Writing Wednesday: It's the End of the World as I Know It--and I Feel Fine

Years ago, I read Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold when it first came out, one of the few hardcovers I allowed myself to buy at a time when I was desperately struggling financially. I love almost everything by Bujold, but this book holds a special place in my heart because it was about a character who was giving up everything he thought he ever wanted, hit rock bottom in all conceivable ways, and discovered that he finally had the freedom to get what it turned out he had grown up to want in the meantime.

When I read it, I had just been nudged out of an adjunct position at my local university and had been in a lot of emotional pain at this rejection. At the same time, I was able to keep a clear enough head to realize that I was at last being given the chance to pursue my writing full-time, if I had the courage to do it. I had been kicked in the teeth, and I could have chosen to try to prove myself to these people by getting a job teaching German Literature elsewhere. There were several other local universities around who would probably have been glad to have a Princeton graduate there. But I didn't do that because I finally saw that I had been using teaching about other people's writing as a distraction from doing the courageous thing of writing my own literature.

It was time for courage, and I threw myself at my own career with everything I had in me. This was not an inconsiderable amount of energy. I wrote 4-5 books a year for the next five years until I finally had a book accepted for publication. And then began a long, long time figuring out what publishers wanted to publish. I did not intend for this to have an effect of my writing. It is hard for me to put a finger on precisely what the difference was. It may not have changed what I wrote, but it may have. It certainly changed how I felt about writing. I was anxious a lot and tended to have to make elaborate rules about not talking about my books or promising myself this wasn't the "real" book.

Then this year, a whole series of books was cancelled by Harper. And another contract was cancelled. And I was really upset for a while. I couldn't talk about it in person to friends, to my family, to my agent or editor. But the strangest thing happened. I was suddenly filled with ideas of books I wanted to write. Though it was the middle of the Holiday season, I ended up writing an entire novel in a few hours a day. It is a novel that will never sell and I keep calling it the unsellable novel. I could probably come up with a tagline that would make it less unsellable, but there is a delicious freedom about the idea that it won't sell, that I wrote it purely because I wanted to write it. And then I started to work on another novel, which had already been rejected in idea form by agent and editor alike and I didn't care. I like it. So I am writing it.

What happened is that what seems to be the worst possible thing in the world was not the worst possible thing. I mean, of course, it is terrible financially and I am extremely lucky in that we will survive perfectly well (minus MIT tuition costs) without my writing income this year and probably in foreseeable years, too. I am married to someone who supports my writing, but doesn't care if it makes money. He wants me to be happy, and to be an interesting person who finds good things to do in the world. I have a modest lifestyle that I have no interest in increasing. I don't want a bigger house. I am happy with junky old cars. I like doing my own laundry.

And I can write whatever the hell I want. I used to take everything I wrote to a critique group to ask if I was doing it right. That was a useful thing, I admit. But I don't really care about that anymore. I don't want to do it right. I just want to do it the way I want to do it. I like to get feedback from people who read my books and enjoy them. Not so much people who don't enjoy them. Mostly, I am back to writing because writing brings me pleasure. I spent some time this year wondering if I should do something else with my life. Maybe I should, but the truth is, I can't stop writing. I am a writer. I write because I have stories and they must out. They come to me and I find satisfaction in writing them down as best I can. I love words and I love characters and twisty plots and secrets and magic. I write what I love to write--again.

The anxiety is, I'm sure, not gone forever. But it has been a blessed relief for it to be gone for now, and to accept that whatever happens next, it will be what I want it to be because my books will be my books again. So like Miles, who loses a whole identity in Captain Naismith, I have discovered that while I was busy being "author Mette Ivie Harrison," I may have actually become someone else who wants someone else. Not a completely different person, mind you, but a more grown up one. And there will be other jobs waiting out there for me that are so perfect for me, so wonderful and exciting, that I could not have conceived of them before. And even if they don't come, it doesn't matter. Because I have what I have done, and what I have become. Me.