Journey to Publication 1: Relationships
This is not just another “how I found my agent” story, but a story about centering what matters. About having no regrets, about observing the integrity of the process, and surrounding yourself with community (in a totally COVID-free way).
We all remember 2020. But what I remember most—at least in the writing life—is the predawn awakening when I figured out what I needed to fix. My wife works in healthcare and needed an escape for a weekend, so we drove down to Malibu and stayed in a weirdly deserted Airbnb on a burn-scarred hillside above the ocean, where the coyotes howled outside the windows. I’d been despairing over the agent search because I knew I’d written a good novel, albeit an unconventional one, and I kept getting rejections because it didn’t fit the standard narrative arc. Or I’d heard nothing at all. I thought, I’ve been throwing myself at this goal for 20 years, come close with a different project and set it aside, learned a lot, finally gotten an MFA, and I’m still where I started. What else did I have the power to do?
And that’s when I woke up in the dark and just knew I could keep everything that was weird and wonderful about the novel, if all I changed was to let the first-person narrator address the whole thing to her dead aunt. Over the next months, I reworked the manuscript, and by December, I heard back from my now-agent Adam Schear within 10 days of submission, delivering an enthusiastic yes.
But this isn’t my achievement: it’s about the lifetime of friendships and good working relationships that sustain a person when the pursuit of a dream feels like a dead end. It’s about the friends who genuinely wanted to read a manuscript and share their thoughts. It’s about a month-long chapter-by-chapter manuscript swap I did with my mentor, who was also finishing a novel. It’s about sharing a revised first chapter with my wife and hearing her say that it worked. It’s about a colleague who speaks Palestinian-dialect Arabic and who could help me fine-tune dialogue, and learning something new. It’s about an unsolicited offer from a lit mag editor who suggested querying his wife’s agent. It’s about saying yes to opportunities I hadn’t heard of, or smaller journals, or classes and readings online. It’s about a client and her wife who understood literary agency contracts and could offer advice before I signed.
It’s about all these people being part of my life and willing to help, not in a transactional way, but just because engaging with good people around a dream is its own reward. It helps me clear my mind of doubt and just do the work that’s in my power to do.
Here are five pieces of advice that I want to share, in case they are useful:
Give back. Helping others on a low day improves the mental weather.
Listen. Seek advice from your resources. Maybe that’s a beta-reader friend, a fellow reader, an MFA classmate, a colleague, or an online class. Then just set your brain on “receive” and let the other chatter take a backseat for a little while.
Control what you can control. At the beginning of my query journey, I noticed I overlooked my own typos or sometimes missed ways I might be misread. (And I’m an editor, for crying out loud!) If a query only has one shot, I want to give it my best, so now I’m a stickler about seeking a second read on all important messages. I also seek out second opinions often. My only goal is to do as much as I can to the best of my ability at the time, so if the whole thing goes awry later, I can stand behind my efforts.
Say yes. I once had a teacher who shared a list of lit mags ranked by prestige. What aspiring writer wouldn’t start near the top? I sent out my stories and got rejection after rejection. Things have changed—a little—but one of the most joyful and sustaining rituals in my writing life is when I can share published work with my community; it closes the loop on all those long hours honing a manuscript in solitude. Submit widely and build relationships with the editors who accept your work. If someone offers you a legit opportunity, say yes.
Do it for its own sake. When I need to clear my head of doubts and distractions, I meditate by imagining that nothing I write will ever be read, and if my words go into the world, my name won’t ever be attached to them—and then I ask myself, would I still write, even then? I love the challenge of finding language for slippery consciousness, for the skip in my heart when I make a new discovery in a plotline or marvel at possibilities. My core writing practice is writing. I wouldn’t give it up for anything.
BONUS: Celebrate every victory, especially the small ones.
Have other advice that has really worked for you? Share it with me on Twitter!