One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made as a writer is comparing my own journey to other writers who published before me. It’s impossible not to compare yourself considering that as writers, we are emotionally and artistically self-centered by nature since the things we create come from inside us, so we spend a lot of time there. But being self-centered is not the same thing as being egotistical. Focusing on your craft isn’t the same thing as thinking you’re better than other people. If anything, published authors remind me a lot of Ivy League graduates: they love love love to say “I graduated from a university in Boston” since false modesty is an absolutely lost art in America and the truth is they’re dying to say “Hahvud” because certain words are linguistic Fentanyl to the educated masses and overachievers know that the instant they drop certain sacred words, they receive instant cultural benefits, admiration, and social privileges that almost no one else gets in America.
Authors with books have very similar energy and not just because some of them graduated from Columbia or Cornell. Just as educated people love to say the words, Yale and Princeton and genius and PhD and Freudian and Foucaultian and liminal, authors with books love to say the words, my agent and New Yorker and Paris Review and pub day, but especially the words, my book. Authors with books are just waiting for you to ask them what they do. They might as well wear name tags that say “Ask me about my book even if you don’t care.”
There are a lot of reasons for this but the principal ones are:
Most authors never publish a book in their lifetime, even after slaving away at it for an insane amount of time, and the odds are really stacked against us
Most MFA graduates suffer through years and even decades of watching their cohort reach their milestones and it’s impossible not to feel like shit about that
There’s no way to predict why some classmates who are insanely talented never publish anything and why other classmates who are mid at best suddenly become New York Times bestsellers or darlings of the New York publishing industry. Of course, stubbornness, connections, work ethic, and talent all help, but there are plenty of writers with all those things who never publish anything and a small number of writers with one (or none) of those things who become huge, defying all expectations
When writers do sell a book through a small press or a Big-5 press, it’s impossible not to feel like you’ve fucking won the lottery even though almost nothing changes economically or emotionally or professionally or socially at all for you. You just feel different about yourself, which is a good enough reason to publish something with a press, tbh
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