“It sure would be nice to have some folks to talk to.”
Will Varner / BuzzFeed
Writers share a lot of personal stuff online. Which books are lining their "to be read" shelves, what they had for brunch, the fact that they had brunch, how many thousands of words they're in to their new projects. But with few exceptions, even the most socially active writers shy away from sharing the darker moments of their debut book experiences.
This silence comes from a place of professional, grown-up restraint: For most writers, publishing a book is the achievement of a lifetime dream and only the most tasteless of people would talk negatively about it. But having been a debut novelist myself, I've come to feel like we need more transparency around this rite of passage. The necessary gleefulness embedded in publication-related social media posts can make the first-time author thing look like a carnival of successful signings and carpal tunnel massages to the uninitiated. The reality, I'm afraid, is more like you're sitting alone, post-carnival, on a cigarette-butt encrusted patch of grass typing your own name into Bing, but other than that you're feeling super-duper lucky. Everything is great!
The trip from struggling writer to published author is a vision quest that takes place in a protected area bordered on all sides by strip malls. It is like sitting at a dinner table in haute couture with a dirty diaper on. For a lot of writers, it will prove to be the most emotionally unsteady period of their lives. It is a privilege and a gift and an honor to be a debut author, but it is, above all things, an existential test.
Will Varner / BuzzFeed
Let's start out with the pre-publication period, or, as I like to call it, When You Lose Your Friends. If you're anything like I was before I had a book deal, there was nothing I liked more than getting together over a basket of pre-frozen French fries to groan about the writing life with my writing friends. Tallying up rejections from different magazines, discussing which publications did and didn't pay, bitching about the undeserved advance that just fell down from the heavens on some undeserving writer's head.
Now, the elephant in the beer garden during such discussions was that all of us secretly wanted to possess that lucky head. Or rather, we felt secretly bolstered by the knowledge that we already had that head, it was just a matter of time until the publishing industry awakened to our genius and slapped a book advance on it.
But let me tell you what it's like when the unthinkable happens, and that book advance arrives. All of a sudden, you're not a struggling writer any more, you're the recipient of a golden one-way ticket to The Other Side. No matter that your new employer offers no health insurance or job security whatsoever, your ship has come in and if other authors' Instagram feeds are any evidence, it's carrying paid speaking engagements and loads of free white wine.
This is really exciting, though! Look, you've actually made it! It is time to be proud! You want to celebrate with your writer buddies, but since you got your book deal, they no longer share their pre-frozen fries with you. In fact, they've started adjusting their postures when you're near them. They stop conversations short. Having been swept up by Editor Charming, you're not one of the underdogs any more. You're not one of them.
You have a book coming out though, so you're feeling benevolent. You understand their hostility — well, heck! So you stay out of the way of your former writing pals. You hope this is a situation that time and their own future book deals (fingers crossed!) will mend. Except of course for Jeffrey, who's working on a collection of experimental short fiction. You'll never talk to him again!
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Why Being A Debut Author Isn't Exactly A Dream Come True