Before and After the Book Deal. Courtney Maum

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СКАЧАТЬ you were accepted there for poetry? Maybe not. But with their affordability, convenience, and lower-stakes environment for experimentation, you can try out translation, travel writing, memoir, erotica, and many other genres you might not have had the time—or even the permission—to try in an MFA.

      Join (or start) a writing group

      If you haven’t had any success finding an existing writing group through the common channels (your local library, bookstore, or good old word of mouth), it might be time to start one of your own. You can post flyers in actual brick-and-mortar places, or use social-gathering sites like Meetup to gauge interest in your group. Remember that your group doesn’t have to be stylistically homogenous; it will serve you as a writer if your comembers have varied life experiences and are working in different genres than you.

      Attend AWP

      It’s not cheap to get to and it usually takes place in the godforsaken month of February, but AWP (which stands for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs [which should actually be abbreviated as AWWP, but . . . artistic license?]) is an annual conference attended by thousands and thousands of publishing professionals and writers. A conference as large as this one can feel panic-attack-level overwhelming at times, but there’s no better one-stop shopping for all your career needs. At the many parties and off-site readings offered throughout the five-day conference, you can hear new work and socialize with like-minded artists; at the book fair, you can spend hours talking with conference and writing-program managers about the different opportunities they offer; you can network for job opportunities in academia and publishing; you can browse everything from quirky chapbooks to doorstopper bestsellers, and enjoy conversations with the editors, publicists, and interns who brought those books to life. If you’re feeling up for it, you can even pitch projects to an editor, and you can flick something grody at the editor from [name of literary magazine redacted] who has rejected every piece you’ve ever sent.

      A word to the wise: AWP lists discount codes on its website for hotel and airline fare. Make sure to use these discounts when you book!

      Join a book club if you’re not already in one

      Learning to read other people’s work, to question it, and to praise it in a clear and concise manner are skills essential to any writer, as is the proper handling of oneself around copious amounts of white wine.

      Read

      Duh, right? Not so fast. If you want to be an active member of the literary community, you have to read beyond the kind of work you normally gravitate toward, in both genre and style. Every fall there are lists about the top ten or twenty books out that year: earmark BuzzFeed’s most-anticipated novels, read the National Book Award poetry finalists, set yourself a goal. Subscribe to literary magazines (and read them), and visit the areas of your local library that you usually avoid. Challenge yourself to leave well-thought-out reviews of these books on social-cataloging sites like Goodreads, so that you learn to speak respectfully about other people’s work. In an MFA program, you would be thoughtfully critiquing other people’s writing on the regular, so don’t slack on this skill set.

      A quick tip about book reviews, especially online: Do not leave negative reviews of authors whom you might one day want to beseech or befriend. Early in your career, you might not know who these people are yet, so book-review with caution. As a general rule of thumb, if you have negative thoughts about somebody’s creative output, it’s best to let them die a silent death inside your mind.

      Volunteer at a literary festival

      If you can’t be invited by them, join ’em. Literary festivals are always in need of volunteers, and they’re one of the best ways to stay connected to the writing world. If you offer up your services, make sure to choose a committee that actually suits your career interests: event planning will give you an idea of how panels are organized (with a sneak peak at the kind of topics you can one day hope to talk about yourself), public relations will give you experience writing press releases and interfacing with the media, and hospitality can put you in the same orbit as the authors you admire.

      If your volunteer time is limited, festivals, arts organizations, and literary magazines always need extra help during their end-of-the-year fund-raisers.

      If you do all these things, or even half of them, while also keeping up a regular writing practice, you’re going to find your book people, and they’re going to find you. If you still find yourself yearning for a more codified community after all these efforts, start researching part-time and/or low-residency MFA programs. More affordable, less competitive, and more flexible with scheduling than their full-time counterparts, part-time MFA programs will only need you on campus two to three times a week (usually at times that are convenient for nine-to-fivers), and low-res programs offer long-distance education with site-specific meetups one or two times a year.

Am I writing the wrong book?

      I cannot tell you how many times I have written a book-length manuscript only to realize that it would perform better as a personal essay or op-ed, and that the novel I actually needed to write was hiding within a sentence on page seventy-three. I’m not exaggerating: I write a book to find a book all the freaking time, and this process is infuriating, and not a little heartbreaking, but it does—eventually—guide me to the thing I’m meant to write.

      In case you share my predilection to need to write (and write) your way to the true story, I’ve come up with a checklist to help you figure out if you are running the wrong race.

      Is this book actually a personal essay, and I just don’t know it yet?

      During the writing of my second novel, I suffered a second-term miscarriage that I wanted to make the topic of book three. There was a lot of mismanagement of my medical information in the wake of the pregnancy loss, and I suffered some bizarre physical repercussions that I’m still navigating today. Accordingly, I felt a deep need to write my way toward a better understanding of what had happened to me and to my body, and I wanted to explore why women’s bodies are so little understood and respected in the United States. These are huge topics, and I felt like the appropriate and most exciting place to explore them was in a novel.

      So I wrote a manuscript in which a prematurely menopausal thirty-eight-year-old is navigating a world in which her partner has left her in the wake of their lost pregnancy. Infertile in a culture that values fertility, the protagonist feels discarded and unseen. I think these issues are important—this state of being is important—but what I ended up with was three hundred pages of a woman feeling things about events that had happened in the past, which is slow-going content for a narrative.

      This novel wanted to be a personal essay from the get-go, but I had to write it as fiction—and watch it fail as fiction—to realize this was so. It was a difficult lesson, but an important one: just because something moves us does not mean that it has the engine to power an entire book.

      Are you scared?

      Of course you’re scared. You’re a writer! If you’re not terrified, I’d like to know what herbal supplements you’re on. But all too often, our fear keeps us from writing what we actually need to write. This is especially true for memoirists whose writing can estrange friends or relatives, or even put their careers at risk if they tell the truth.

      Unfortunately, the truth is usually the best path to the story. There are two outcomes when you’re scared of what you’re writing: either you cave in to the fear and you write something superficial that probably won’t sell, or you write something brave and vital that might. Your writing can be private for as long as you need it to be. So why not write the thing you’re scared of? The СКАЧАТЬ