How A Writer Stays Sane
She reads books; she drinks coffee; she points herself toward the rising sun.
As I write this post, it’s now less than three weeks til the publication day of Our American Friend. I know, I know! How many times have I said this now? I sound like a broken record! But before I get into the musings, let me give a quick plug to the book events coming up in February (all of which you can find listed here). At each of these events, I’m in-conversation with another writer—and you guys, these writers! I’m pinching myself. I have so much respect and admiration for every person on this list.
Jonathan Darman (New York Society Library, in-person, February 15) is a brilliant political biographer, not to mention a dear friend, not to mention the person who introduced me to the Society Library in the first place, so this feels cosmically perfect. Lara Prescott (RJ Julia, virtual, February 17) is the author of The Secrets We Kept, a novel about the real-life CIA intrigue behind the publication of Doctor Zhivago, which I devoured like an ice cream sundae. Jo Piazza (Philadelphia Athenaeum, in-person, February 22) writes crackling, perceptive, of-the-moment fiction, and also created one of the low-key best podcasts of the last year. And Jennifer Close (Solid State Books, virtual, February 24) is someone I’ve admired for the longest time, whose novels strike that impossibly elegant balance between funny and compassionate.
HOT DAMN! These are going to be fun. And the silver lining of these virtual events is that you can join from anywhere in the world. So even though I’m not making it out to the West Coast, and even though there are so many people I haven’t seen in far too long, I still hope you might join for one (or more!) of these events. It really would mean so much to see you there! I mentioned this on Instagram the other day, but it bears repeating: when The Futures came out in 2017, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy doing these events as much as I do. I’ve always thought of myself as an introvert (although, honestly, the pandemic has changed that), but I love them. And they’ve turned out to be very important to me. In a way, the book doesn’t feel real until I’m sharing it with you; until I get to talk to you about it. These events are the first time the book really becomes a thing separate from me. My relationship to it starts to shift. I love my little baby, but I recognize that my little baby has left the nest. It no longer belongs to me. These events are where I mark, and celebrate, the feeling of holding it more lightly.
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Talk to any writer with a book coming out, and she will tell you how nerve-wracking and topsy-turvy those weeks right before publication are. When you begin writing a novel, you have a frightening amount of control. You decide what will happen to these characters. You decide what they will say, what they will do, whether they get to laugh or cry or yell or whisper. And then time goes on, and other people weigh in. You take edits, incorporate feedback: you have a little bit less control. You come up with marketing copy, review cover designs: your opinion matters, but it’s just one among many. You send early copies to booksellers and the media: you would like to think that all of them will love the book, but they won’t. By the time the book hits shelves, you are starting to see that your role in the process is pretty much finished. You are there to talk to people, to answer questions, to support the story you have written. But you are no longer steering this ship.
This lack of control! It’s a lesson I have been fated to learn over and over, in every arena of life. I find that it’s usually easier for me to accept my lack of control when my life is relatively quiet; when my routine is stable and predictable. I can sit there, sipping my morning coffee, enjoying the afterglow of meditation, and think: oh, yes, look how evolved I am. But this (and it’s taken me a while to realize this) is entirely false. I’m congratulating myself for something supremely easy. Of course I can be calm, cool, and collected when life is calm, cool, and collected. It’s when life becomes a proper shitstorm that the difficulty makes itself known.
It reminds me of something I heard on a podcast this morning. Everyone on the internet is reading Atomic Habits, and while I haven’t read it yet (I almost certainly will), I’m listening to Brene Brown interview James Clear, and she highlighted this observation of his: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
Your third novel isn’t as sexy as your first. You lack that cherubic newborn glow; you no longer embody such limitless potential. Schrodinger’s box has been opened; the Debut Author is discovered to be just a regular old author after all. But there are many, many, many ways in which the third novel experience is better than the first. I have a better grasp of my systems. I know which will help me through this time, and which will only hurt me.
What hurts: reading your Goodreads and Amazon reviews. There is no upside to this. Louder for the people in the back: there is no upside to this. What hurts: comparing your book to the other books that published in the same week or month. Thinking to yourself: if only, if only. If only you had gotten that review, been featured on that show, gotten this or that celebrity to post about it. Would those things have changed the trajectory of your book? Quite possibly yes. But did those things happen? No. And did anyone ever tell you that were entitled to those things? Was there some legally binding contract that guaranteed those outcomes? Also no. Can you feel a little sad about the fact that your dreams didn’t come true? Sure. You’re only human. But you are not meant to stay in that sadness for too long.
What helps: finding the people with whom you can tell the truth. Despite working in book publishing for many years, it took me a little while to find a community of writer-friends. But now they are extremely dear to me. They are my soulmates, each and every one of them. We take walks together (in-person if they live in New York, on the phone if they don’t), criss-crossing Central Park, setting a quick pace, getting the blood pumping. We gossip a little, but mostly we talk about the hard stuff. If something is making you feel tender, or fragile, or afraid, or disappointed, then you have one task: to pay attention to that feeling. There is knowledge within that feeling. Your heart is trying to tell you something. But rarely can you decipher the heart’s tricky language on your own. So you walk and talk with your trusted soulmate friends, and you speak to them in that tricky language of your heart, and most of the time, they hear what you cannot hear. Your awareness of the problem also contains the seeds of a solution.
And then you also do the basic things! The things so ordinary you almost overlook them. For me this means regular daily exercise. Whether running, or Pelotoning, or walking, or yoga, what matters is the movement. It also means baking cookies. It means meditating every morning. It means singing along to the Beatles while making my coffee, and tearing up every time I hear Let It Be. It means saying no to certain plans in order to have enough quiet time, to have those nights when I wear pajamas and unplug myself from the world. But balanced against that last imperative is something just as important; probably the most important thing on this list. To keep myself sane, I cannot suddenly start to think that this is MY moment, that the people in my life are suddenly orbiting around ME. Because I feel most myself—the best version of myself—when I find ways to serve my friends, my family, the people in my community. This service comes in all forms. It can mean texting a friend to say that, hey, this old song made me think of you; it can mean cooking or doing the dishes for a person you love; it can mean volunteering for the nearby soup kitchen; it can mean taking the time to ask how a stranger is doing, and slowing down enough to actually listen, and to listen for as long as they would like to talk. These things remind me that, as long-awaited as this publication might be, in this moment, I am still just plain old Anna. I am still a mere planet circling the sun.
After an extended hiatus for the holidays, over these last few weeks I’ve been falling back in love with a running routine. It feels good. Most mornings I rely on the Nike Run Club app. The knowledge that I’ll have Coach Bennett (LOVE YOU, Coach Bennett) chatting in my ear makes it a little easier to get myself out the door. Coach Bennett is constantly giving you these little tips and tricks, and like he always says: This is about running. This is not about running. The same goes for everything I just said above. Every lesson I learn, every tidbit I glean. This is about writing. This is not about writing.