Today’s Writing Music: “Don't Carry It All” by The Decembrists
Today’s Reading: Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
Ten years ago, on my twenty-ninth birthday, I received a wonderful gift. My wife took all of the stories that I had written over the previous two years—sixty-four of them—proofread over six-hundred pages on her own, and sent the file to McNally Jackson Books. There, they had recently installed a machine that could bind a real customized book from a digital file, right in the store.
She chose, for the cover, a variation on the classic Salinger paperbacks that I treasured. And even made a second copy that I could submit to the Library of Congress because I’d been anxious about not getting published before my 30th birthday. (I never sent it in, after accepting that I was being ridiculous.)
It was a wonderful gift, and it made the work I’d been doing over the past two years feel somehow more real and lasting. At a time when I didn’t know whether any of this hard work would ever amount to anything, it reminded me that it already had. Here were my stories, in the flesh. Or, the print. The paper just made them feel real in a way that putting them up onto my blog never quite had.
It reminded me of how, when I was a kid, I'd write stories in my marble notebooks at school and save every single one, fantasizing that someday I'd be so famous that some museum would want these old journals filled with my third grade scribblings. I imagined they'd be worth millions. It’s embarrassing, now, but then again there are times I wish I had that same confidence still today. Or even just some healthier fraction of it.
It takes a lot of ego to be a writer—you have to believe that what you’re doing matters. That what you have to say could really make a lasting impact on the world. That you really could write a book that someone reads a century in the future, and underlines, and highlights, and loves so much that it inspires and awakens and nurtures them. It’s a lot to keep believing in—especially whilst facing the old constant rejection.
Anyway, at some point I took a few of the stories from that book and began to turn them into a novel I was already calling The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards. But as often as I re-ordered all the stories and tried to think of them as chapters, they still felt too disconnected. I couldn’t quite get myself to see them as pieces of a whole.
So I made them whole.
Inspired by the gift from a year earlier, I reformatted it into “booklet format” in MS Word. I modeled its internal titling and page formatting on Salinger’s Nine Stories and then printed it out on a heavy, off-white paper that more like that of a real book. Soon I found some step-by-step instructions on how to bind the pages myself using some canvas and glue and cardboard and thread. And I drew (for better or for worse) the picture on the front myself with a gold pen, and found maps to go on the endpapers that I could label with the locations of the various chapters. Over the course of an hour, after spending less than $20 at a craft store, I’d made the book in my imagination turn real.
A few months later, I repeated the process with an older project called August Asphalt which I had finished and wasn’t sure if I’d go back to or not. My reasoning this time was that, if I didn’t ever return to that book, I still wanted some record of its existence. I’d worked on it since I was in college, and I didn’t want to lose it the next time I upgraded my laptop or lost a thumb drive. Again I saw that this was a way for me to honor all of that work, whether or not the book ever got published.
The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards did get published, though, two years later though in a somewhat different form than the one that is preserved in that homemade book on my shelf. My editor had me write a new final chapter, and some major structural shifts happened in the submission process. I love the final published version-- but I'm glad that my original one exists in some way too.
Is there a part of me that, like my third grade self, socking away old journals, still fantasizes about some busy scholar, someday, finding my old homemade copy of Leopards and writing a thesis about that original version? Absolutely—and though I am embarrassed to admit it, I know that I need to keep that fantasy alive in my own mind at least to keep believing that the next project will matter.
When I published my second novel Why We Came to the City— I did not end up binding my own version. At the time I was overwhelmed, beginning a full time teaching job, and flailing through the beginning years of parenthood. The book had been bought by my same editor, so I knew from the start it would become real. I thought I didn’t need to bind a copy for myself. I believed (wrongly) that I was now past some “amateur” phase I’d been in before—and that it would go on like that forever.
Only then I found myself once again having written a book that might not be published.
My third novel, Loops, which I worked on for almost four years, was later turned down by my former publisher and then by everyone else I sent it to. This was, of course, a crushing disappointment. For the purposes of this post I won’t go into why it may not have pleased potential editors—perhaps I’ll write more about that in another post. But for now, suffice to say, the book was very ambitious and complicated and I remain deeply proud of it. I still hope very much that it will someday find its way into the world in some form or another.
But what to do until then? Just let it rest in the digital drawer?
Not quite—I dug up those old instructions for home-binding and decided to make a copy, just for me.
I’d come to realize by then that the “real” writer I believed I’d become after publishing two novels still had no guarantees of publishing whatever came next. That this was actually common, but that writers tended not to talk about their “drawer novels” publically.
Still I wanted some way to honor the work I’d done and make it real, even just for my own self and my own shelf.
So I gave the book my dream treatment:the cover I imagined, the endpapers I loved, with all the wild diagrams and illustrations I’d never known if some hypothetical editor would ever let me include.
In this sense, making one copy, my way, would always be important—I realized, no matter what its fate might be.
Now I wish I had even done this for my second novel, which after all originally had a whole other title (and about two-hundred extra pages!). Maybe someday I’ll print that old draft out and get it on the shelf as well, where it belongs.
In any case, this summer, I didn’t wait, when I finished my newest book. After I sent The Idealists to my agent, before he even sent it out to editors, my celebration was to once again take a trip to the craft store.
I put the book together just the way I wanted it—with the cover I’d imagined as I’d written it—and put it on the shelf where it belongs, no matter what happens next.
Binding this one copy for myself has become an important way of separating the writing part of the process from the publishing part of the process. The first part is all up to me, to write as well and truly as I possibly can. But that second part is, unfortunately entirely out of my own hands—editors will read it and decide if they love it but also if they think they can sell it to readers. Their decision is artistic but also capitalistic, in the end. Great books aren't just automatically sent right to the printer.
That’s why it’s become important to me to create at least one version of the book that lives wholly in that first realm, regardless of what life it may eventually have in the second.
Going forward into new projects now, I try to imagine the chapters coming together in my own hands-- what cover I'll make for it, and how it will look on the shelf by the others. Even if I know that there's little chance anyone ever reads that version but me, I can still let myself imagine that someday someone else will be glad that I did. Until then, they're just for me, and that's plenty.
Writing Towards the Fun #10: Take something you’ve written that you’re proud of, and feel is finished—a story, a poem, a whole book—and make it real. Format the poem like it would appear on the pages of the New Yorker, why not? Put the story into the font you love from a collection you’ve read a hundred times. Print it out on some nice-quality paper and make it into a book. Design the cover you’ve always dreamed of—or use something you find online or at a craft store (no need to worry about copywrite law here). You can add illustrations and diagrams, organize a cool table of contents… whatever makes it feel real to you! When it’s done, just enjoy it yourself—take it out when you need a reminder of what you’re capable of. Imagine that someday it will sit under glass at the New York Public Library, that scholars will only be able to look at it with gloves on.
Why not?
Now, just take that feeling with you when you sit down to write the next thing.
And have fun!
I love this! And it couldn't have landed in my inbox at a better time. Thank you. I'm going for it.