Advice to My Younger Self About Being Published

I got an email recently from a young person who wanted my advice on how to get published as soon as possible. And I shook my head a little, and then sighed, and remembered when I was that age, making it a New Years resolution every year to get published, and sure that when I was, I would finally feel like I had “made it,” that I had justified my existence to the universe, that people would take me seriously and that I would be treated like I felt I deserved to be treated by all those people who dismissed me.

Twenty-five years later, eight books published and another coming out in about a month, I think I would say this to my younger self:

1. Being published isn’t going to do what you think it will do. Most people will have never heard of your book. The others will still think it’s not important enough to treat you differently.

2. Being published isn’t something you earn by working hard. It’s something that happens organically, both when you’re good enough at writing and when you’re good enough at networking. Pushing the issue inevitably makes it take longer. The more anxious you are about it, the less likely you are to be working at the right thing.

3. The way to get the feeling of satisfaction in yourself and what you are doing isn’t through publication. It’s through finding work to do that has value.

4. We Americans in general are obsessed with getting results right now. We want to go on a diet and have lost weight by tomorrow. We want to start lifting weights and looked ripped in two weeks. These kinds of expectations end up backfiring and making us sacrifice the healthy habits that are long-term healthy for stupid short-term benefits. For writers, they lead us to signing contracts that are bad, giving up rights, taking a quick up-front payment, and publishing things that maybe should have been improved or shouldn’t have been published in the first place.

5. Writers aren’t writers because they’re published. If you’re a writer, you live life in a certain way. You write about life. Some writers write every day about everything. Some write when they feel pressed to. But it’s not a badge. It’s a way of living, seeing, breathing, interacting.

6. You publish a product. You don’t publish yourself. You will always be evolving and that’s a good thing. No book you publish will ever be perfect. You will always want to tinker with the end product. You will never think you really deserve what you get, either good or bad.

7. The best part of being a writer is finding other writers who are like you. This doesn’t require publication at all. You can find wonderful people around you who will inspire you and help you along your path right now. Don’t imagine that they have to be published in order to help you along.

8. You may have days you regret publishing one thing or another thing or regret ever being published at all. You may wish you had gotten a “real job” instead. That’s just part of the process. It’s messy.

9. You are never going to be happy with where you are. There will always be new goalposts, because that’s the way you think. There are always more and harder books to write. There are always things left to say, to get right.

10. Failure is part of the process, and not just because it leads you to success. Failure is part of a life spent trying, and if you can’t give yourself credit for failing, you’re going to struggle because there’s more failure than success and they don’t always feel connected. Just because you get through one failure doesn’t mean that you’re going to have success next. And no matter what the self-help books say, every failure isn’t taking you one step closer. It may or it may not.

Well maybe this isn’t the advice I would give to my younger self, after all. Maybe it’s the advice I need right now. My younger self probably wouldn’t be able to understand any of this. My younger self probably just needed to hear:

Keep at it. You’ll get there. You’re good enough. Working hard is all that matters.

The nuances are perhaps best left to the older and wiser and more cynical—and more joyful. I refuse to take pleasure only in success. I refuse to only celebrate a book deal. I celebrate every day, every sentence, every word. I celebrate failure and I even celebrate doing nothing, regret, and bitterness. It’s all part of being a writer, even if it isn’t all part of being published.