What I wish I had learned: anything, anything, about what it would be like to publish a first book. It was so difficult to find any information, outside of the people I was privileged to know from my time in NYC, what a fair deal looked like. I had no idea what the difference between types of royalties were, what the author questionnaire was supposed to be about, and how to talk about my writing without feeling like a complete sell-out.
>>how to talk about my writing without feeling like a complete sell-out.
Yes! this. it totally reinforces the whole 'well just be amazing enough and you wont have to talk about your writing.' talking about our writing, I think, could and should be a joy, a good thing. no matter what level of published we are at the moment.
Something that helped me recently: we think marketing is about becoming the weird 5-second ad you have to pass through in order to get to the video you actually want to watch, but that's bad marketing. Good marketing is reaching the people who already want to hear from you, and that's how I think about reaching out to the people who would most treasure and value my work.
I wish writing classes touched on how to be a good literary citizen. How to be generous, how to build community, social media etiquette (can I/should I share acceptances or rejections on twitter??), how to ask for help without being demanding... things like that
Ooh, this is a good one. Do you have a piece of hard-earned wisdom to share here? I feel as though this information is weirdly hard to pin down because it's hard to talk about money in the writing world—the advance system, royalties, agent cuts, and paying to submit to places because there's a slant belief, still, in meritocracy and individual artistic genius. It's also very social/political, with the pandering and power-play that's quite rampant in MFA programs and the industry at large (reminds me of this *classic* essay from the past few years -- https://tinhouse.com/on-pandering/).
I don't know about wisdom, but I do think a lot about generosity and how that can be a very action-based thing. Not coming from an MFA, I definitely feel like there's an invisible mass of information that I don't know and I'm going to have to seek it out, ask questions, participate when generous offerings (like this newsletter) are made. I sense this idea that "Once you 'once you make it,' then we (meaning the publishing institutions/famous writers) lift the curtain and give you the answers." I'm always grateful for people who are actively working against that exclusionary mode. Thank you for the article rec!
I was in the same boat for many years. Didn't study writing in college aside from a couple workshops and didn't go to a MFA until well after I needed industry knowledge. Everything was so piece-meal. This is definitely one of the main reasons I started The Writing. I'm planning on having a nice, organized series answering common questions around publishing, editing, and existing in the literary world. :)
I agree with so much of this. Not coming from an MFA in creative writing, I constantly feel clueless. Generosity from other writers is what helped me most recently (from workshops held by Kundiman). But I didn't know about Kundiman or AWP being in New Mexico at first. It was a total accident that I found that programming. Once I got my writing fellowship, it started to feel like a curtain was lifted. But I still have a bit of anxiety since I am the only person in my cohort who didn't get an MFA in creative writing and I work in another industry. I feel like I somehow lack certain vocabulary to navigate the literary world. Now that I have had a writing fellowship, I pass on whatever advice and resources I can to writers who also don't have the MFA. But it definitely feels like a barrier.
One of my first poetry teachers gave this advice: "Stick to your guns and choose who you listen to." I'd already done a few workshops by then, but this was really eye-opening--it meant I didn't have to take *everyone's* advice. I couldn't anyway, because a lot of it was conflicting--but still, as a young writer, I felt weird about ignoring anyone's feedback because it seemed potentially rude, and how should I know better?
I still feel this way sometimes, but I've internalized it more. It matters a lot to find a handful of readers that you trust, who can read your work carefully and help you make it better. Also, they may not be the ones whose writing you like the most--because critique and writing are different skills.
100% agree on how to receive feedback, Isabel. It seems to line up, too, with the idea of owning your own mistakes. If we always listened to what other people wanted or thought about our creative work, what's the point of doing it for ourselves? And how diverse would the offerings of literature really be if we weren't willing to make our own mistakes?
I also learned the lesson that those who read you best may not be your favorite writers. Seems counterintuitive, but this is something I tried to emphasize in my column on Sunday on getting through that MFA.
This is so important! The people who make work in class that you think is amazing may not have valuable insights for you. And the people who make work in class that you think is dull or embarrassing may be the perfect reader for you. Not only that, one day they may begin writing work that you think is amazing. No one is "only as good as their last story," as we are trained to believe. I wasted so much time judging who the "superstars" were that I missed out on the people that I really needed to be in community with. (I was also in film school where this is 100 times worse.)
I wish I was taught POC writers & LGBTQ writers. Why wasn’t it until grad school that I learned about Audre Lorde? Claudia Rankine? Don Mee Choi? Eileen Myles? Why was Junot Diaz the only POC writer I was introduced to?
I wish I was taught that it is okay to follow my instincts after getting feedback. To accept feedback from peers and learn to sift through for my own solutions. Most importantly, to trust myself when white peers made frequent microagressions and faculty didn’t intervene.
And I wish I had something similar to T Kira Madden’s workshop structure–an open workshop with dialogue encouraged where the author always has space to respond, ask for clarity, or move the discussion to a new topic. To be part of a community. Not silenced. I realize this takes a lot of work for the facilitator to establish this though.
Whoa, I've never been in a writing class where the author could interject like that (though some classes made being silent an implicit, rather explicit, policy). What were some challenges and advantages to that structure?
From a teaching perspective, I often pull from my recent / favorite reading to make syllabi. I think teachers, even POC and queer ones, feel a pressure to teach white writers because they're canonized and are what students expect, and we unconsciously repeat the canons we were given.
That being said, part of it is laziness. If you want to teach X, there's plenty of POC and queer writing out there to use as examples. I know because I've had to painstakingly cut so much reading from my intro syllabus already this summer, and I'm not teaching any white men!
Early on it was established that this structure of workshop wasn’t for people to get defensive, but for people to clarify comments and get the most out of this time.
To be honest, it was one of the most useful workshops I ever had. Everyone sent the class questions they had about in advance to share their vision for the piece. It never felt like anyone imposed their own vision on my work, but rather helped me make it more me. We helped each other strengthen our own voice and I better understood in advance of reading someone’s work what their intentions and goals were.
Thank you, I really love this format idea! Part of the problem I'm trying to get around is people's assumptions about people's work—this short-circuits it pretty quickly and doesn't give as much room for people to completely misunderstand a piece. I will try using it in my own class that starts in a few weeks. :)
If I am ever in a writing class, I would like to learn close reading. Everywhere there is only craft talk, narrative arc, characters need to be in action and not be observers. Why don't we talk of close reading, enjoying the diction, the punctuation and how words sing on the page and how this practice of finding detail makes us observants of human beings in the way detectives are. All along the history writers learnt to write by reading. Why have we forgotten this and move past this and only talk of craft, as if we are only interested in writing, and not reading, writing, being a human being striving towards achieving awareness?
Hi Arpita, I totally agree with you. It's about capitalist, if you ask me! If you like thinking about the music of language, you should take a poetry class if you haven't already, and I also recommend Ursula Le Guin's Steering the Craft (https://lithub.com/a-writing-lesson-from-ursula-k-leguin/).
Hi Yanyi - one of the hardest things which took me a long time to learn (or accept): writing and publication are two completely separate things. Discovering joy in writing must always be the main. Publication is an extra, a bonus. Otherwise you’ll never find happiness in writing.
Hi Wei! Yes, I think this is such an important truth. We already spend so much time in our lives proving ourselves and doing things for other people or their systems. Art is one of the few places where we can feel and make pleasure for ourselves.
I wish I had learned about rejection and failure. At the beginning of each class, everyone would be invited to note their achievements (some would have published in journals or won awards) but the rejections, and persistence, was so rarely discussed.
What have you learned about rejections and persistence, Ysabelle? I know someone who just deletes their rejections in Submittable, haha. But there's something special about seeing that green "accepted" category after a stream of red rejections. They seem to happen when you're not expecting them. And you only need one to place a piece.
I’m not sure why, but I feel that rejections form a bigger picture/create a narrative around writing and engaging with the literary industry. I used to send my stuff to all the journals, hoping to just be published, but now I’m slightly more selective—I think in that sense I’m also respecting my work a little more, and acknowledging that my work/the work of an individual doesn’t always match that of a publication, and that’s not an indication of value or merit. I think rejection and failure also taught me to be more critically engaged with regards to revision and looking at my work from a distance (sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way). Sometimes I’m relieved when a work is rejected because I’ll look at it again and be like, “oh, of course—it’s not ready yet.” Of course, rejections can be crushing and can turn a mild day into a bad one—but like you said, seeing the green category is so rewarding. I guess I’m also wary of relying too much on that rush though; but that may be my own insecurities speaking!
I love that: rejections being part of a map rather than a series of failures. I had a very similar realization. My first publication was with a magazine I had adored for years.
I’ve been thinking about how traumatic or harmful autobiographical info in poems can reinforce the harm or trauma. Do you have thoughts on this situation and how to move through it?
I’m thinking that we might have to write it, but we don’t need to share it... been wrestling with this for a while! Feels tough bc it can get so emotionally charged!
Hi Sarena! Good question. I never, ever think you have to disclose what you don't want to in your writing. If you're trying to communicate that, your writing will aesthetically or formally reflect what you're trying to get at. You'll make a new way of saying it without thinking too hard about it. I think there's a *lot* of pressure in the industry right now, especially for marginalized writers, to reproduce and offer portraits of trauma for their shock value and difference or to make you more sympathetic. But what does it *really* mean when your audience needs you to eviscerate yourself in order to prove you're human?
Oh good question. I guess I was working on a piece and thought knew what I was making but suddenly found it had become something else entirely. So I guess, just finding that it happened? What are you thinking about with the poetry anthology?
On the poetry end, I've found that this happens a lot with groups of poems. I just kept writing them over a period of time and didn't read them together until I felt like I had enough to put a collection together. The interests and themes always overlap from piece-to-piece and would turn out to be saying something unexpected when read in succession. Very different from what would have happened in the manuscript if I had started out with a thesis in mind.
Yes I see! You know, the story I was working on when this happened was made of a lot of small sections that kind of had a plot but were also each their own. So maybe in that regard it was like your poetry collection, in how it let me see those things. I will have to watch to see how that can happen in a more sustained narrative.
I swish my first writing class had focused more on process and less on results. I think I needed someone to teach me the difference between process and results. I really believe process is all we have. Results are an illusion that I wish had been dispelled sooner.
As much as pessimism and cynicism can be useful in publishing, in writing, it's OK to dream. Let yourself imagine the future you want without making concessions to reality.
I wish I’d learned that no matter how great my writing might be, I would need to revise it again and again. And that taking my time and doing it thoroughly would save me time and rejection (there will be plenty of that in any case).
Oof, I know that feeling. I used to send work out in the week I had finished it, thinking it was the best thing I had ever written, but to discover otherwise a few weeks later. Now I leave work in the "cellar" for far longer—months, sometimes years—and it's given me so much space to revise them to be even better.
To be patient and to take better care of myself physically, emotionally and intellectually. To stand up for myself (especially against male "experts") and to delight in NOT knowing the answers.
So agree with this! Not knowing and wonder are two of the most undersung qualities in writing, imo. Even Natalie Goldberg, whose writing I love, advises answering the questions you ask on the page. But isn’t asking its own art? Should we also blame capitalism for this one?
I would like to learn about ways to turn a story idea into a narrative, as well as ways to better market and promote your writing. I do feel like oftentimes, I have sparks of ideas that I'll write and elaborate on, but sometimes have trouble connecting them together.
What I wish I had learned: anything, anything, about what it would be like to publish a first book. It was so difficult to find any information, outside of the people I was privileged to know from my time in NYC, what a fair deal looked like. I had no idea what the difference between types of royalties were, what the author questionnaire was supposed to be about, and how to talk about my writing without feeling like a complete sell-out.
>>how to talk about my writing without feeling like a complete sell-out.
Yes! this. it totally reinforces the whole 'well just be amazing enough and you wont have to talk about your writing.' talking about our writing, I think, could and should be a joy, a good thing. no matter what level of published we are at the moment.
Something that helped me recently: we think marketing is about becoming the weird 5-second ad you have to pass through in order to get to the video you actually want to watch, but that's bad marketing. Good marketing is reaching the people who already want to hear from you, and that's how I think about reaching out to the people who would most treasure and value my work.
I wish writing classes touched on how to be a good literary citizen. How to be generous, how to build community, social media etiquette (can I/should I share acceptances or rejections on twitter??), how to ask for help without being demanding... things like that
Ooh, this is a good one. Do you have a piece of hard-earned wisdom to share here? I feel as though this information is weirdly hard to pin down because it's hard to talk about money in the writing world—the advance system, royalties, agent cuts, and paying to submit to places because there's a slant belief, still, in meritocracy and individual artistic genius. It's also very social/political, with the pandering and power-play that's quite rampant in MFA programs and the industry at large (reminds me of this *classic* essay from the past few years -- https://tinhouse.com/on-pandering/).
I don't know about wisdom, but I do think a lot about generosity and how that can be a very action-based thing. Not coming from an MFA, I definitely feel like there's an invisible mass of information that I don't know and I'm going to have to seek it out, ask questions, participate when generous offerings (like this newsletter) are made. I sense this idea that "Once you 'once you make it,' then we (meaning the publishing institutions/famous writers) lift the curtain and give you the answers." I'm always grateful for people who are actively working against that exclusionary mode. Thank you for the article rec!
I was in the same boat for many years. Didn't study writing in college aside from a couple workshops and didn't go to a MFA until well after I needed industry knowledge. Everything was so piece-meal. This is definitely one of the main reasons I started The Writing. I'm planning on having a nice, organized series answering common questions around publishing, editing, and existing in the literary world. :)
I agree with so much of this. Not coming from an MFA in creative writing, I constantly feel clueless. Generosity from other writers is what helped me most recently (from workshops held by Kundiman). But I didn't know about Kundiman or AWP being in New Mexico at first. It was a total accident that I found that programming. Once I got my writing fellowship, it started to feel like a curtain was lifted. But I still have a bit of anxiety since I am the only person in my cohort who didn't get an MFA in creative writing and I work in another industry. I feel like I somehow lack certain vocabulary to navigate the literary world. Now that I have had a writing fellowship, I pass on whatever advice and resources I can to writers who also don't have the MFA. But it definitely feels like a barrier.
ack, typo. should be: "Once you 'make it,' then we...
One of my first poetry teachers gave this advice: "Stick to your guns and choose who you listen to." I'd already done a few workshops by then, but this was really eye-opening--it meant I didn't have to take *everyone's* advice. I couldn't anyway, because a lot of it was conflicting--but still, as a young writer, I felt weird about ignoring anyone's feedback because it seemed potentially rude, and how should I know better?
I still feel this way sometimes, but I've internalized it more. It matters a lot to find a handful of readers that you trust, who can read your work carefully and help you make it better. Also, they may not be the ones whose writing you like the most--because critique and writing are different skills.
I also love this advice from Sofia Samatar: "Make your own mistakes! You're going to make mistakes. What you do is not going to be perfect. But make your own mistakes. Choose them. Don't let other people talk you into making theirs!" (All her answers in this Reddit AMA are great: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/8lro18/hi_im_sofia_samatar_sf_and_fantasy_writer_ama/)
100% agree on how to receive feedback, Isabel. It seems to line up, too, with the idea of owning your own mistakes. If we always listened to what other people wanted or thought about our creative work, what's the point of doing it for ourselves? And how diverse would the offerings of literature really be if we weren't willing to make our own mistakes?
I also learned the lesson that those who read you best may not be your favorite writers. Seems counterintuitive, but this is something I tried to emphasize in my column on Sunday on getting through that MFA.
This is so important! The people who make work in class that you think is amazing may not have valuable insights for you. And the people who make work in class that you think is dull or embarrassing may be the perfect reader for you. Not only that, one day they may begin writing work that you think is amazing. No one is "only as good as their last story," as we are trained to believe. I wasted so much time judging who the "superstars" were that I missed out on the people that I really needed to be in community with. (I was also in film school where this is 100 times worse.)
I wish I was taught POC writers & LGBTQ writers. Why wasn’t it until grad school that I learned about Audre Lorde? Claudia Rankine? Don Mee Choi? Eileen Myles? Why was Junot Diaz the only POC writer I was introduced to?
I wish I was taught that it is okay to follow my instincts after getting feedback. To accept feedback from peers and learn to sift through for my own solutions. Most importantly, to trust myself when white peers made frequent microagressions and faculty didn’t intervene.
And I wish I had something similar to T Kira Madden’s workshop structure–an open workshop with dialogue encouraged where the author always has space to respond, ask for clarity, or move the discussion to a new topic. To be part of a community. Not silenced. I realize this takes a lot of work for the facilitator to establish this though.
Whoa, I've never been in a writing class where the author could interject like that (though some classes made being silent an implicit, rather explicit, policy). What were some challenges and advantages to that structure?
From a teaching perspective, I often pull from my recent / favorite reading to make syllabi. I think teachers, even POC and queer ones, feel a pressure to teach white writers because they're canonized and are what students expect, and we unconsciously repeat the canons we were given.
That being said, part of it is laziness. If you want to teach X, there's plenty of POC and queer writing out there to use as examples. I know because I've had to painstakingly cut so much reading from my intro syllabus already this summer, and I'm not teaching any white men!
Early on it was established that this structure of workshop wasn’t for people to get defensive, but for people to clarify comments and get the most out of this time.
To be honest, it was one of the most useful workshops I ever had. Everyone sent the class questions they had about in advance to share their vision for the piece. It never felt like anyone imposed their own vision on my work, but rather helped me make it more me. We helped each other strengthen our own voice and I better understood in advance of reading someone’s work what their intentions and goals were.
Thank you, I really love this format idea! Part of the problem I'm trying to get around is people's assumptions about people's work—this short-circuits it pretty quickly and doesn't give as much room for people to completely misunderstand a piece. I will try using it in my own class that starts in a few weeks. :)
If I am ever in a writing class, I would like to learn close reading. Everywhere there is only craft talk, narrative arc, characters need to be in action and not be observers. Why don't we talk of close reading, enjoying the diction, the punctuation and how words sing on the page and how this practice of finding detail makes us observants of human beings in the way detectives are. All along the history writers learnt to write by reading. Why have we forgotten this and move past this and only talk of craft, as if we are only interested in writing, and not reading, writing, being a human being striving towards achieving awareness?
Hi Arpita, I totally agree with you. It's about capitalist, if you ask me! If you like thinking about the music of language, you should take a poetry class if you haven't already, and I also recommend Ursula Le Guin's Steering the Craft (https://lithub.com/a-writing-lesson-from-ursula-k-leguin/).
**capitalism (lol)
Hi Yanyi - one of the hardest things which took me a long time to learn (or accept): writing and publication are two completely separate things. Discovering joy in writing must always be the main. Publication is an extra, a bonus. Otherwise you’ll never find happiness in writing.
Hi Wei! Yes, I think this is such an important truth. We already spend so much time in our lives proving ourselves and doing things for other people or their systems. Art is one of the few places where we can feel and make pleasure for ourselves.
I wish I had learned about rejection and failure. At the beginning of each class, everyone would be invited to note their achievements (some would have published in journals or won awards) but the rejections, and persistence, was so rarely discussed.
What have you learned about rejections and persistence, Ysabelle? I know someone who just deletes their rejections in Submittable, haha. But there's something special about seeing that green "accepted" category after a stream of red rejections. They seem to happen when you're not expecting them. And you only need one to place a piece.
I’m not sure why, but I feel that rejections form a bigger picture/create a narrative around writing and engaging with the literary industry. I used to send my stuff to all the journals, hoping to just be published, but now I’m slightly more selective—I think in that sense I’m also respecting my work a little more, and acknowledging that my work/the work of an individual doesn’t always match that of a publication, and that’s not an indication of value or merit. I think rejection and failure also taught me to be more critically engaged with regards to revision and looking at my work from a distance (sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way). Sometimes I’m relieved when a work is rejected because I’ll look at it again and be like, “oh, of course—it’s not ready yet.” Of course, rejections can be crushing and can turn a mild day into a bad one—but like you said, seeing the green category is so rewarding. I guess I’m also wary of relying too much on that rush though; but that may be my own insecurities speaking!
I love that: rejections being part of a map rather than a series of failures. I had a very similar realization. My first publication was with a magazine I had adored for years.
I’ve been thinking about how traumatic or harmful autobiographical info in poems can reinforce the harm or trauma. Do you have thoughts on this situation and how to move through it?
I’m thinking that we might have to write it, but we don’t need to share it... been wrestling with this for a while! Feels tough bc it can get so emotionally charged!
Hi Sarena! Good question. I never, ever think you have to disclose what you don't want to in your writing. If you're trying to communicate that, your writing will aesthetically or formally reflect what you're trying to get at. You'll make a new way of saying it without thinking too hard about it. I think there's a *lot* of pressure in the industry right now, especially for marginalized writers, to reproduce and offer portraits of trauma for their shock value and difference or to make you more sympathetic. But what does it *really* mean when your audience needs you to eviscerate yourself in order to prove you're human?
To trust the story and characters, let them take me where they needed to go.
Hi Catherine! What helped you realize this? I can think of a poetry analogy, but I'd love to hear a fiction take on it.
Oh good question. I guess I was working on a piece and thought knew what I was making but suddenly found it had become something else entirely. So I guess, just finding that it happened? What are you thinking about with the poetry anthology?
On the poetry end, I've found that this happens a lot with groups of poems. I just kept writing them over a period of time and didn't read them together until I felt like I had enough to put a collection together. The interests and themes always overlap from piece-to-piece and would turn out to be saying something unexpected when read in succession. Very different from what would have happened in the manuscript if I had started out with a thesis in mind.
Yes I see! You know, the story I was working on when this happened was made of a lot of small sections that kind of had a plot but were also each their own. So maybe in that regard it was like your poetry collection, in how it let me see those things. I will have to watch to see how that can happen in a more sustained narrative.
I swish my first writing class had focused more on process and less on results. I think I needed someone to teach me the difference between process and results. I really believe process is all we have. Results are an illusion that I wish had been dispelled sooner.
Hi Eli! Wholeheartedly agree. I will think about how to include this lesson in my next class.
As much as pessimism and cynicism can be useful in publishing, in writing, it's OK to dream. Let yourself imagine the future you want without making concessions to reality.
Yes, this. Dreaming is about practicing the world we want in the world we have.
I wish I’d learned that no matter how great my writing might be, I would need to revise it again and again. And that taking my time and doing it thoroughly would save me time and rejection (there will be plenty of that in any case).
Oof, I know that feeling. I used to send work out in the week I had finished it, thinking it was the best thing I had ever written, but to discover otherwise a few weeks later. Now I leave work in the "cellar" for far longer—months, sometimes years—and it's given me so much space to revise them to be even better.
To be patient and to take better care of myself physically, emotionally and intellectually. To stand up for myself (especially against male "experts") and to delight in NOT knowing the answers.
So agree with this! Not knowing and wonder are two of the most undersung qualities in writing, imo. Even Natalie Goldberg, whose writing I love, advises answering the questions you ask on the page. But isn’t asking its own art? Should we also blame capitalism for this one?
I would like to learn about ways to turn a story idea into a narrative, as well as ways to better market and promote your writing. I do feel like oftentimes, I have sparks of ideas that I'll write and elaborate on, but sometimes have trouble connecting them together.