I was nervous at my reading on Thursday. I am almost never nervous at readings anymore. I do twenty readings a year usually. It either works or it doesn’t, and if all else fails I can coast on my humor.
Guess what I realized the other night? I have written a VERY SAD book.
Sure, there’s a little humor in it. But the main thrust of it is pretty tragic. You can’t joke about the subject matter. It feels disrespectful and insulting to…someone. To the characters? To people like the characters? I don’t mean to take myself this seriously. I just take them, the people in the book, seriously. They’re as flawed as any other characters I’ve ever created, but for some reason I feel extra protective of them. I guess it’s because they feel like family.
My hands shook during the reading and I read too fast and I didn’t enjoy it one bit, and I could not imagine having to present that material twenty times in a year. I couldn’t wrap my head around what I had written.
The next day I emailed with a few people about how I felt about the reading.
Wendy said I hadn’t found my access points yet. “It doesn’t have to be the kind of book you do entertaining readings from. Maybe what you do with this book is you talk about writing it. You talk about the people in it and how they live,” she said.
My editor said, “It’s OK not to make people happy. I think what you have to figure out is what is going to pull people through the book. There has to be something. It doesn’t have to bring them joy, but it should give them a reason to care and want to keep going, you know?”
My agent asked if I was having second thoughts about the book. I told him not to worry. “I am not putting another book in the drawer,” I said.
I recognize that I am in transition. I consciously chose to write something very different than anything I had written before because I was sick of staying in the same place. That’s one of the reasons why I threw away the book I wrote last year. Yes, it was too personal, that was a big reason. But also it was just the same as everything else I had written before.
It felt urgent that I take some sort of leap.
Everything is getting reconfigured. The writer I was in my twenties is different than the writer I have been in my thirties and the writer I will be in my forties.
I cannot stay the same. I refuse to stay the same. So now I have to embrace the choices I have made.
