I sat on my couch with the computer on my lap and started to write. I wrote every single day, incessantly. I filled blank white pages with torrents of dialogue, scenes and flashbacks. I couldn’t get the story out fast enough and in four months the rough draft of my novel was complete.
That was three years ago.
While it sounds like a bit of fantasy, it is true. I wrote the novel in four months…but the story had been percolating for some time. For nearly two years before I sat down to write, I jotted down notes as they came to me on anything I could find – napkins, newspapers, receipts. I had no idea what form the notes would take or when, but I knew I didn’t want to lose them. So in the winter of 2008 when the full story had seemed to finally come together and my novel was complete…when I could’ve felt pride…what I felt was so much more real, so much deeper. It was a sense of purpose, as if I had found or finally answered the question of my life. There was no doubt in mind that writing was what I was meant to do.
That feeling lasted right up until the moment I shared the news of my novel with friends and family. Immediately I got hit with the same question from EVERYONE – ‘so what happens now?’ I can’t really blame them. We live in a society that puts value on the creative arts only once they have been externally validated, whether it be by a publisher, record label, film credit or exhibition. I felt a strange shame, as if the writing wasn’t what mattered, getting published was what did.
So, in the weeks and months that followed, I too, became obsessed with the next step – finding a literary agent. A friend put me in touch with a well-known boutique literary agency here in the city. I emailed the agent my first hundred pages and a month later got the response back – he loved the pages and wanted to represent me and the book – I was ecstatic.
That was the fall of 2008. In the first of what would be only two face-to-face meetings, my agent described the challenges of getting a commercial fiction book published. We needed a completed manuscript that was publishable ‘as is’ and one that a marketing department felt they could promote easily. In the year that followed he responded to my monthly emails and calls inquiring about whether he’d read the latest edited version and where we were with the book, with excuses and promises to look at revised pages. In the beginning, I talked myself out of being frustrated and disappointed by listening to what everyone told me, ‘publishing takes a long time…years.’ But, I was uneasy about the lack of progress, having come from the world of 24-hour news in New York City where things moved fast, fast, fast. I was extremely frustrated. It was my creation, but I had lost control.
When friends asked how it was going I did my best to put on a brave face and say things I was having trouble convincing myself of, like ‘well, ya know publishing takes forever’ and ‘my agent is working on final edits.’ I had a battle going on inside as I tried to dial back the ‘lets get-it-done’ Type A reporter mentality with the writer who eagerly wanted to launch a career as a full-time author and felt this was the only way to do it. In February 2010 I finally got a phone call back from my agent in which he said that he was swamped and simply did not have enough time to give the novel the line-by-line editing it deserved. He said the only way to move forward would be to hire a ‘book doctor,’ someone who had worked at a major publishing house and now worked as a consultant turning first-time author manuscripts into publishable material. Thousands of dollars and three months later, I got back a manuscript with still uncorrected typos and an essay on how the non-linear format would never work and the main character lacked a ‘likability factor.’
As a touchstone, I had sent several versions of the book to a close friend, also a former English major, an English teacher and someone who represented a slice of my target audience: college-educated female in her 30s, married with kids, lives outside New York but has an appreciation for cosmopolitan life. We’d been friends for twenty years, I knew she would be honest with me. She said it was a page turner and she loved it. The best part, she corrected all the spelling and grammatical mistakes the editor missed and helped me make the book more authentic by raising plot issues with questions rather than judgment. She reaffirmed what I felt in my gut – this book would find an audience.
In early August 2010, I sent the latest version of the revised novel back to my agent. Around the same time, I started catching up on recent issues of my Poets & Writers magazine. There it was. A two part-series on self-publishing. Up until now it never dawned on me to self-publish. In a city where image is everything I had this haunting feeling that it would carry too much stigma. But something in the article assuaged my fears.
I had been so blinded by the idea of an agent I ignored the talent and ability that had gotten me to this point. Getting things done and taking charge came naturally to me. I knew I could do the work of getting it printed and promoting it – that was the easy part. The hard part for me was being vulnerable enough to self-publish, to go out into the world without a big publishing house as a stamp of approval. A month later I still couldn’t shake the idea. I checked my contract with the agency. It automatically renewed in three weeks unless terminated. I figured I would test the universe. I fired off a polite but aggressive email to my agent reiterating my desire to get the book to market as soon as possible and asked for a clear timeline for pitching the novel to publishers. He responded a week later, again with apologies, and said that he expected to start sending the manuscript out by Thanksgiving. Two weeks later he called and admitted that he ‘was not servicing’ me well and ‘had lost clarity.’ In other words, apparently he TOO was so concerned with image that he wasn’t about to let me be the one who did the ‘breaking up.’
I felt anger and relief. I had wasted two years, but now it was over. Or was it? He gave me a list of three other agents who represented more women’s fiction and said he would write a positive recommendation on my behalf. I figured I had nothing to lose. The responses came back from the other agents, ‘not for me,’ ‘disappointed in the direction the plot took,’ and ‘this business is about passion and I didn’t feel a connection.’
I had my answer from the universe to self-publish. I had it when after two years my agent rarely returned my calls. I had it when an ‘expert’ editor sent me back a sloppy manuscript. I had it when I read the piece on self-publishing in Poets & Writers and rather than firing my agent, gave him one more chance. I had it when I insisted on reaching out to other agents. I received the answer…ten different times and in ten different ways…and I ignored it.
That’s when it hit me. For two years I had felt as if my novel was being held hostage by forces outside my control…an agent, an editor…even time. These gatekeepers getting in the way of my novel being published. I suddenly realized it wasn’t them getting in the way, it was me. I was battling my own gatekeeper…the gatekeeper inside…that for whatever reason wanted to slow-down or stop an author from emerging, from taking her place in the world. Who was this gatekeeper inside creating a story of how my novel was to be introduced to the world, telling me it could only happen in a certain way and if it didn’t, it wasn’t right? Who was this gatekeeper feeding the fear inside me that maybe it wasn’t going to happen at all? Who was this gatekeeper who had allowed a creation so close to her heart to be abandoned and abused by others?
When I became witness to the gatekeeper inside…all was released…everything shifted. I developed a plan and things started to fly. In the same amount of time it took me to write the book – four months – I had a published novel.
I recognize now that the experience with the agent gave me two years of revisions that I may not have otherwise put into the book. I was in the habit of the 24-hour news cycle where content is written and edited seconds before air. My novel is now a deeper, more authentic book and has layers it didn’t have before…there is meat on the bones. But the greatest reward has been the person that I’ve become through the writing of this book and birthing it into the world. I trust my intuition on a level I haven’t before. I’ve exposed the shadow that haunts my work with the hows and when. I feel a peace surrounding my writing and trust that anything I write will unfold as it supposed to, at exactly the right time. What matters is that I write. It is what I am here to do. I’ve reclaimed the power I’d given away…the power I gave to others to validate or anoint me as the writer I already am.
If I’ve learned one great lesson…it is that the only person who can stand in the way of making your dreams come true, is you, if you allow yourself to get locked by fear or enveloped in ego. I came face-to-face with the gatekeeper inside and discovered the strength to politely say to her ‘no, thanks. I’ll take it from here.’