My Literary Not-Success Story

Or How to Sustain "The Dream TM"

Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act” was seeding some very important thoughts for me in early 2024…

Dear Kristin,

I’m so nostalgic, lately. Doing that thing where you scroll through your camera roll to remember who you were last year. Do you do that too? My phone tells me early-2024 Lindsey was reading Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act and dog-earing page after page because I was too lazy to get up and find a sticky note. Taking so many pictures of my son’s ever-changing face, so many blink-eye photos that I couldn’t delete because each one represented a second I would never get back. Listening to a playlist called “Coming of Age Indie Sleaze Afternoon,” that Spotify generated for me, an insultingly accurate representation of my deepest musical needs. Obsessing over each day’s horoscope—Chani, tell me if the placement of the moon and the stars means I will be situationally happy today—desperately grasping for some kind of meaning, some kind of coupon code, some kind of sign. As usual, right? But reading between the photos, I instantly see what was going on in early 2024. My first novel had been on submission and hadn’t sold. Communication with my literary agent had gotten dicey. I was about to break up with her. A broken relationship. An unsold book. The shame of it. The disappointment of it. The failure of it.

I was Googling stories of debut novels not selling. Of writers choosing to leave their agents. Of what my prognosis for success might be given these unfortunate facts. And I found the same thing over and over: in order to advance at all in a career in traditional publishing, I had to go write another book—LIKE IT’S THAT EASY— before I could try again for an agent, a book deal.

{Cue chaotic orchestral number to illustrate protagonist’s complete loss of the plot}

What I was actually looking for was an answer to how am I supposed to carry on when my ego has suffered such a blow? Nowadays, generative AI—that scourge— would probably try to give me an answer. I would probably hate that answer.

The answer is always something like this: you just do. But, can we not for a minute? Because while that’s technically true, it’s incredibly unhelpful. And, anyway, early-2024 me was too busy trying to make herself into a tiny ball. Wrapping myself up with myself so I could feel both small and comforted. And that kind of an answer is an insult to a flesh ball of sorrow.

Better to feel for a little bit. To ask open-ended questions of the void. Such as: HOW? How am I supposed to keep writing when the business of writing has ruined writing for me? How do I write the next thing when my optimism has died and I’m uncertain how to grieve it? How do I view my career when it feels like I’ve taken a gigantic step backwards, on a rickety staircase, have maybe, in fact, fallen down said staircase and broken something vital in the darkness? Can I blame anyone? Would that be okay? Can I sue? Because I need a place to put the hurt.

Clearly Rick Rubin had my number here.

I did blame my agent for a while, and that was fun, but it didn’t really solve my problem of how. How do I carry on with joy and a wild mind when my mind is loud with the reality I have observed and lived? The reality that books often don’t sell, and agents are sometimes a bad fit, and short stories get passed on, often with incredibly trite emails. Rejection cloaked in praise. A sign off without a name. How do I activate hope when I’m painfully aware that it might soon be dashed? When someone passively insulted my creativity just yesterday? When I’ve been unable to catch a break for literal months?

That was the work of the following year. When I finally got bored of not writing. When I finally got desperate enough to ask for help and so many kind souls told me that what had happened to me was both a unique kind of awful and also so commonplace in this business. When I realized writing and the business of writing were mutually exclusive and the one didn’t have to have anything to do with the other. It was right around this time that my husband and I were watching old episodes of the NFL’s Hard Knocks— a football reality show that illustrates how many career dreams are dashed in the making of a single team’s 53-man roster—and it was dawning on me that my situation could be a lot worse.

And at some point I realized the answer to my question was this: you just do. Damn.

Personally vetted action items should you ever find yourself recovering from a creative gut-punch

• Stop thinking ten steps ahead. Ambient anxiety is no friend of creativity.

• Instead of fixating on the business of books fixate on the connective tissue you can make right now on the page. How one thought becomes another and nobody else’s brain would make that connection but yours just did. Think about what makes your work your own. What obsessions, what weird turns of phrases, what source materials. Lean in.

• Remember what writer Marie-Helene Bertino’s agent once told her: Your work is not everyone’s cup of tea, nor should it be.

• Lower your gaze from the horizon line down into your own notebook for a little bit. Listen to the sound of your own breath. Make poetry out of pouring a pot of hot water into a cup. I’m sorry, but steam is very cool. Forget the clock and remember that time is a construct. Forget those stupid lists that fetishize the relative youth of successful people. Those lists are stupid anyway and only show 1/16th of the truth.

• Ask yourself: what is success anyway?

• And: what if the only goal was to be present for discovery and synchronicity? Finding the corner piece of a story that before didn’t work. Discovering the title was there all along. Rubbing two ideas together and making heat. That’s writing.

Sending so much love across the country,

Lindsey

---

What’s Making Me Happy

Reading:

The other day I was trying desperately to get into a writing flow state. That’s always a great place from which to start: desperation. Anyway. I had enough sense to stop clawing for a minute and think critically about what might help. Poetry, I thought, and picked up a book of Mary Ruefle’s selected poetry and read the first poem “Standing Furthest.”

All day I have done nothing./ To admonish me a few aspen jostle beneath puny stars./ I suppose in a rainforest a draft of hands brought in the tubers for today, women scratched their breasts in the sunlight/ and smiled: someone somewhere/ heard the gossip of exotic birds and passed it on in the night/ to another, sleeping curled like an ear:/ of all things standing furthest from what is real, stand these trees/ shaking with dispensable joy,/ or those in their isolation/ shading an extraordinary secret.

And poetry worked like it always does. I think it was “sleeping curled like an ear” that did it. Or maybe it was “puny stars.”

Watching:

Due to situations beyond my control (read: my husband’s work schedule), I haven’t started the new season of White Lotus yet, but that’s what I WANT to be watching. What I WILL be watching. Will it be as perfect as the first two seasons? I can’t wait to find out. But knowing that there IS a season three, and it’s waiting for me on whatever HBO is called now is making me very happy right now.

Listening to:

I’m going through a big Beatles re-listen, remembering how overwhelmingly vast their catalogue is, how it shifts with each decade. How incredible so much of it is. I’m also secretly trying to expose my son in the hopes that he likes it enough to start requesting it over Handyman Hal on repeat. Diabolical parenting tactics, I know.

What else:

I got two of these blankets when Anthropologie did their blanket fire-sale this past December. And after suffering through winters with the thinnest and least satisfying blankets on planet earth, we are now the smuggest and warmest people you will meet. The blankets are plush, thick enough to act as quasi-weighted blankets. In other words: perfection. Highly recommend, and apparently they go on deep sale every year and have a lot more colors to choose from?