Twenty or so years ago I was working on what would be my first full-length manuscript, something that most people reading this post have never seen and likely never will. Back then all I knew about the publishing industry was how small the chances were of ever seeing my work in print. About ten years back I was trying to get through the final weeks of a school year knowing a literary agent in New York was looking over something I had written. She eventually passed (it wasn’t even close to ready), but just by requesting it she gave me back the hope I had pretty much abandoned. I kept writing and continued querying. About half of the agents I queried requested to see my work, which, looking back, is actually a darn good percentage and should have made me more optimistic than I ever allowed myself to be.
Eventually I broke through and signed with the agent I’m with now. When that happened I figured things were going to come together quickly, and it was only a matter of time until a book was sold and my career was launched. I started making rough estimates about how many years of writing and publishing it would take before I’d be able to take an early retirement from teaching and begin to write full-time without having to worry about a mortgage or health insurance payments.
That was four years back, and I’m still at the same place.
Am I frustrated about this? Yes and no. Yes, because of course I’d love to have a book on store shelves with a collection of great Amazon and Goodreads reviews. I know of other authors who found their agents after I did and already have multiple books published, and that inevitable envy still tweaks at me sometimes, no matter how hard I try to fight it off. No, because I now know how much work is involved at this level, and how much time it can take. It’s already taken me a lot longer to even make it this far than it has for a lot of other people, because I had spent so much time, decades really, of assuming the attempt wasn’t worth making since the goal seemed so impossible. That worked out for me in a way, because it gave me time to work myself into the writer I am now. It’s also given me a lot of time to think about exactly what I want to achieve with my writing, and what kind of legacy I want my career to leave behind.
There were two events in the past week that had me thinking a lot about legacy. About a week ago, author Tom Wolfe died at age 88. I’ve only read about half of his books, which is more than enough to appreciate his capacity for brilliance. I think it would be fair to say that any list of literary titans from the past fifty years would rightfully include him. Last night I watched HBO’s adaptation of “Fahrenheit 451.” It wasn’t great, but revisiting the story got me thinking about how the prevalence of technology and the toxicity of social and political climates that favor the lowest common denominator have gradually detracted from literature as an expressive art form and a source of compelling and potent ideas. The problems that defined the society portrayed in that story aren’t so different from some of the problems our country is facing right now.
I’m turning 50 tomorrow. I don’t know if I’ll be writing well into my 80s like Tom Wolfe did. I don’t know if I’m ever going to be writing anything that future generations will consider important enough to memorize and preserve as one of humanity’s finest works. However, the informed perspective that comes with age and experience gives me some ideas about what I hope to accomplish as a writer in whatever time I’ll have to accomplish it:
*I want my name to be recognized equally for the strength of the storytelling and the consistency of the written voice.
*I want my writing to matter. I want to know it meant something to the people who read it. It gave them things to think about, and maybe influenced how they see their world.
*I want to feel pride in everything I do, knowing it was the best I was able to produce.
*I want to produce something more than the kind of books people finish reading, set down, and stop thinking about an hour later. I want to know people were transported by something I wrote, that they reached the end and felt slightly disoriented as they tried to re-orient themselves to being in the real world.
*I want to produce a few of those touchstone lines, the ones that people latch onto, mediate on, and apply in their own lives.
*I want to look back at the decisions I made regarding my career without regret or doubt.
*I want publication to arrive in a time window that will let my parents enjoy seeing it happen.
*I want to eventually produce a warts-and-all piece of literary fiction that shows a true depiction of education as a profession.
*I don’t expect I’ll ever be earning the kind of money that will enable me to build that 200-seat movie theater in the basement of a brand new house, but I want to reach a level of professional success that would allow me the choice of retiring earlier than I normally would, even if only by a few years. I would like to know I had reached that benchmark.
Will I achieve all of these goals? Probably not. But it’s okay to hope and dream about them, and to use them as motivation. I’m at something of a crossroads with writing at the moment; without getting very specific, I believe steps are being taken that are at least in the right direction, whether they result in any kind of dividends or not. I hope they will. I’m fairly optimistic they will, actually. However, there’s no way to know for sure.
For the time being I’m just ready to keep moving forward, knowing I have good people helping me and supporting me as I work toward my goals, and continuing to hope for the best. Everything else will take care of itself when the time is right.
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