Why Embark on a New Book When You're Not Famous, Young, or Fabulously Cool?

Because if you're born to write, it's the one thing you ought to do.

Photo by LOGAN WEAVER | @LGNWVR on Unsplash

I used to be a distance runner. On the estate where my dad lived, there was a miniature racetrack where he’d break horses. It was covered in grass and sand — one lap around was a quarter mile. For hours, I would run in circles. In the snow. When the rain came down in sheets. On the days in August where the humidity and heat threatened to swallow me whole. Newton’s Second Law of Motion: force equals mass times acceleration.

One evening, my dad stood at the edge of the track to watch me run. I had a Discman and I remember complaining about the music skipping. We walked back to his small apartment in the dark, and the only thing I remember from that night was him saying that I needed to stop running.

The next day there I was, on the track again. Ancestral in my misery. My mother vanished into the ether, college friends slumbered back to that from which they’d come — I was alone. Although I emerged from the womb fully-formed, forever bracing for impact, when adulthood finally came I didn’t know what to do with it. And although I’d grown up riding the subways, the city that had been my home felt foreign and impenetrable.

I had all this pain and I didn’t know where to put it. No container existed big enough to fill it. I would often say, it’s just too much, to which everyone replied, what’s too much, and I’d say, everything. Perhaps running, the burn and ache of it, was a way to break me. Crack me open and force an Exxon spillage. Relieve me of a sadness that had become too much to bear. I liked running, because it felt familiar. I made a homeland of my pain, which had become comfortable and familiar and it was only when my knees became arthritic, gave out, that I had to stand still.

I rode the subways to work with ace bandages wrapped around my knees. At night, I need a means to move so I wrote a mess of pages about a childhood that had been stolen from me, one that had been mired in love, cruelty, and fear.

I mailed these pages to an admissions office and when Judy Budnitz phoned me one evening to tell me I had been accepted to Columbia’s graduate writing program I laughed and asked if this was a practical joke. It took an hour of her convincing me this was true. Assured me a letter and a packet were to follow. It hadn’t occurred to me that writing was something I could do even though it was the only thing I’d been doing since I was able to hold a pen.

My MFA experience was underwhelming, to put it kindly, and it didn’t help that I had a drug problem that forced me to take a leave after first semester. When I returned nearly two years later, I made a handful of friends and wrote a terrible story collection as they tend to be.

Unless you’re Zadie Smith.

I spent over a hundred thousand dollars to learn how to see a story through. How to endure it. How to keep circling the track with a Discman in my hand. Years later, when my first book was published, I thought to myself, okay, you’ve arrived. Everything will get easier now. Until I put down the pipe, the shuttled landed, and reality settled in. Writing books doesn’t get easier because there exists no end state. As you grow, the stakes get higher. Ideas become more complex. Plots trickier to map out. Language impossible to navigate. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, etc. etc.

I cringe when reading that first book — not because I refuse to revisit that dark country, although the memory of it still stings — but because I wasn’t there yet. I loved my editor, but she was accustomed to editing traditional fiction, and although I hadn’t found my voice and solidified my style, I knew I wasn’t that kind of writer. I wanted to play and she wanted me to focus, and while the end product was lovely and it got a bit of attention, it felt like a sliver of me. If you asked me to rewrite it today, it would look nothing like the original.

Publishing, the machine of it, demands a second book. People press hot pokers onto your back. You have to write a debut, every said, and I was confused because wasn’t this thing I held in my hands a first book. Oh, no, no. Your novel is your debut. Memoirs were adorable little books but serious (whatever that means) literary writers wrote novels.

Instead of starting a new book, which I liken to surgery without anesthesia, I spent four years working for a sociopath. And my longest piece of writing was an email, a digital strategy. I wonder if it was actually possible to stop writing, to lose your love of it, desire for it, need to put thought to type.

When I resigned in 2013, I was a wreck, a negative of a person. Paled down and bone china. I boarded a plane to Europe and it wasn’t until I set my bags down in Biarritz in the off-season, until there was nothing to do other than sit in quiet, I remember the French news and starting what would become my second book.

The words came like a torrent. Writing seven pages after a four-year drought, my body registered 7.2 on the Richter. I stood up and re-read what I’d written in a kind of shock I still can’t explain. The style and voice weren’t like anything I’d ever written, but there existed a certainty. It felt right. As I read the lines aloud, I knew how to re-arrange them. There was a kind of music I hadn’t heard before, possibly because I’d live life with the volume turned up in every aspect save this.

I could finally hear the music and it hasn’t left me since.

My second book was a strange little thing — it wasn’t what female editors with their ingrained misogyny had expected of me. An editor at Harper, where I’d published the paperback of my first book, was eager to see new work and I couldn’t even finish the email my agent forwarded. No one expected this. Let’s build a box for Felicia to play in. She can write her weird, elliptical sentences but not too many. We need her to write for the masses because publishing is a business, after all. Did you think it was about the art, you foolish sweet child, you? Bless your heart.

No, no. Publishing is about what you can package and sell. How many followers you have on TikTok. How you can be positioned. And as someone who doesn’t fit into any boxes, who now refuses to work in marketing, it seems there’s no place for me. I don’t fit in this new world where peddling yourself is more important than the art you put into the world.

The book finally found a home and although I’m not as fond of it as I was when writing it, I regard it as my bridge book — a departure from my first and a gateway to my third. After arguing with my agent of ten years, I resigned him because I was tired of people telling me to be a writer I never wanted to be. I can write traditional fiction. I can write a linear, easy plot. I can write what sells. I can write sugar so the medicine goes down.

But I don’t want to. Ever.

I was the educated woman everyone wanted me to be. I was the executive everyone wanted me to be. I was the woman who glued her mouth shut when I wanted to shout. I was the woman who rarely kicked up a fuss when I wanted to kick everyone in the face. But my writing? No way, no day. This is mine. This is me. I will write my strange stories with their non-existent structure. I will use the word ossify as often as I please.

But publishing is a business. Everyone wants the fancy name on the back of your jacket. Did I not give you the boldfaced names for my first book? Did I not do my duty? No one cares that the writers whose work means something to you matters more than the blurbs from fancy strangers.

How did I start preparing to write my third book? First, by procrastinating for five years. Then, by wondering if I had a third in me at all. Then, wondering how hard this journey would be without a marketing plan, an agent, and all the bells and whistles I had when I first entered the game so many years ago.

A semi-famous writer once told me, no one’s waiting for our next book. Unless you’re a celebrity or on the Times bestseller list. No one’s waiting with bated breath. Wait too long and the hype around you will be forgotten. It’s easier to be a debut author than someone who’s been around the block a couple of hundred times but fails to leave it.

I had to set aside the business of writing to focus on the writing. I spent years figuring out how I was going to position and package the book I’d yet to write. Now, I’m keeling over from the mountain of earmuffs pressed against my ears, covering my head and neck. I won’t think about the business of writing until I have to deal with the business of writing.

Then, I embraced uncertainty with open arms. I’m not writing a novel because while fiction is something I love to read, it’s not what I’m best at writing. I’m at home mining myself for art. Essays. Narrative non-fiction, whatever you want to call it. For better of for worse, the best work I’ve written has been about me.

Zadie Smith famously categorized the two writer archetypes in an essay that was originally in The Believer, “That Crafty Feeling.” I’m what Zadie Smith would call a “Micro Manager,”

“Micro Managers like me build a house floor by floor, discreetly and in its entirety. Each floor needs to be sturdy and fully decorated with all the furniture in place before the next is built on top of it. There’s wallpaper in the hall even if the stairs lead nowhere at all.

Because Micro Managers have no grand plan, their novels exist only in their present moment, in a sensibility, in the novel’s tonal frequency line by line.”

Make no mistake, I don’t craft one perfect line to the next. I’m meticulous about the arrangement of sentences, not their movement. After that first line, I need a torrent, velocity. This puppy’s got to move fast to hold my attention. Let me explain.

I played clarinet for thirteen years. I was good at it but never great because I’d rather write to music than play it. But I learned about writing in the playing.

For example, I loved a run. Playing a long stretch of notes without breathing, ascending or descending chromatically. Especially on the upper register. The elegant slur of your fingers tapping the keys, the breathless nature of it, and the feeling of being carried by the music were exhilarating. Back then, I used to hold my breath underwater so I could take larger gulps of the music.

That’s how I preferred to play — squeezing in every note I could until I could no longer breathe.

It took me years to appreciate tonguing the reed and its abrupt staccato, which felt halting and violent. I hated articulating notes, I wanted to be the drunk at the bar slurring them. Until I realized you needed the staccato to appreciate the run. It was a break in the music, a moment where the player (and the audience) could collect itself and rest. The beauty is in the balance of the two and knowing when to use which.

I think about that in my writing, how the first line has to come out swinging. How it needs enough momentum to carry a paragraph and then I stop. There’s my beat, my rest. I think about that as I’m editing the paragraph. Creating a series of manic lines juxtaposed with a three-word, monosyllabic sentence. Even within the run, I need the illusion of a break.

This is all to say that I’m coming to this new book, a work of autofiction, with only a first line. While fiction requires me to map out the structure and plot because I need to have an idea where this book will go (even though books never go where you expect them to), anything that resembles narrative non-fiction or memoir I liken to a road trip. I have a vague idea of the destination, but I care more about the journey — the snacks, map, and detours I’ll take along the way. I went into this book prepared for the swerves, detours, and veering way off-course.

It takes discipline and a certain level of fearlessness to accept that your journey amounts to wading through the dark.

Then, I blared the music.

I spent the past six months re-reading books that shook me. Writers with a similar style and form. Writers whose work sets a standard I’m challenged to meet: Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, Elissa Washuta’s White Magic, Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This, Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, Deborah Levy’s Things I Don’t Want to Know, Vivian Gornick’s Unfinished Business, Abigail Dean’s Girl A, Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plows Over the Bones of The Dead, Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations, Daisy Johnson’s Sisters, Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses — to start.

I’ve read these specific books for three reasons:

1. I re-read Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy to revisit the genre of autofiction, which is a kind of fiction rooted in the real. While you’re tethered to the capital T truth, fiction fills in the “truth” spaces. There’s a tension between the freedom of fiction and the confines of fact. But you’re telling the reader parts of this are truth, the core of it is married to a great truth, but the telling of it gives me space to maneuver and move. I can think of no other writer who inhabits this genre so completely, so re-reading Cusk is now more of an excavation to see how she structures and tells Faye’s story.

2. I want to blast the music. Many of the books above oscillate on the linear medium. Yet all of them feel musical to the ear. There’s a certain rhythm and cadence that satisfies me. Attention is paid at the line level and you can tell each writer is a surgeon and artisan of the English language. I care just as much about the arrangement of the words I use as the story I tell — both hold equal weight and importance. Reading these author’s stunning books is sort of like marathon training. You’re training with others at your pace or those who exceed it, and your work is meeting and raising your bar.

3. I want to breathe air into the work. As I grow older, I find writing about me is often smothering. I need contrast so the feelings have context, finding its place in the universe while recognizing there exists a universe. Whether that’s bringing in other stories or disciplines, I want to find a way to weave my story with something other. Apex predators, astronomy, neurology, and art excite me and I want to find a way for them to seamlessly weave into the story.

I read books for pleasure, but I also read and re-read them for study. I highlight paragraphs, copy sentences and vivisect them, outline stories to understand their structure and flow. I read to love and learn. In my entire life, I’ve read maybe one book on how to write, which wasn’t useful to me. I learn by reading what other artists have created.

The learning, for me, is in the creation — not the schematics. Essays, in contrast, are sometimes useful in lending a point-of-view or perspective rather than mechanical pedagogy. Mainly, I like hearing my favorite writers talk about their work. In one of my favorite essays, Jenny Offill writes:

“But if you’re someone who is trying to move to a more pared-down language, or language that is trying to do things at a couple of different levels at the same time, the workshop environment can be difficult.

So I try to teach my students to read at the line level, because I think that’s what’s helpful: to start thinking about what they’re writing line by line, as well as the bigger picture. I’m also always trying to make them read things in different genres: poetry or essays or non-fiction or primary sources from science or anthropology. I want them to get a sense of the strangeness of language. It reminds you that there are all these different ways in which you can create density and give a vital feeling to the words on.”

You’re not going to learn how to write if your diet is filled with Medium articles written by people telling you how to write. Most of these “experts” haven’t even written a book or attempted one. Writing a five-minute essay isn’t the same as a 200-page book. Different skills are required. Then there’s the discipline of being wedded to a story for a long time without the dopamine hit of virality or validation.

Learn from those who’ve done the thing instead of writing about doing the thing based on a book they’ve read about someone who’s done the thing.

You learn how to write by reading across styles and genres until you find work that speaks to you. Then, you study it. Deconstruct it. Learn from it. Determine how it can inform the words you put to paper (or screen). And then you write and then you don’t stop writing. Ever.

Finally, my prep work includes something odd…a soundtrack. I find it difficult to write in quiet — I need ambient noise, preferably music.

Since I have an idea of the scope of the book I want to write and the time periods I plan to cover, I create playlists of songs that either:

1. Bring memories back from that period.

2. Evoke the mood of the story I plan to write.

3. Match the rhythm of what I’m trying to achieve at the line level.

I’ve queued up Mobb Deep and Laura Pergolizzi, Led Zeppelin, Prince, Tori Amos, Portishead’s “Sour Times” and all my favorite songs from 1994, Guru, Nine Inch Nails, and Radiohead (without irony). Nas and Neil Young. I don’t listen to the lyrics, but like a metronome, I pay attention to the rhythm, riffs, and beats underneath. When I write I try to match the energy and rhythm of what I commit to the page to what blares in the room.

It’s as if I’ve found a way to burrow into the songs and live there for a brief period of time. Hours will pass because a song is constant repeat and I emerge with something, when read aloud, reminds me, only me, of the song I’ve been listening to.

And for the first time in many, many years, I feel ready. I’ve got the engine running, snacks packed, phone charged, mixtapes made, and I’m ready to hit the road. And drive, drive, drive.