the Empathy List #134: A Debut Writer's Publishing Story, Part 2

Killing The Myth of "Getting Discovered"

Hello friend, Liz here.

Remember: every artist success story is likely preceded by failure and rejection. ;-) (Does knowing that help to tame the envy monster? It helped me!)

In part 1 of this special publishing series, I described the origins of my desire to become a writer, a manuscript of short stories I wrote and that the indie presses of the day roundly rejected (40 indie presses rejected my first book! Four-Zero!), and the encouragement that kept me from quitting.

In part 2, I describe the paradox of a burgeoning career and the shattering realization that “getting discovered” is bologna. Let me explain…

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The Myth of “Getting Discovered”

During my twenties, I believed in a common publishing myth: if I just got good enough as a writer, then the publishing opportunities would come. It was inevitable. Eventually the Pulitzer Prize Winner-to-be gets discovered, right? Someone finds the musty manuscript buried in the back of the desk drawers, turns the pages with increasing awe and, voila! A book deal and literary stardom.

Jeremy and I would often talk about it this way: one day they’ll understand. Even if we’re rejected now, our only job is to do the work. Perfect the craft, write the book, belabor the sentences because one day your break will come. As we toiled month after month at our respective crafts, we both harbored not-so-secret delusions of ourselves as undiscovered geniuses, always on the verge of “breaking out.” How could we not? We had a destiny (“calling”), and we would fulfill it.

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A Brief Detour About Craft and How Most Artists are (Healthy?) Narcissists

Despite believing we were undiscovered wunderkinds, Jeremy and I are not actually narcissists, by the way, even though you’d be forgiven for wondering. 😏 I’ve come to believe that you need a level of delusion to try anything new or hard in your adulthood, and you certainly need a healthy amount of self-belief to sustain yourself to the end of an artistic project. (Book writing is hell without delusion to spur you on.)

Read more about Paul Cornu, “the incredible helicopter cyclist from Lisieux” and his 1907 invention.

Annie Dillard (one of my writing heroes, as I’ve mentioned) describes this necessary artistic delusion like this in her luminous book, The Writing Life:

“Every morning you climb several flights of stairs, enter your study, open the French doors, and slide your desk and chair out into the middle of the air. The desk and chair float thirty feet from the ground, between the crowns of maple trees. The furniture is in place; you go back for your thermos of coffee. Then, wincing, you step out again through the French doors and sit down on the chair and look over the desktop. You can see clear to the river from here in winter. You pour yourself a cup of coffee.

“Birds fly under your chair. In spring, when the leaves open in the maples’ crowns, your view stops in the treetops just beyond the desk; yellow warblers hiss and whisper on the high twigs, and catch flies. Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.”

As a writer, you must keep your desk in mid-air. You must float. But how do you attain these heights? You must sweat. She compares the work of mental levitation to the mechanics of the earliest planes, which had large metal wheels (flywheels) that stored and steadied hand-built engines. Except this one is human-powered, like the early helicopter bicycles, which had engines powered by their rider’s pedaling.

In other words, she’s saying, starting an artistic project is easy; finishing is nearly impossible. To bring your project from its state of shitty first draft to readable, competent or even masterful, an artist must continue to pumping the pedals of belief as fast as she can. This belief is a belief both in your ability to accomplish the project and in your vision of the finished work—both are necessary to keep you progressing. On the other hand, if you lose momentum/belief, the artist may not find it again.

Read more about Annie Dillard’s remarkable work on writing:

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The Hard Truth & Conquering My Own Snobbery

Returning to the story of my authorial ambitions, I can tell you definitively that the idea of “getting discovered” is a myth. It is true that the more accomplished and competent you are at your craft, the greater chance you have at finding success in your chosen artistic career.

But the hard truth is that, according to my experience, I have found that it took a tremendous amount of entrepreneurship to get me within a few feet of my ultimate goal: publishing a book. Which I only discovered when I put writing on hold for a time to pursue an unrelated career as a birth doula.

My career swap had surprised me. During my child-bearing and infant-rearing years, as I said before, I stayed home and I wrote during naptimes. I was rigorous about this writing because I had noticed that without a regular practice, I slipped into nihilism. I loved my children deeply, but did not find the tasks of motherhood fulfilling at all. I had not realized how much administration is involved in raising children!!!!!! We based our days around rigid sleep schedules and routines and consistency, most of which revolved around staying home and cleaning (not my forte).

So writing became a haven. I assumed I’d have a book out in no time, I would rocket to the top of the charts (NYT watch out!), and people across the country would recognize my talent, throwing money and book deals at me forevermore, amen. Instead came failure and rejection. As part of my practice, I wrote essays and I submitted those essays to literary magazines, the only magazines I believed to be worthy of my writing. I had disdain for the entire collective of “religious” publishing houses and “Christian authors,” whom I viewed as less talented and rigorous practitioners with whom I would not associate as a bonafide literary writer. (Oh, sweet baby Liz.)

In reality, I submitted to Relevant Magazine every other week and they wouldn’t have me. I could not break into the religious market or any market. And eventually, nearing 200+ rejections, I grew weary.

I turned my attention to building a birth doula business. I studied to become certified through DONA International (Doulas of North America), and I began taking clients. To my surprise, I was in the black within a year of starting my company. And I happened to be very good at the business side of my doula business; I was a scrappy entrepreneur. But my best feature? I could get clients because I had no fear in pursuing clients. And my clients liked, nay, loved me. So did my colleagues.

I attended my first organizational doula conference and realized that conferences are my super power because for some reason, my extroversion and charm means that I become queen of any conference I attend. (Or so I joke with my husband— haha) I started speaking at MOPS (Moms of Preschoolers) groups to promote my business and after 20+ events in one year, I got good at it. Clients started to come to me, rather than me recruiting them. And it finally hit me that I’d gone about a writing career the wrong way.

After my college graduation, I had never considered going to a writer’s conference. Why did it matter?, I thought. I understood that my job was to would woo editors and my fellow writers with my superior craft. So I moved to the middle of the country and knew hardly any writers. I certainly had no author friends. Though I had some vague intuition that I wanted a literary agent, I did not understand how to get one to respond to my emails. I viewed editors as unapproachable, untouchable. In fact, I did not want to get to know editors because I did not want their view of me as a person to influence their view of my writing. I had a sense of the purity of the industry that meant the craft alone dictated who got published and who didn’t.

Sigh. You see where this is going, I have no doubt. After my experience in the industry of childbirth (20167-2018ish), I realized that I had deluded myself. In fact, I had deprived myself of one advantage I certainly had—I can make friends with anyone! In fact, my children tell me I have too many friends because they cannot keep them all straight when I tell stories about my friends. And like every other industry in the history of humankind, publishing is about people and relationships.

Once I grasped this, I started making friends and, because of my experience as a doula, I had no fear about reaching out to anyone in the publishing industry—because even if you receive a no, at least they saw your name in their inbox! (Exposure, baby.)

My first paid publication was for On Faith, an off-shoot of the Washington Post’s religion section of the same name, and I got that opportunity because I pitched a friend at church who just so happened to be the editor. I made $100. To my chagrin, On Faith was a religion outlet, but by this point, 200+ rejections in, I no longer cared. Whatever, wherever, I just wanted to get my words into the world and off of my computer screen.

In fact, my words seemed best suited for Christian publications.¹ Other publications showed less interest in my perspective, and though I did (and do) publish in the general market, I found an audience in Christian publishing. I no longer felt chagrined by this fact or even resigned—after all, these were the people with whom my words resonated, and who was I to refuse them?

During this time, I also began work on a memoir, the “falling-in-love story” of me and Jeremy, which involved making fun of myself for my very serious purity culture ideals. I woke up early before my young kids, inspired by a successful Christian author I followed Addie Zierman. While she woke at 4AM (!!) and wrote for 2 hours, I could only manage 6AM-7AM (okay, more like 6:30AM-7AM). Jeremy agreed to take care of the kid wake-ups and breakfast so that I could lock myself away in my closet office and tap out scenes of our goofy dating experience. Bit by bit, the memoir took shape, and as I blogged and developed a small group of readers who read my serialized memoir weekly as I wrote it. I started directing my instagram account toward my writing, chronicling days with my kids in the comments. As I wrote, I was discovering a voice, encouraged by the live feedback of friends and family who read along devotedly. I was getting closer and I knew it.

But then things changed again.

A Surprise Diagnosis

70 pages into writing the dating memoir, in 2018 at the age of 29, my eye broke. I mean this literally: I developed a rare eye condition (called Unilateral Acute Idiopathic Maculopathy) that meant a lesion had developed in the macula of my right eye (the central vision in the retina) and as the lesion grew and shrunk, it destroyed rods and cones. Turns out, rods and cones are irreplaceable and the damage to my sight was irreversible. Ophthalmologists cannot fix a broken retina. Long story short: I became permanently low-sighted (worse than 20/200 and non-correctable by glasses).

The journey to a diagnosis was very difficult. My anxiety rocketed and I finally got on meds (halleluiah). During that time, I could think of nothing other than my own vision, and so work on the love story manuscript stopped.

However, I discovered I felt less powerless when I wrote down everything that was happening to me as it happened to me. I carried a journal into doctor’s appointments, in which I scribbled down medical terms, the names of equipment they used on me, and results from various tests. I also requested that the doctor print out photos of my eyeball for me to take home so that I could spend time with the images and wrap words around them. As obsessed as I was, I decided to switch gears in my morning writing half hour, and I began to chronicle my experience on my blog. 10,000 words later, and I realized I’d begun a new memoir.

That year, I joined a professional Christian women’s writer’s group—Redbud Writer’s Guild—and decided to really give writing my full attention. (I had already stopped doula-ing because of the stress of my disability.) In that group, I learned of a writing residency opportunity in Minnesota where I could study with one of my favorite memoirists, Lauren F. Winner, and I applied. In 2019, I received a call to say I’d gotten in. I was floored. While at the residency that summer, I met a handful of Christian writers and clergy, and one recommended a literary agent. She gave me his email, and sometime in the fall, I emailed him. He emailed back to ask for the full memoir manuscript. I just about fell out of bed when I read his email. He read it, and signed me onto his roster a month later. I had finally been discovered! I had a literary agent! Which qualified me to call myself a real, professional author! It had happened! Watch out, Big 5, I am on the rise!

Because that’s how it happens, right? A big single moment that changes everything?

Not always, my friends. And not for me.

To be continued…

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Tune in next time for part two of this special publishing series to celebrate the publication of my debut book. Thanks for reading, my friends.

Warmly, Liz Charlotte Grant

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Can I ask you for a favor? Go preorder my book.

It releases in two weeks. Amid New Year 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. 😜

1. At the time, though I endeavored to write without any Christian-ese—which I disdained—I had no idea how evangelical I still sounded. To many, I still sound very religious! But gratefully, I have found alternative ways to express my spirituality than the tired phrases preferred by white American evangelicalism… which I still disdain.