A professor for one of my graduate writing classes is an acquisitions editor at a major publishing house. He’s worked with some pretty big-name authors. Last week we took the entire class time for a Q&A session about the publishing industry. We’re all in this great program, focusing on our writing and how to make it better, but no one is really talking about how to market our ideas, what to do once we’ve got something good.
Many interesting questions came up during the two-hour session (Should one use a pen name if they want to write something commercial before writing something literary? Can a successful author switch genres mid-career? How do you find an agent who really gets you?) until someone finally broke the ice: ”What kind of advances do authors get paid these days?”
A weight was lifted off everyone’s shoulders. After frankly stating that very very few authors will get the big advances of the last ten years, our professor told us a story about Junot Diaz, author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Apparently two publishers had a bidding war over Diaz’s first book, until finally, Riverhead Books (a division of Penguin), offered Diaz a $150,000 advance for two books, guaranteeing themselves first rights to whatever he ended up writing next. The other publisher gave up at that point, not being able to outbid such a high figure. Well, they probably regret their decision now given how wildly successful Diaz’s two books have been.
Most of us aren’t going to have such a high-stakes bidding war for our first book, let alone any bidding war at all. Diaz is a pretty lucky (and talented) guy. Given all this, it was refreshing to find his recent admission that even he — a Pulitzer Prize-winning author — has had problems churning out good work. So even if he’s successful on the whole making-money-off-your-writing thing, he still struggles with the whole actually-doing-the-writing part:
It wasn’t that I couldn’t write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked. My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn’t budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing.
He worked tirelessly on what later became The Brief Wondrous Life and found that he had a lot to say, but then he’d look back at his pages and find them all to be really crappy.
There were no sudden miracles. It took two more years of heartbreak, of being utterly, dismayingly lost before the novel I had dreamed about for all those years finally started revealing itself. And another three years after that before I could look up from my desk and say the word I’d wanted to say for more than a decade: done.
As writers, we have no choice but to work, and work hard, and work constantly, if we hope to ever achieve such success. Every once in a while, it’s just nice to hear stories like these, stories that bring the contemporary literary angels down just one little notch. They’re real people, too, you know.
(As a side note, I feel obligated to point out that Junot Diaz’s piece on Becoming a Writer (quoted above) was first published in Oprah Magazine. What?! I laugh everytime I see the magazine at the checkout line because Oprah puts a new highly photosophopped picture of herself on the cover — attire always matching the season. So tacky. How did they get Junot Diaz to agree to fill their pages? Money? Probably a lot of money. Damn him.)
