This essay by Mary Miller originally appeared on her and has been reprinted with her permission.
I ran into a friend this morning at the grocery store. He’s graduating this year—a year behind me, I finished my MFA last May—and was recently accepted into a PhD program.
That’s a great program, I said. Congratulations!
He didn’t seem excited about it. He said he didn’t have any other choice, considering he hadn’t yet finished his novel. It’s the way I hear many graduate students talk, as if the publication of their novel (or even the mere completion of it) will lead to life as a full-time writer. No more worries, at least not for a long while.
At the Michener Center, we have seen recent graduates publish to great acclaim. We flip through magazines and see their faces, remembering those same faces from workshop. While we know how difficult writing is, and how much time and energy is involved, these people have made it look easy. Or at least doable. And they have given us a skewed perspective on what we might expect.
Because I also published a book, some of them look to me as a writer who has “made it,” a novel out with a major publisher, some good reviews, including a starred one in Publishers Weekly, for which—don’t misunderstand—I am grateful. But it doesn’t mean that my life has changed all that much. Mostly I just feel like shit for living off my advance and watching my account dwindle while I watch The 4400 on Netflix. (I have a job lined up teaching for the fall. I don’t really plan on watching Netflix full-time for forever.)
My point is this: the publication of your novel is probably not going to change your life. It may lead to other positive things: a visiting writer’s gig, some fan letters, perhaps even a big grant (I’m not speaking from experience in regards to the big grant), but it’s not going to mean that you are set, by any means, or that work can cease or even take a hiatus. Perhaps I’m feeling more sensitive than usual because I haven’t been writing much, or I’ve been writing sporadically and working on a dozen different things while knowing that nothing that I’m working on is going to lead to my next book.
And that’s what it has to be about, the next book.
When writer friends send me congratulations, more than a few of them have asked, “When’s the next one coming out?” I’m sure this is an innocent question, but it’s an awful one when you’re spending your time watching TV and feeling like maybe you aren’t really a writer after all. Perhaps you’ll never publish anything again. Perhaps you’ll even have to move back in with your parents and everyone will talk about the promise you once had. These are unlikely scenarios, really, but maybe not all that rare post-publication. At least I’d like to think I’m not alone.
What’s the point of all this? I don’t mean to say that publishing a novel isn’t awesome. It is. In so many ways. But it disheartens me to see my friends talk as though it will solve all of their problems and alter their lives completely when I know it won’t. Or perhaps this is part of the required delusion in order to accomplish their goal? I don’t know. If that’s the case, maybe we could all use a little more delusion. I know I could right now.
