How to Be in the World with Your Book
Why does travel fascinate creative people? Why do we get that urge to leave the safety and known territory of home to steep ourselves in new vistas and experience the risk and invigoration of being completely out of our normal lives? As routine and predictability recede with each highway mile, there’s a sense that anything can happen.
Not always a welcome feeling in today’s world. Especially right now.
Yet creative people still pursue this particular risk. And this week, I am doing my share of that.
Travel in my childhood was limited to away-camp in summer and occasional holiday visits to relatives. I envied my school friends whose families spent vacations crowded in a car touring national parks or visiting historical landmarks. As soon as I hit my college years, I took off solo to Europe. Came home, packed my VW bug with guitar, clothes, and books, and headed to California.
Road trips still hold an allure, despite their total lack of control. When I risk letting go of knowing what’s going to happen five miles down the highway, there’s an emptiness created inside. A kind of waiting. Creative ideas might come unexpectedly. We pass exit signs for towns that sound like character names.
My painter’s eye also opens: to new landscapes like the endless cornfields of the Midwest and its big skies, so different from where I live in New England.
I’ve been preparing for months for my book publication next week, and part of the preparation was our road trip to Minneapolis for my launch party. We left a week ago, my spouse, two dogs, and I, traveling in our camper van for 1000 miles of new experiences.
Minneapolis is home to the Loft Literary Center, one of the best writing schools in the US. My literary landscape for over two decades when I lived there. Even before the book was printed, I knew I wanted to celebrate there.
It’s been a long wait for this party. Ten years of achingly hard work. More revisions than I want to count up. A good amount of money spent on classes, freelance editors, publicists. Some days, when I’m watching the endless stretches of highway through the Midwest, I wonder how I ever got here. Right? We all wonder that. How we got here. And what we’re doing.
A good musician friend was talking with her music buddy, both lamenting about unsold CDs—they’ve each released two, excellent, by the way—and the conversation wove around the huge challenge of creating and releasing art into the world. All the feelings that come along for the ride.
Some writers feel guilty about how much they love their books. Some keep their celebrations quiet so they don’t inspire ill will or professional jealousy. Some divorce themselves from community and make it all about one person—them. When there’s always a crowd who helped make it happen.
I think that’s one of the main things I’ve learned through these months of bringing my novel out into the world: how many people actually step forward to help.
Driving gives me time to ruminate on this. Why did this book make it into the world with such success (so far, it’s reached bestseller status, been reviewed a lot, received great trade reviews, and sold well in pre-orders), when others I’ve written didn’t?
Not just quality of writing; yes, this is my best work so far, because I’m a better writer now. I worked harder on it. And I asked for and got tremendous help from my launch team of family, friends, and fellow writers.
But in the final moments of whether this book would successfully launch into the world or not, it came down to (1) how much I believed in the story, (2) what it meant to me, and (3) what I wanted it to communicate to readers. When these beliefs were conscious and clear in my mind and heart, I knew I could make it a success without betraying myself.
Although I’ve learned so many things this time around, this has to be the hardest, ongoing lesson: Staying true to myself while I release a creative work. Keeping grounded and true to my chosen life. Staying aware of what brought me here and the people that supported me. Making choices along the way that felt right to me, not because I was pushed by others’ expectations or my fears.
When I get to Minneapolis, I’ll have more than the party to look forward to. Because I love the Loft Literary Center, I’m offering a workshop as a benefit (fundraiser) for their education programs. It’s a new workshop, one I’ve never taught before, because until now the topic was foreign. It’s called “Writing and Risk: Aligning Your Creativity and Your Life,” and we’ll be exploring a series of exercises and steps to learn ways to stay true to yourself while you create. The point is to keep the narrative of your book and the narrative of your life on the same road.
The workshop is sold out, and many of you won’t be in Minneapolis on Tuesday (although if you are, drop by Open Book’s Performance Hall at 6:30 to join the celebration, pick up a signed copy of my novel, and say hi). So I’m going to share some thoughts today about this topic of aligning creativity and life. Why it’s close to my heart. Why so many of us find it terrifically hard when putting their creative work out into the world. Why competition is the disease that eats at the soul.
Did you see the animated film, Up? One of Pete Docter’s brilliant creations. Here’s a great conversation he had with NPR about the film. You may remember Dug, the dog who wears “cone of shame.” Why do many of us feel like Dug with that cone of shame when standing up for our creative work? I believe it comes from our comparison-based society.
Poets & Writers magazine featured an article by Benjamin Schaefer in the September/October issue. “What Is Meant for You Is Always Meant for You: A Mindful Approach to Writerly Competition” explores how Schaefer was haunted for years by another writer who always seemed to get the MFA acceptance, the prize, the fellowship ahead of him. The sense of comparison, and eventually competition, grew in his mind each time he saw this writer’s name on a list that he wanted to be on himself.
He was finally released from this cone of shame (my words) not by his own wins or the other writer’s failure, but by realizing truths about himself, his creative work, and the world.
“The logic goes something like this,” he said. “If I am not awarded a creative opportunity, whatever that creative opportunity may be, it isn’t because someone else has won what I’ve lost. It’s because the opportunity was not meant for me.” He also acknowledges that his way of deconstructing “stories of competition” doesn’t take place within a social or cultural vacuum—the publishing industry does privilege certain “storytellers to the diminishment of others.” But much of our attitude is our responsibility, primarily.
“When I deconstruct the construct of competition and return my attention to what I truly care about, which is the work, rather than the success and validation of that work, or how that success measures up to that of my peers, I experience a shift,” he concludes.
I do too. And it’s been perhaps the most valuable lesson learned in the past months as my new novel, a little jet plane compared to my very slow-burner earlier books, gets closer to publication.
My other books got only a handful of reviews; they achieved slow but steady sales over a long period of time. I got used to not seeing my book in bookstores or libraries (no matter if it was traditional or indie published). But this jet, which has soared to the Amazon bestseller level? I almost don’t know what to do with it. I guess I’ve been wearing my own cone of shame for decades.
How do you make sense of this kind of cosmic shift in your creative work? I don’t say this to brag, to point to me as better in some way than another writer, because I know that’s not the core of this. I have to go back to Schaefer’s theory that what is meant for me, is meant for me. With the other books, the same was true.
Perhaps I wasn’t ready to be out in the world this fully—and success with a book does take that. I was and am a very private person, so being on social media, making videos of myself, sending reminders to buy my book are hard actions. I had to choose them deliberately and educate myself on ways to do them that felt aligned with my life and my nature. I’m watching another author release her book with daily Tik-Tok videos, promoting nonstop, and I admire her ability to be out in the world this way. It suits her, she’s a serious extrovert. I am not. So I had to find a way to give my all, to be present with the process, while staying true to who I am.
I also had to be OK with how other writers did their book promotion, to face the reality of how I’m different. I had to trust that everyone is NOT out to get me or make me suffer for what I put forth in the world. I don’t believe that anymore—although there were times in the past when I did. I believe, now, that what we earn comes from our own efforts. With this book, I decided to make a huge effort, to give it all I had. I see other writers doing a lot better, but my result is mine. I don’t need to push against them. I’ve learned that these past months.
I’ve also learned that we’re all in community together. Because of our instinctively competitive society, creatives are falsely taught to see other artists as the ones to push against for what we want, an action that can take us far from our organic reasons for creating. Whatever we define as success becomes the marker for whether the creative work is working. The world becomes our mirror for its worth. Not how much we love what we create.
In adopting this, we’re buying into the idea, subtly or overtly, that we need to set aside our truest direction for our work in favor of conforming to certain narrow guidelines and expectations to gain approval from the world. That’s terribly demeaning, in my opinion. It negates the beauty and individuality of what we are putting forth. We’re also taught that readers count more than we do—I definitely believe readers need to be part of the conversation, but they are not the only ones talking. We are sharing our voices too.
We don’t even realize we’ve contorted the creative process, making the outside world the thing that drives our work, rather than our innermost beliefs, values, desires, expression.
What if this was reversed? What if we wrote to honor ourselves, to love the work itself, to please that part of ourselves that needs to create, then found others who resonate with that expression?
Elissa Altman writes a wonderful Substack newsletter, Poor Man’s Feast. In a post last month, she talked about” why we write what we write and why we hide what we hide, why we are inevitably bound to James Baldwin’s belief that Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, and how truth and fact are moving targets—the latter being empirical and the former, subjective.” (Read the entire piece here.)
I find the best writing, the writing that seems unashamed of itself and stands tall, contains a meandering towards truth that is unique to that writer.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
This is adapted from a well-loved exercise in Julia Cameron’s classic, The Artist’s Way. I’ve reread that book every year or so since it came out in 2002. My original penciled responses to the exercises are still there, like bird tracks reminding me who I was and where I’ve come to. More writers and creative folk are heading back to its wisdom, working through it with friends or writer’s group, as I have many times.
If you are unfamiliar with this book and its effect on writers, check out this article in the New York Times or this one in Huff Post about Cameron and her “morning pages.”
This exercise is a chart and it’s very self-revealing. I use it every time a sense of competition and shame overwhelms my ability to create. As I said, it’s not verbatim from Cameron’s book, but morphed over the years to suit my needs. Adjust as you wish!
On a page in your writing notebook, journal, or laptop, list five people you envy. It can be envy for their way in the world, their writerly success, the new book that’s getting so many accolades, their youth or looks, their money. With each name, honestly describe what it is, exactly, you envy. “He got the award that should’ve been mine.” “Her story is in The New Yorker this week.” “I’m fifty-five and she’s thirty, so of course she’d get that job.”
Then write down what you most admire about this person. What’s the story behind the achievement, the thing you most envy? Maybe they’ve worked years for that award, that job. Maybe they work out and their great looks have something to do with that. Try to be un-spiteful as you list these qualities. If you don’t know anything about them other than what sparks your envy, do a little research online.
In a third column—and this is the hardest part of the exercise—write about you. What qualities do you have that are worthy of note, that align in some way to the object of your envy?
An example: when I did this exercise the first time, I was smarting from an agent rejection. That agent had signed a good friend. I felt our writing was equally strong—so why not me? So I wrote the friend’s name, described the win, then described her good qualities (there were a lot!). One of them was persistence. As I wrote, I realized that’s what we shared. She was about a year ahead of me in the agent search, and as I did the exercise, this also came to light—she’d persisted a year longer. When I wrote down my good qualities in connection, I saw that I was persistent in the same way but where she hadn’t given up, I had.
It was illuminating. It dissolved the feeling of competition (and the almost-loss of a good buddy to unneeded envy). I could be genuinely glad for her and get myself to work again. About a year later, I signed with my agent.