Turns Out The Problem Is Me
February 10, 2016 § 37 Comments
I wrote a memoir. It took ten years–two years of blogging regularly about a category of experience in my life, eight years of rewriting and printing it out and literally cutting it apart and making notes and putting it back together and workshopping it in a class at Grub Street and having friends read it and hiring an editor and querying and getting an agent and having the agent shop it to publishers.
The first page is really, really good.
Good enough that when I did that “Writer Idol” thing at a workshop, where everyone’s first page is read anonymously out loud and the panel of judges raise their hands when they’d stop reading if it came to their inbox, the reader got through my whole page and the room paused for a moment and then applauded. Talk about a stroke to the writer ego! So I thought, hey, there’s a student reading tonight and I’ve never read any of this manuscript publicly before, why not capitalize on this momentum, and I started leafing through pages. And my reaction was:
Boring, boring, porn, boring, not a self-contained section, boring, boring, I am no way reading that, awful, porn, boring.
And that’s also when all of a sudden I noticed it was ninety-six thousand words, which for a memoir by someone not-famous is, as we say in the publishing biz, “really freaking long.” (How the hell did I miss that?)
Suddenly, the year’s worth of rejections my agent has amassed made sense. Suddenly I stopped feeling like maybe the world wasn’t ready or maybe we’d been submitting to the wrong people or maybe I’d ended up with the wrong agent, because clearly the problem was the manuscript.
It wasn’t good enough.
And boy, it sucks to realize that ten years of work wasn’t enough, and that in fact I may have burned through the chance of ever publishing this book, because once it’s been shopped around, it’s been shopped around, and you don’t get to shop the same book again even if you make it a whole lot better.
I might get to sell it if I sell another book and the publisher wants to know if I have anything else in the pipeline.
I might get to sell it if I self-publish.
I might get to sell it if I drastically revise and trim and find a publisher who hasn’t seen the previous version.
But a better choice is to let it go for now. To do something else with the material–maybe that wealth of experience is meant to back up a novel. Maybe the essential story, or part of the essential story, is an essay, or a radio story, or a magazine article. Maybe it was only ever meant to be a blog.
I still won.
I won the ability to write a whole book–now I know I can. I won three years of reading agent blogs and going to conferences and learning how the publishing world works and meeting writers I can help and who can help me. I won knowing how to write a query. I won when an agent I queried who read the full and didn’t want it seemed like the right agent for someone else, and I hooked up that agent with my author friend. I won finding out people liked the underlying story, that when workshop teachers and guest writers asked me about the topic of the book they got excited, that somewhere in that 96K is a set of facts worth sharing in some way. I won building a writing habit and sitting down every day alone or with a writer friend and living a life that feels like a writer’s life. I won knowing that my problem is structure and I’ll have to pay more attention to that next time. I won being able to step back and look at my work with a critical eye and say, “close but no cigar,” and next time I’ll know it faster. I won knowing that failure isn’t death, or even death to my career.
In the end, the memoir functions a lot like my MFA. The piece of paper is not the doorway to fame and success. But everything I did to earn it is.
Next project, here I come.
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Allison K Williams is Brevity’s Social Media Editor and the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book. Want writing news, events, and upcoming webinars? Join the A-List!
inspiring..
VERY inspiring. And real.
That’s a hard moment. You’ll be better for it, but still hard. I appreciate your honesty–that’s the only way we get better.
You continue to impress me. I look forward to your next book too.
Thanks so much for the vote of confidence!
Being objective about your work, your writing, the choices you’ve made…it’s hard because if it’s yours, it’s you, so it’s perfect just as it is. Isn’t it? And because it’s you, you end up spending too much time shoring up a perception that it’s perfect. So being objective doesn’t just poke a hole in your sense of perfection, but where’s the time gone? The bravery is in saying, it’s itself and not me, and time passed is irretrievable, but here’s what I can do now. Brava.
And it’s tough, too, when so many of the pieces seemed to be in place – the blog posts had been well-received and I’m happy with the “voice” of the piece, and I already knew the subject matter would make it a hard sell, so it was hard to come around to “nope, just not gonna happen!”
Wonderful. Thank you.
Thank you. Why didn’t the agent or editor tell you it was too long? I am wondering more about their roles in your process of ten years of work.
You know, I think somehow we all missed that, or maybe it didn’t seem like an issue in the process of writing it. I’d already been working for 8 years when I was ready to have it edited, and I’ve been with my wonderfully patient agent for about 18 months, so most of the process (and blame 🙂 ) goes right to me.
I love the new perspective I have from reading this…there are so many wins in what could seem like the opposite. Thank you for that.
LOVE this post. I, too, spent 10 years on a novel that didn’t quite work. But it was 10 years well spent.
What a perfect journey! Success is in the joy of unfolding itself …wish you the best!
smart girl that Alison.
Any chance that writing about the issue was therapeutic, too? That was the case with my memoir – getting all those stories and thoughts down on paper was cheap therapy, which can also be a huge benefit of writing memoir.
I do experience that, but not as much with this one – the thing that helped the most was time, and that was part of the process, too! But you’re absolutely right, often organizing our thoughts on the page can give some therapeutic perspective and distance.
People keep asking me about my book. It’s a vicious cycle. Thank you for sharing how you won.
There is so much to learn from this post and your story. Thank you for sharing!
And you won, too, by lending your candor to writers you don’t even know–and to some you do know, as well.
[…] I opened WordPress tonight and began reading, I came across a post by Allison K Williams called Turns Out the Problem was Me. In the post she describes the process of discovering that her memoir wasn’t as good as she […]
A wonderful post that left me feeling weepy and inspired. Thank you.
Wonderful and inspiring. We can all notice and cherish the benefits that weren’t what we desired. But I too wondered why your editor and agent fell down on the job by not advising you that your ms was too long. Your statement “somehow we all missed that” is much too generous and forgiving. If they are truly professional, they shouldn’t have “missed that,” least of all “somehow.”
Alison, this is you? I have a hope. Thank you for your honestly. Good stuff.
I loved this! It really resonated with me. I’ve recently started a ‘blog-oir’ and am finding the experience very empowering – even if only family and friends are following it. Like you – I can already see many ‘wins’ from just simply doing what I’ve long desired but have often self sabotaged. And that is – to write. Thank you.
Love this. So much rings true and it was good to see such a positive spin as I tend to get down in the dumps over the “lost” years writing stuff that doesn’t work in the end, which, as you describe so well, aren’t lost years at all, but rather the hard work of becoming a better writer, and–so important–acquiring the self-editing skills to know what when you’re writing isn’t working a heck of a lot sooner. Thanks!
Thanks so much for your honesty and frankness in this post. I read it to the end, and was inspired by it. I’ll look at my finished book, and see if I can improve it before shopping it around. Keep up the good work!
[…] on the Brevity blog, Allison Williams has written an outstanding post on what’s “won” even when one’s book doesn’t sell. Many details (and […]
Wow, brilliantly, painfully honest; what else is good writing but the process of forever trying to make ourselves better writers and not merely better sales associates. TL
My first published book was the fourth book I wrote.
I am so comforted by that.
Ditto!
I simply love your attitude. Nothing done for the right reasons is ever a waste.
Seeing the “wins” … wonderful. Inspiring. I am going to keep this one around as a good reminder, thank you for writing it!
That’s me! It’s reassuring to know there’s another me out there who has similar experiences with her memoir. Thanks for sharing your positive reflections.
Thank you fro writing this essay–I relate to so much of it. Sigh. But I especially appreciate how you’ve found a way to reframe the experience as a win. I needed to hear that.
[…] My first memoir was unsellable, largely because I hadn’t finished living the story I was trying to tell. I couldn’t wrap up a plot about depression while I was still depressed. I wasn’t at the destination; I hadn’t reached closure. […]
[…] The memoir agented but never sold. Recently, a friend urged me to revise and send it out again. She texted: […]