Thank You, Next
Thank You, Next
This October... another book launch? Welcome to the world, REVISIONARIES!
How is it that I have another new book coming out in just two short weeks? That’s the topic for today’s post… but first, the details.
My new essay collection is called Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers.
Publisher’s Weekly calls it an “enlightening guide” and promises that “aspiring novelists will be heartened.”
It goes on sale on 10/15 and you can preorder it now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop and at your local bookstore!
Now.
The past six weeks have been something of a blur. In mid-August I launched Our Narrow Hiding Places, my first novel in eight years, down at Greenlight Books in Brooklyn and it’s been nonstop ever since. The weekend before I was on CBS Saturday Morning with my Oma, talking about the novel on a TV news show that reaches more than a million households weekly. Then I was sitting in my son’s closet recording a radio interview for NPR’s All Things Considered. Soon enough I was travelling to Portland, Exeter, Princeton, and Montclair for events, plus stacking a crowd into libraries here in Chappaqua and up in New Paltz where I teach.
Somewhere in there we got a great review in the New York Times Book Review.
Finally this weekend I returned to Brooklyn for their annual Book Fest, marking the end of my main tour.
It’s been a total whirlwind, full of great crowds and fun questions, and lots of signed books. Mainly it feels like a huge relief, because not that long ago I didn’t know if I would ever publish another novel again. (I’ll come back to that in a second.) And ordinarily I’d press pause for a few weeks now and try to just relax and enjoy the moment—but actually I’m publishing another book now in just two short weeks, so the ride continues on.
My essay collection, REVISIONARIES: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers goes on sale on 10/15. But you knew that already.
A few people have asked me recently how it is that I ended up publishing two books, two months apart—and the answer has something to do with the different ways that nonfiction and fiction books are each published.
With a nonfiction book like Revisionaries an author typically writes up a 10-20 page proposal with a detailed outline (and a few sample chapters) and submit this to editors who might be interested in the idea.
In my case, this process began in early 2022. I’d been writing a series of columns for Electric Literature called “Unfinished Business” for several years and had always imagined them eventually becoming part of a bound collection.
I began exploring the project more closely that year as I realized how much comfort I had been taking lately in these stories of failed novels and abandoned books, seeing as my luck had not been going well lately in that same department.
After my second novel, Why We Came to the City had been published in 2016, my editor left the house we’d worked at together and I’d become “orphaned” as they say in the industry. Despite a huge success for that book in its French translation, I ended up having a lot of trouble selling the next book I wrote, a novel called Loops. The years I’d spent on it felt wasted, and I wondered if I’d ever get to publish another book again. Eventually I channeled some of this frustration into a new novel involving two political speechwriters on a doomed campaign, called The Idealists. That novel also didn’t get sold to anyone in the US, though my publisher in France loved it and we ended up selling it in translation over there instead. Meanwhile, I tried to work up the confidence to get back out there for a third time. I had this idea for a book about WWII and the Hunger Winter, and I’d begun diligently writing scenes and chapters for it, but deep down I was worried that I was in some kind of irreversible slump and this, again, would all be for naught.
That’s when I began to think back on some of those columns I’d written before, about books that had fallen apart or failed in some way, in the hands of a dozen or more writers that I admired and idolized. If a genius like Ralph Ellison could get stuck on his follow-up book for forty years, I reasoned, then surely I could have a detour or two. If a writer as incredible as Kafka could go to his deathbed believing his three unfinished novels were all awful failures, then maybe I had to accept that a writer may not be the best judge of the quality of their own work. Staring at the list of books that someone like Jane Austen had finished and shelved, or started and given up on—I suddenly felt a lot less alone and a lot less scared of career-ruin.
Revisionaries was soon born out of my attempts to piece together a story about the central role that resilience plays in any successful creative life. It was the clearest thread that ran through the dozen columns I’d already written, and moreover it lead the way through a dozen more I wanted to do next. So I put together a proposal around that idea and we found a loving home for it with Quirk Books and my former Electric Literature editor Jess Zimmerman, who had begun working there. She had been the one to help me shape so many of the previous columns, and I knew she would have the vision to help put the rest together with me as well.
And so, I got to work, writing new chapters and revising old columns, all through 2022 and into 2023. As I did, I got more and more of my confidence back and felt more inspired to return to my novel-in-progress. Before too long, both books had bloomed into being.
Whereas a nonfiction book gets sold and then written, a novel is—these days at least—almost always written and then sold. (It used to be more common for novels to be sold as “partials” but as I understand it, those days are more or less over. And in this case we’d left lots of time in the schedule for me to do the research and assemble Revisionaries—enough that the novel I’d sold next would wind up coming out first. And so here I am, heading into another book launch, barely two months after the last one.
I’m not complaining—truly, it’s amazing, particularly when I think back on how bleak things felt to me just a few short years ago. What Revisionaries taught me—and what I hope it will be able to soon teach many other writers and artists—is that nobody gets to tell you to stop except you. As long as you’re still breathing, and still writing, you can have hope. Just because the last thing, or the last two things, or the last ten things, didn’t work out, doesn’t mean the next one won’t—if you push yourself, learn from the feedback you’ve gotten, and refuse to give up, then something will eventually break your way… maybe even two somethings!
Because of the things I learned writing Revisionaries, I remade the whole way I worked, began to read more regularly and more broadly, began writing on a schedule again, began to use exercise and meditation to help me get my focus back where it needed to be. These were all things I picked up by studying the processes and tricks used by the writers I looked at for the Revisionaries, and which I’ve shared inside in brief “Fail Like a Genius” sections that can be used handily by writers and in classrooms to help prompt new work or guide work-in-progress. Without those things, I don’t think I would have been able to right the ship I was on, and now that I have I’m very happy to share them with my fellow writers.
One of the biggest themes in the book besides resilience is collaboration, and the importance of building community with living writers and the writers of the past, in order to share in the great work we’re all doing, and have done. My hope is that Revisionaries will be the kind of book that appeals to other writers, but also to artists of all kinds, and to those who love to read and want to know more about how great books are written.
I hope you’ll check it out, and then, at some point, I promise I will take a break.
Read more here about Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers. Publisher’s Weekly calls it an “enlightening guide” and promises that “aspiring novelists will be heartened.”
It goes on sale on 10/15 and you can preorder it now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop and at your local bookstore!