the least bit radical, really—comes across as somewhat PETA-ish and tree-huggery.) He offers a beautiful and oddly touching reconsideration of what a species is: “Species are incredible
achievements...[they are] shared, produced, and nurtured in the world through the work of successive generations of living beings.” More than just a lineage stretching out in time, a species is composed of the “work” each generation does—an albatross sitting on its egg for weeks without food, a human mother working three jobs. It is both more than the sum of the individuals living and dependent on their participation. Each individual invests a huge amount of resources in the species—it is
their work and
their striving (even if they are unaware of it) that achieves evolutionary continuity, and so the existence of everything that has evolved along the way, both from it and in being “carried by” it, is co-shaped as a member of its community.
Considering species in this way changes how we think about what extinction might mean and the enormity of the rupture it creates. Martha’s death was a kind of formal mark, but extinction means more than whether or not there is at least one individual of a given species living, according to Van Dooren. As Greenberg’s account of its life makes clear, what it meant to be a passenger pigeon—a “flight way” of vast flocks and noisy, communal roosts—disappeared long before Martha took her last breath. A part of what it meant to be a human in the American Midwest must have changed before then, too.
Recognizing such “entanglements,” Van Dooren calls for an a mode of mourning that “does not announce the uniqueness of the human, but works to…grieve for the loss of a world that
includes us.” Yet what we are bound up with specifically matters; we must “cast our lot for some ways of life and not others.” This is a surprising plea—unique as far as I can tell—in that instead of aiming for vague ideals such as “nature” or “ecosystem balance,” Van Dooren suggests embracing a form of “Cenocentrism,” fighting for a “continuity of the Cenozoic achievement,” which is to say, for the world that took form after the Cretaceous extinction—the community of life that includes our own species. This rather neatly solves the baseline problem Challenger and Kolbert posed, exchanging what Morton would call an “overmined” valorization of life generally for care of what is proximal to us and for our own, intimate world.
Of course, whichever world we stand for, many individual animals and entire species will suffer, die, and disappear for good. The practical question this poses and the true dilemma of now is not what is going on but what one does with that information once one has it, besides lapsing into cynical resignation. Van Dooren suggests mourning as both the ethical and beneficial response. The fact that there has been so little public mourning for extinction is due to the human “inability to really
get—to comprehend at any meaningful level—the multiple connections and dependencies between ourselves and these disappearing others.” We have learned not to be affected by the extinctions of those we consider fundamentally different (the same, of course, goes for those mass human deaths we find it convenient to ignore). But mourning forces us to “relearn the world and our place in it” and can teach us to get the connection, even if it is too late. To other crows, he writes, the body of a dead crow signifies danger, and the birds will often avoid a place where one of their species has died for years. “What must the death of a whole species of crow, alongside a host of others at this time, communicate to any sentient and attentive observer?” Van Dooren wonders. “How could these extinctions not announce
our need to find new flight ways, new modes of living in a fragile and changing world?” Van Dooren suggests that we read extinction stories like these as acts of mourning in themselves, the way we read records of human holocausts, with respect and care for the victims. As with any death, it’s in telling stories about the dead that life and death are put into relation; through mourning, survivors relearn the world and their place in it and, in that way, find new ways to live. This is, in its way, a kind of hope. “In choosing to grieve actively,” as the author and philosopher of grief
Tomis Attig wrote, “we choose life.”
Like any death, extinction represents the end of a certain portion of the world—of an idea of our world as we thought we knew it. They say shock at the loss of the passenger pigeon was so great that that no one believed it; some speculated it had simply gone to live in Australia or even the moon. For a while, Midwesterners continued to feel the shadows of great flocks passing above, the way an amputee can feel a missing limb. In stories like this, extinction touches us, making an animal’s absence as pointed and as intimate with our human lives as we perhaps never realized its presence to be.
Stories like this force us to rethink what survival really means, for us as well as them, whether merely living is enough or at what point we become too alone. The stories we need now go beyond informing us of our errors. They have to be emotionally relevant, inhabiting all of the complexity—ethical, political, and personal—of this moment in time. Doing more than teaching us, such stories could be in themselves ways of mourning—eulogies for a world we thought we knew and that we must relearn.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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…
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.”
At least you have an agent.
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!!
“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!
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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 .
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?
JJL,
Trust me when I say she doens’t want her husband to proofread it.
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. :)
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
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!
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. :)
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.
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!
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…
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!
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.
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.
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.)
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.
This too shall pass! I predict that I’ll see your name on the spine of a novel in the next couple of years.
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.
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.
“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 :)
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.
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 :)
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
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
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
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
Ed, I actually prefer your reaction to the droves of people who believe I’m giving up for not self-publishing…
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.
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.
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.
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.