As a former high school valedictorian, I was not cut out to be a self-published author. My kids would identify that statement as a flex—bragging, showing off, for those unfamiliar with Gen Z vernacular—but it’s been thirty years, and the only gold left on that star is for fools. The relevant point about valedictorians is that we care a lot about external validation. Whether or not we were the smartest kid in the room, we were the ones most highly motivated to grasp the assignment, size up the standards by which we’d be graded, exceed them whenever possible, and knock that thing out on time—time after time—for the glory to be had in a number on a sheet of paper, our name at the top of the list.
Do you see where I’m headed with this? When a former valedictorian sets out to write a novel, her dreams are made of coveted agents and prestigious publishers and impressive advances and bookstore displays and bestseller lists. It will not occur to her to question the value of these measures or her ability to reach them. She excels at success on other people’s terms. If she fails to reach it, she will try again to the point of self-inflicted concussions against implacable brick walls, and if she’s still failing she will generally give up quietly and avoid class reunions, and other places where her absence of reflected glory will be particularly noticeable. What she is least inclined to do is publish her own damned novel, since there is absolutely no external validation in that, and the self-promotion required to succeed at self-publishing feels a lot like trumpeting her failure from the rooftops. In the highly unlikely event that she does self-publish, you should sooner or later expect an essay explaining how she misunderstood the assignment and still deserves an A according to the criteria she aspired to.
This is that essay.
When I began writing the novel that became Seven Tears in the Sea, I was nine years into a marriage that was far less happy than I could admit, my daughters were four and one, and I had just had a revelatory experience with Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight novels. Look. I knew they were terrible. I could have explained why as I was reading them. But I read them all in one headlong rush like a junkie on a bad drug. And that’s exactly what I was. Those books did not have one true thing to impart about love or sex or desire, but they mixed up some synthetic elixir that delivered an experience that (briefly) filled the gaping hole in my marriage where I expected those things to be. My husband and I loved each other, but never the way what’s-her-name and Edward did (and thank god, because that would have implied that one of us was a cannibal), and we had desired each other once but I could no longer locate that desire to save my life, and we had sex but it was more of a chore than a consummation devoutly to be wished. Like a bad drug, the stories didn’t help me with any of that, but they were a distraction that all too quickly went away and left reality looking even less shiny and fun than it had before, and left me looking for another fix.
I was mad about it. We’re a culture awash in unhappy marriages, and our favorite stories about love are outrageous lies. Someone needed to write a truer love story, a story that somehow accounted for the fact that while lasting love is real, and passionate desire is real, and awesomely sexy sex is real, those things frequently fail to all show up together to the same table, or they come masquerading as one when they’re actually something else entirely, and some of the combinations that result are not dinner parties but disasters. I felt I was the woman for the job.
I was in my mid thirties, I was the veteran of several tragic love stories, I had a degree in English literature, half my childhood had taken place in my mother’s bookstore, and I’d been reading fiction nearly nonstop since I was three years old. I did not consult anyone: I wrote my own assignment.
I think writing your own assignment is standard operating procedure for writers of literary fiction, which is the serious kind of writing that I aspired to. However, I was also committed to including various candy elements from commercial genre fiction—over-the-top love affairs, sex explicit enough to turn the reader on, twisty plots, happy endings, mythology, and magic convincing enough that you almost forget it’s magic. It was my book and I didn’t see any reason I shouldn’t mix everything I like into it. (I do understand why I shouldn’t do this when baking. Books and baking are two different things.)
Over the next dozen years, the novel and I went through eight from-the-ground-up rewrites, well over a hundred queries to agents, two actual and most excellent agents, six theories about which genre it belonged to, three failed attempts by agents to sell it to publishers, and no small amount of waiting dormant on hard drives while I wrote other things that aspired to be more marketable but were not. Along the way, some very kind, smart, successful publishing people tried their very best to explain to me how my book could be well-written and entertaining and hard to put down, but also completely unsaleable to a traditional publisher. Every time they did this, I would latch onto the piece of the critique that I judged to be a valid criticism of my book and rewrite it again to fix the problem, and my book got better every time I did this. But I never got the “Your book is unpublishable,” part of the message through my thick skull, because it really didn’t fit my self-image, y’know?
A self-image is a very difficult thing to change: Most of us would rather live small, disappointing lives. I’m not sure I can take credit for changing mine. I think everything else changed so much I simply had no choice. In my marriage, when following all the rules didn’t work, I switched to judiciously breaking some of them. But my marriage ended anyway—turns out the rules weren’t the issue, the marriage was. Shortly after that, some germs went on a rampage and the world as we knew it came to an end. Everything we’d had to do all our lives for reasons we’d never questioned became unnecessary or even forbidden. And when the world gradually started turning again, everything still seemed optional in a way it never had before. I lost friends I’d never imagined I could live without—because of the divorce, because we weren’t in each other’s covid bubbles, because we got out of the habit, because when we finally saw each other again we were strangers—I don’t even know. I stopped reading manuals and started reading tarot cards. I let—no, I encouraged—my oldest child to drop out of high school. I, the former valedictorian! By the time I turned my attention back to publishing, I was different. I’d stopped asking other people what was true and valid and worthwhile and started deciding for myself.
I finally recognized the great, horned, fire-breathing truth that was roaring in my face and singeing my clothes. I hadn’t been able to see it before because it had no place in the story I’d been telling myself (that’s how powerful stories can be). Every story I knew about readers and books aspired to be a love story. Readers seek books to love. Writers seek readers who will love their books. Librarians seek to matchmake readers with books they will love. So do booksellers—at least booksellers who work in the independent bookstores where I’ve always hung out. And I’m certain the vast majority of editors and agents went into publishing for love of books, since they surely didn’t do it for the money. But the rotten truth is that pitching woo to an agent or a publisher—and I’m truly sorry for the distastefulness of this analogy—is like speed dating at a slave auction. You’re trying to entice them with your one-of-a-kind charm and wit and joie de vivre, but they’re just shopping for a cog to fit an economic wheel.
I don’t think it used to be like this. And I think very few of the people stuck perpetuating the situation are happy about it. But the fact remains that the candy genre tropes with which I filled my grab bag of a novel are not—to a publisher—simply attractive elements for a story to have, the more the merrier. Genres like fantasy and romance and thriller and mystery are finely calibrated to correspond to very specific and well-understood markets. Within genre, publishers know how to calculate author advances and keep their balance sheets in the black. Without genre, they’re sailing blind in shallow, rocky seas. In the old days, as long as a publisher had a Stephen King and a Nora Roberts to bring in the millions, it paid to take the occasional calculated risk, offer a small advance for a kid in a cloak and gamble that it might, against all odds, be Harry Potter. Now, with digitizing and ebooks and print-on-demand making it unnecessary for books to ever go out of print, publishers are so busy acquiring each other for their back catalogs and selling the millions of out-of-copyright books to which they already own exclusive rights (so every sale is pure profit), they’re highly averse to spending money on anything new that isn’t a sure thing. Sure things, unlike Frankenstein’s bestselling monster, maintain genre purity.
The fact is, I’m never going to write to genre. Not even to get published. It’s a simple assignment that I made hard, but I made it hard on principles that I stand behind. We move through a broken world, hurting ourselves on truths we can’t see because we’re living by old, bad stories that are not true now and never were. We need different stories. We need truer stories. We need the opposite of genre.
I finally stopped seeking validation from a system whose values I reject. I self-published my book. I’m embarrassed it took me so long, but I’ll get over it.
And that is the story of how, in violation of genre, a former valedictorian became a self-published author.
Comments