the Empathy List #133: A Debut Writer's Publishing Story, Part 1

Because every author began as a starving artist.

Hello friend, Liz here.

Every artist success story is also a story of failure and rejection. (Ask me how I know. 🫠)

I remember the days when I would scour the internet for stories of publishing success because I wasn’t having any, and I wanted to see if it was actually possible for ordinary non-celebrities outside of the coastal cities to publish books.

Turns out, it is, sometimes. And it is more possible for those who persevere.

So I want to tell you my story of how my book, Knock at the Sky, came to exist. I want to tell you this story because I vividly remember needing to read stories like mine so that, way back when I was a newbie, I could see my own perserverance as bravery, not foolishness. From experience, I know that starting a writing career from scratch can feel nearly impossible. But it’s not impossible. And I want you to understand just how much hard work, trends, networks, and, I’m not kidding, pure chance contributes to publishing a book. It is not a straight line journey for most authors, and in fact, every story I’ve ever heard about authors I admire getting published includes an uncomfortable amount of failure and rejection.

Buckle up. I’m about to get uncomfortably honest (and self-indulgent?). Hopefully someone out there finds this encouraging and interesting, and if you don’t, have no fear! My regular programming will resume a month or two from today, when the shiny book release is in the rear-view mirror. (Thanks for your patience. 😜)

“1970, Sweden, Marco,” photograph by Frank Horvat

Origin Story

You should know that I have been publishing my writing since 2012, my friends, and I’ve been writing since I began my undergraduate degree in 2005. That’s 12 years of publishing before I ever published a book, and nearly twenty years of serious writing.

I received a B.A. in Creative Writing at a large evangelical institution (Wheaton College class of 2009, graduated Dec. 2008), and from the beginning, I knew I wanted to write big fat books, the type that readers keep through multiple moves, the type that disintegrates on the shelf from too many dog-ears and accidental coffee stains on its cover from frequent reference over decades, the type that a parent passes on to their adult child as treasured wisdom.

By my college graduation, books had already changed my life many times over. My senior year of high school, I read Toni Morrison’s Beloved, one of my first exposures to racism and abuse in literature, and it irrevocably softened me. In college literature classes, I read Langston Hughes, Don Delillo, Marilynne Robinson, Zora Neale Hurston, each exquisite craftsmen, each guides as I sought to hone my own craft. Yet the voices that came to influence me the most I found apart from my classwork. Annie Dillard and Annie Lamott and Joan Didion became my patron saints of creative nonfiction. Though I did not have a writing voice yet, not really, though I did not have an area of expertise or interest, I managed to graduate with my writing trinity and they would lead me into authorship, I was sure of it.

…Except I had no idea how to make a career out of a writing degree. I graduated in December 2008, at the very bottom of the Obama-era economic depression. Publishing had already imploded, in part because no one anticipated the ascendency of e-books. (I know.) Executives and editors who had served on their pub boards faithfully for decades found themselves suddenly unemployed. And I, a new college grad with zilch real-world experience besides running a college literary magazine that no one had heard of, now found myself in competition with industry veterans for the lowest-level roles in publishing. I couldn’t nab an internship, let alone a paid position at a magazine, press, or ad agency.

So, instead of starting out like most new grads who have editorial or writing ambitions —with a grunt job in publishing bringing the execs coffee and patiently sorting through the slush pile—I worked three minimum wage jobs after graduation. I manned the counter of a local toy store. I cleaned my relatives’ home for room and board. I answered a self-help author’s emails part-time. Later, I got a part-time job as a communications assistant for a local nonprofit, and I thought I’d made it because I could finally afford to quit my admin job working for the author. Forget about finding my writing voice, I was just trying to afford gas to get to my retail job every day.

I have talked to many elder millennials like myself, and I believe we all had a similar experience. We graduated from college just as the U.S. economy tanked, thrusting us into a sort of black hole in America’s job market from which many of us still haven’t recovered. We still make too little in our jobs to make our lives tenable because we started out making so little that even as we received raises, we could not keep up with the current standard of living. We may be nearing forty, but our paychecks match our twenty-two-year-old co-workers’ rather than the VP- and manager-level Boomer paychecks our parents received in their second decade of work. But I digress…

So what happened to my writing during this season of part-time hell? I tapped away a few times a week on my very very slow HP laptop, adding one sentence at a time to an essay about the similarities between the changing bodies of astronauts in outer space and the changing bodies of adolescents, half memoir, half science writing. I liked it, but I did not solve the problem of this essay, and in the end, I scrapped it.

But more importantly, I learned. I continued to seek out ways to enhance my writing education, and so I signed myself up for classes, shamelessly requesting scholarships whenever I could or asking my employers to sponsor my continuing education. I took a crash course on grant writing, signed up for a memoir writing, and eavesdropped on publishing panels. I stalked Jane Friedman, through whom I learned how to write a query, what a literary agent did and whether I needed one and how to get one, and why my ambitions of winning a Pulitzer were much, MUCH harder than I’d presumed. Despite my degree, I knew almost nothing about the industry of writing and books. I had much to learn.

A First Manuscript

I married Jeremy in 2010 at the age of 23. He was a graphic designer, also struggling amid the recession. But he was also a visual artist and I liked his work. And I liked his mind, his aesthetic, his cute face, his thrift store Cosby sweaters.

He also happened to like and respect my writing. At that time, aside for looking for live, we both figured that marrying a fellow artist would keep us creating—or at least, having married a fellow artist meant that we could understand the other’s obsession at some level. So our partnership was both romantic and practical. ;-)

But he was more disciplined than I was, and I had severe attachment issues. In those early years of our marriage, my desire to write and his desire to make was mismatched. He wanted to spend more time in the studio than I did, and when he disappeared into the back room of our house where he kept his bins of assemblage materials to play with wood and metal without me and without first asking if I had other plans for our evenings together, I felt hurt, interpreting his absence as rejection. (OMG I was so high maintenance back then.)

Painstakingly, we worked through my insecure attachment, and in later years, we developed a more reasonable rhythm for his studio time that worked for both of us, putting dates on the calendar in advance so that I had space to manage whatever emotions arose without impeding his studio time. (His studio time was a priority to both of us, I just had trouble regulating myself!).

Anyway, one effect of Jeremy’s persistence in getting into his studio was that, being bored and lonely during his absences, I also begrudgingly got to work. I picked up the pen (keyboard) once again. (Was this Jeremy’s plan all along? If so, he succeeded.) Sometime in 2010 or 2011, I began a manuscript, a book of parables. I asked Jeremy to create assemblages (wall-hung shadow box sculptures) to illustrate each chapter. Each chapter contained one bracing, strange contemporary story that, in a way, resembled the parables of Jesus. Before I knew it, I had about 85 pages of deeply researched, almost true stories. (I had NOT intended to write fiction and never have since.)

I joined a local writer’s group of fiction writers who gave me feedback on my (very imperfect, but interesting) stories, and I began to send them to magazines at their urging, starting, of course, with the New Yorker, the top-tier journal in the U.S. according to my encyclopedic Writer’s Market that I’d been gifted for Christmas. (Remember these?) To my surprise, the New Yorker never got back to me (rude). So I worked my way down the lists, tracking my rejections religiously on Duotrope, as my writing instructors had told me to do.

(I remember a professor telling me that she used to keep copies of her rejection letters, and especially the ones that contained any personal notes because those were nearer misses, and therefore, more encouraging than the form letter rejections. So maybe my professors did tell me something about publishing, after all?)

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Are you curious about where the stereotype of the “starving artist” came from? Read this essay from ABC news.

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I continued revising this manuscript for several years, including during both of my pregnancies (2012 and 2014). And becoming a mother finally gave me courage to try my luck at publishing my book. I aimed to send my manuscript to as many independent publishers as possible during the last two months of my second child’s pregnancy. I tapped and printed and mailed off envelopes during my 18-month-old daughter’s nap times, 30 minutes to 2 hours at a time. (We could not afford the childcare that would allow me to work, seeing as I would only make pittance anyway, so I was the lead parent for my children during their earliest years.)

I submitted to 40 publishers and heard a universal no. Sometimes, I did not even hear no; I simply heard nothing at all. The void was defeaning.

To this day, that round of rejections is the worst I’ve ever experienced. I had felt certain that God called me (vocationally, not in my eardrum) to write that book, and if God had called me, then why had every single publisher said no? I nearly quit. No one cared if I kept writing, so why bother? I had no deadlines, no agent, no editors clamoring for my words. I could not even make them read my words when I paid the postal service to deliver my package to their desk. So, what good was a failed vocation?

I would have quit then, if it weren’t for Jeremy. The man who had watched me struggle to accept his artistic vocation had no problem accepting mine.

“I don’t care if you ever make a dime,” he told me, knowing full well that collectively we would only make $32,000 (pre-tax) that year and that, in order to balance our budget, we’d had to cancel every one of our magazine subscriptions, some of which only amounted to $5 per year. Still he told me, “Your art is worth making. I believe in it. Keep writing.”

In the end, I believed my husband. He convinced me to return to the blank page. His support meant that I could keep trying and failing without fear. He did not see my efforts as a waste of time, but a worthy endeavor because making art formed me into a good and interesting person. So, I kept writing.

And the next year, I accepted my first paid writing assignment: $100 for an essay for an organization called On Faith for a personal essay I’d written. Finally, I thought, I had made it. I’d never be a starving artist again! At least I hoped. But, of course, that’s not how things worked out. (Spoiler: um, no, I had not “made” it.)

To be continued…

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Okay, your turn: Tell me your own story of success preceded by failure. Or just tell me your story of failure. Or just tell me how mad the publishing industry makes you. Chime in. :) (BTW, this is a safe and positive community, so I will block and delete negative comments directed at fellow commenters.)

And tune in next time for part two of this special publishing series to celebrate my transition into authorship! Thanks for reading, my friends.

Warmly, Liz Charlotte Grant

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Can I ask a favor? Go preorder my book.

It book releases in less than one month (less if you don’t count the holidays which do not count as conscious time in which anybody gets anything done). Amid holiday festivities, I KNOW you won’t remember my book—duh! Cause you’re plugged into your churches and families and neighborhoods and PTAs! That’s why we get along so well! You are an IRL kind of person!

So, help a girl out and preorder now, while you’re thinking about it—>

If you’ve already preordered the book for yourself, thanks for supporting this newbie indie artist!! Now, please go tell a friend to go preorder, and voila, you’ve created a mini book club. Or if it’s in budget, buy a copy for that friend because it’s the gift-giving time of year. 😜