But it didn’t.

It’s true that the little clump of people at the cocktail party might be less inclined to drift away from me, but I found out that the interrogation had only just begun.

Next up:

“I haven’t heard of that book.”

“Well, you have now.”

“What genre is it?”

“Literary fiction.” I hate this question. Literary fiction sounds so lame in the face of this moment. So hoyty-toyty. So, “I don’t know how to define what I do, therefore I don’t know what I’m doing.” (The last is true. But writing is about muddling forward, and how can that be explained to anyone who doesn’t write? At a cocktail party, no less?)

“How many copies did it sell?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Asked incredulously. “Surely you know your own book sales.”

At the risk of sounding rude and ungrateful for being a published writer, I don’t answer at all. My books sales have never supported me. I’ve always had a day job. I’ve made peace with that, again and again and again. I wonder if I were a surgeon, would I be asked how many people died on my table. This question feels like that. “You may be a writer, but…”

The next comment: “You should write an Oprah book.”

I don’t say that I already did, but Oprah failed to notice.

“You know – insert name of celebrity – wrote a book.”

“Yes, I know.”

“It did really well.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Months on the bestseller list.”

Silence from me.

“I’ve got three weeks off next summer and I’m thinking of writing a novel. I think I can get it done in that time. How long did it take you?”

“Two years.”

“Two years! Really? Why did it take so long?”

“Excuse me, I have to go pee.” I don’t even care that I said the word pee at a social gathering. I’m just thinking about the comfort of the bathroom stall, and the closed door, and wondering if I can take as long to pee as I took to write my last book.

The point is that the opportunities to prove you’re a “real writer” never end. It seems that someone (usually a total stranger) is always ready to challenge your claim, or to make you feel smaller for it. If you’re not published, you should be published. If you’re not a best selling author, you should be a best selling author. If your book isn’t genre fiction, you should try genre fiction. If Oprah hasn’t noticed your book, you should write an Oprah book. You should have a youtube channel, a Twitter account, followers, a hoard of people who know who you are, and so on. Listening to someone tell you they’re going to write a novel during their three-week vacation, rubs salt in the open wounds of being one the millions of midlist writers out there. Most of us, in fact, are midlist. Perhaps we take too long to write. Here is a person who can do what it took me two years to do, in a whole lot less time, while eating ice cream and skiing.

What I want to say to writers, all writers, is that it’s a deep journey. You have to measure yourself by a yardstick that doesn’t exist in the commercial world. You can write a deep book, and it can be a best seller. You can also write a deep book and no one will notice. Take heart. Find a gauge of success that is your own. Most of us wanted to write long before we did write. Writing itself, bringing a work to completion is huge success. It’s a huge success that will mostly go unnoticed unless you happen to hit the jackpot with a best seller, and that too is a long arduous road. So always (ALWAYS) love yourself. And admire that you are writing. And as much as possible, divorce yourself from the world of capitalism, which cares not for art unless it sells. Most of your writing, arty life will be spent in capitalism’s shadows, and in order to be strong throughout the journey, you must respect who you are and what you’re doing. You must respect the risk.

For now there will be celebrity authors whose books will be read while ours are not, simply because this is the culture we live in. Total strangers will throw this in your face because total strangers have no idea what sort of gestalt work goes into the creation of a story, and because the work of writing is not respected in this culture. Only the work of publishing matters, and if there is publishing, there must be book sales, and if there are too few book sales, there must be a marketing plan, and if there is no marketing plan, then you, the author have failed.

But you have not failed. I have not failed.

I think the next time someone asks me if I am published, I am going to answer no. It’s an honest answer. I am unpublished. Most of my work is unpublished. Most of it will remain unpublished. We’re all unpublished together. That’s the club. Respect the real club, not the imagined one.

Of course, in all that time there were years that I didn’t write. There were many years during which I berated myself for not having “discipline.” Also years during which I stabbed at it, and looked at my work and thought, “But it’s not real writing.” It was as difficult then as it is now to believe that art matters.

And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Art always has be clawed out of some sort of life. The messages don’t change, or they haven’t changed in my life time.

A few of the messages I have heard during the span of my writing life:
Don’t quit your day job.
You simply must read Proust.
You must subscribe to the New Yorker
You must get an MFA
You must teach in a college
You must travel
You must have a platform
You must have a brand
You must have something important to say
And so on.

There is a tremendous amount of advice on how to be an artist. Some of it actually comes from artists, which blows my mind.

It isn’t until an artist reaches some sort of national recognition that he or she is given carte blanche permission to simply be an artist. Then the artist is granted that she might have known what she was doing all along. This too is a blow against art, because we usually don’t know what we’re doing. We just do it anyway.

I honestly don’t know if any of this is a bad thing or a good thing. It doesn’t hurt to have to work against the grain, against all that society tells you you must do. It doesn’t hurt to insist on creating something that is, to others’ eyes, frivolous and selfish. It makes you stronger. It makes you fiercer. It can make your art deeper. It can certainly deepen your relationship to it. And it can serve you well in times like these, when America seems to be one big street brawl, from the presidency on down.

It’s helpful to wear my Writing is Revolutionary button, simply to remind myself that there was a time when even just the act of taking time for myself, and clearing the psychic space for writing was a huge revolution. It may have been a personal revolution, but as Gloria Steinem has said, “The personal is political.”

It has never been easy to say to certain people and certain things, “No, I will not serve you.” And then to say to my writing and my characters, “Yes, I will serve you.” Not everyone, including writing and characters, has always been completely cooperative with me and my goals and needs. I still have to make these same decisions. I still have to turn away from some things in order to turn toward my work as a writer. My work might not matter to the larger world, and I have to live with that. Every day, with every word put on paper, there is the possibility of obscurity. I have to make peace with that.

Art is a gamble. Art is a crap shoot. Art is betting on the horse with the lame leg ridden by the 300 pound jockey. Always has been, always will be.

This is what I grew up believing about myself, and there was no place that proved these points more often, more relentlessly, and more consistently than school. All day long, five days a week I was shown what a poor performer I was.

“Does not apply herself.”

“F in effort.”

“Daydreams.”

“Does not engage socially enough.”

I know now that throughout my childhood I was in survival mode. It was the only mode I knew. Get through the week, enjoy the weekend, go back. I also believe now that I have an undiagnosed learning disorder. ADD or ADHD.

The symptoms I’ve read about fit. Overwhelm at too much stimulation. Distracted by outside noise. A need for specific directions when traveling. A need for solitude and quiet. An inability to multi-task. Daydreaming.

I’ve taken some of the online tests and results come back mixed. But the questions are crummy and one dimensional. For instance: “Do you have trouble focusing?”

I’ve written three novels and one memoir, all of which required intense focus. They each took years to write, and tons of research and an ability to pull threads and information from different sources to use or support story.

But can I sit in a meeting and listen to someone drone on about statistics and power points? No. Do I lose focus in such a setting? I never had it, just as I could never attain it in school.

I could learn what I was interested in – reading, stories, diagramming sentences. But science? Math? History, which was basically just an advertisement for the patriarchy? No. I couldn’t focus on these things. They ran through my brain the way water runs through a bladder.

I suppose I was fortunate that at the time I was going to school, there were no diagnostic tests for ADD. ADD wasn’t even named yet. And because of that I was never given drugs to “correct” my “disorder.” I maintained as best I could. I graduated from high school and pursued no further institutionalized education. I started working odd jobs. I learned immensely from these jobs, and from the people I worked beside. And after a time, when I realized writing doesn’t do itself, I applied myself to producing a novel. And when that was published I wrote another, followed by a memoir and another novel recently published, The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson.

But what I’ve come to realize lately, and what made me cry recently, was the understanding that publishing a book slams my face right into the wall of my “disorder.” Suddenly the things that kept me focused while writing no longer apply to the task of publishing and promoting. I am back in veritable school again.

And this makes me sad. The thing I have loved all my life, telling stories and writing, the thing I have made great sacrifices to pursue ends up, if I publish, asking more of me than I can give, or more than I can give while maintaining the things I need to write more stories.

To write a novel, my attention cannot be fractured into a million different directions. Politics, panic, tracking sales, researching blogs and seeking reviews for the book just published, traveling, socializing and mingling too much, chatter, TV, too much social media, too many voices, etc., are all things that send my mind skittering, and then drying up, like water thrown on a hot skillet. Writing a novel requires a focus like none other.

At the point where a book is published a lot is asked of an author. I can manage the details to a point, but then I cave, and the reason I cave is not because I am stupid, and not because I am inadequate, and not because I am a failure, but because I am me.

It is ironic that at the time when I should most feel like a success, when my book is being published, I am pushed into the place where I feel the least adequate, where I feel stupid, where I feel like a failure simply because of my inability to function in a system that overwhelms me.

Yes, I had a good cry yesterday when I came to realize this. I cried for the adult me who struggled yesterday with the timeline of the new book while also struggling with trying to understand how to contact bloggers and ask them to review the previous book. I cried because I recognized this as shame. A feeling I have carried since childhood over my inability to make sense of the adult world. Being an adult has not helped me make any more sense of it.

But, it’s good to know this irony. This shame. It’s good to recognize it for what it is, and get help. And by help I don’t mean that I’ll be going to a doctor and getting drugs. Screw that. There’s really nothing wrong with me except that I find society a difficult task master, which I tend to believe is a sign of mental health.

The help I will be getting will be to hire out some tasks, as many as I can afford, so I can do the thing I can’t hire out – writing.

This is true no matter what most of the world is paying attention to. This is true whether the Democrats are running things or the Republicans. This is true whether Obama is in office or Trump.

A writer, an artist, all artists have to disengage from the dominant culture in order to engage with their work.

But how do we give ourselves permission to disengage when there is new information to process every day, and it comes at us fast and furious, and it’s wild and unmanageable? In an environment where the nation is no longer arguing politics, but is instead arguing values, it can seem extremely self indulgent to value art, especially our own. In times like these art can seem unnecessary. Art can seem quaint. Art can seem extinct. An ancient fossil left in a rock. A shadow of that thing I used to do.

Trump’s election to president threw me into a state I’d never been in before. My dreams were riddled with darkness and gloom. Three days before he was inaugurated my fourth book was published.

I suppose I was lucky to have the focus of promoting my book during the first two weeks of his presidency. I could not respond or react to what was going on because I had something to do that was intense and important and required of me. I trotted around giving the readings my publicist had scheduled. The reading I gave on the Saturday after the inauguration, the day of the Women’s March in Washington, was attended by a scant audience. It is never easy to garner attention for a book, but it seemed especially futile this time around. The political climate sucked the air out of everything.

Publishing a book is often a sort of black hole. An author throws her energy there and hopes to be able to write again after the initial wave of attention is over. Writing is not a black hole for me. Writing, without thought of publishing, without thought of the outside world, without thought of how this story is going to be received, is an intimate, nurturing relationship. It is not so easy to enter back into it after a book tour, even a small one, but it was especially difficult this time. Is it right to enter into solitude, deep conversations with “imaginary” beings, intense research, silence and dreams and holding things close to my vest when every minute feels as though there is something I should be doing to save the world?

I sank into depression. Depression is not my go-to place. It’s not a place I can work from, although I tried. The depression was like quicksand. It slowly sucked me down until my eyes were filmed and gritty, and I couldn’t breathe.

I am just one person. Just one writer. Just one tiny speck of an artist who has worked for years to build the life I have. For income, I teach writing in my studio. Although I have hours to keep, I also have flexibility. Flexibility is wonderful, but it can also be a slippery slope.

I know what it is to flex myself away from my writing. In the past I have over socialized, overslept, overeaten, over given of myself, and spent too much time on social media.

And now the situation calls for activism and close observance and vigilance.

I hope I can step up. I hope I do not fail. I hope we do not fail. But I also recognize that I had better hang on to my life. I had better remain present for my students, and for my own writing. I had better step up to this game of writing. I had better pull myself out of the quicksand of depression and instead sink deeply into the work of writing. I had better engage with my fictional world, and be the writer it requires, for if I don’t and we win this fight against chaos and insanity, I will have lost what I am fighting for. I had better not lose what I hold dear.

This has always been the way of the artist. We have always had to scratch out space and time. We have always had to prioritize. We have always had to be fierce. And now we must fiercely protect what is dear to us, and what is dear to me is far larger than I ever imagined, and it is not just my art.

I find that after any intense period of being on the go, I have trouble being still again. I am restless. I wake up in the middle of the night sure that I’ve forgotten some crucial detail. I have trouble concentrating enough to read a book. I can’t think of how to cook anymore, because I lack the psychic space it takes to organize ingredients. I determine to sit on the couch and do nothing, but it feels as though a bolt of lightning will strike me for such a sin. In short, I have to relearn stillness.

I have to remind myself that I am coming down off something, down off stress, down off movement, down off intensity, and it is like coming off a drug. In America the drug of busyness is a part of our culture. We’re encouraged to be busy. We’re rewarded for it. So, I must relearn stillness while living in a soup of cultural busyness.

The first step I take is awareness. I admit out loud that I have had a ton of stuff to do, and that while I got it done, I also lost my way a bit in the throes of doing. I have been on a long journey. Like Frodo in The Hobbit, things don’t quite feel the same when the journey ends, even though it ends in my kitchen.

The second step is taking a day without placing any sort of demands on myself. I do not try to get anything done in this day. I might dabble in something, but I have no goals. I might read, but the goal is not reading. I might so a little scribbling, but the goal is not writing. I might take a walk, but the goal is not walking. This is a day of zero goals. I let the day unfold. If something feels difficult I don’t do it.

The next day, I take deep breaths and carry on. It helps if I can find pockets of stillness in this day. It helps if I don’t have to dive back into intensity. It helps if I can remember what I was doing before life got so damn busy and try to ease back into that.

Writing a book? Oh, yes. What scene was I on? Who are the characters again? What was the work saying to me when I had to stop listening and attend to moving?

It’s scary to step back into the fictional world. I’m afraid my characters won’t talk with me. I’m afraid the thread has been dropped and lost. I’ve not been a fiction writer for nearly two months now, not one that was writing anyway. Do I still know how?

This fear is real. Reentry is hard. If you’ve dropped your writing for whatever reason, then know that you sit where I sit now. Somehow I have to reenter. And so do you if you want to bring the project to fruition. So take my hand. Let’s wade in together. I’ll work on mine and you work on yours and we’ll know each other is there.

You may have read that you should never give your reader an opportunity to stop reading, and this advice might be confusing to you. Of course your reader will stop reading. She, like everyone, has a life to attend to. You cannot control that. You cannot pick up her children from school or attend a business meeting for her. Your reader will stop reading, but this is not the same as wanting to stop reading. Nor is it the same as stopping reading because some information has been left out of the narrative and the reader has to stop, even briefly and unconsciously, to supply that missing bit. Put simply your job is to soothe the reader, to massage her mind into receptivity, and you do this by never missing a beat.

Writing is detail work. Writing is organization.

If it rains in your book, then things must be wet. There cannot be pockets of wetness and pockets of dryness, unless there is something allowing the dryness, such as shelter, or a canopy of trees. If the character dishes soup out, there must be a receptacle for that soup – a bowl or a cup. If someone’s eyes are blue on page ten, then they must also be blue on page fifty.

This sounds tedious, and nitpicking, as though I am splitting hairs. I am not splitting hairs. I am telling you that these things matter. Readers are savvy. Of course they can, in their mind, supply a bowl for that soup, but why ask them to do that? Why leave out anything that causes the reader to stop and say to herself, “There must be a bowl.” If you leave enough tiny details out like this, you create a choppy ride for the reader. You create less chance for her to fall into your fictional world, the world she wants to fall into. It’s your job to soothe the reader into a trance.

In this class we just wrote, and read back to each other, and received each others’ writing by recalling what we liked. As the week went on, we formed a community, and we became important to each other, and we all found out more about this woman. Her alcoholic husband. Her demanding adult children. The dishes in the sink and the laundry on the floor. A smack across the face. She wrote the scenes of her life that week. Through writing from prompts these scenes spooled from her pen and stitched themselves into her story. It may have been the first time she ever told her story, even to herself. Stories are often pattern, and now she could look at the pattern of her own life without the distractions of daily dust-ups of drama her situation kept her in.

She went home after that week and left her husband. She rented a small apartment and lived alone. She wrote me a few times about how peaceful it was. She thanked me. What had I done? Had I broken up a marriage? No, of course not. I’d only held space for a person to hear her own thoughts.

In the burning times, this might be considered the work of a witch. Powerful women, smart women, women with property, women who healed others with herbs and deep knowledge, women who were not married, women who lived outside the “norm” were called witch. But the accusation of witch wasn’t just assumed to be correct. Women were tested for being a witch by various means. Some women were put in a chair and dunked in water. If she was a witch, she wouldn’t drown. Or a woman was needled, her skin pricked and pricked and pricked, because somewhere on a witch was a place she would not bleed. And if she bled, which she did, she was not a witch.

Funny how the tests for a witch always leave a woman dead. Funny too, how this woman was told she was at death’s door if she didn’t do something for herself. Was that doctor a witch too?

The burning times, that I did not live through, and that seem horrific and unrepeatable, are very much on my mind these days, as is the alchemy of writing. I’ve witnessed that alchemy again and again, women and men coming back to themselves, hearing themselves, hearing each other, becoming stronger. I’ve seen the tough and guarded made vulnerable. I’ve seen the meek and voiceless start to speak up for themselves. I’ve seen barriers break down and humanity show through.

And if this is the work of witch then I accept it. Even in these burning times.

The ruckus I am talking about is the world of visibility. It can seem like there are writers who are very visible who are ignoring the writers who are not. It can feel like a club you’re not let into. It can feel like standing outside a house and looking at a grand party going on inside while knocking on the doors, the walls, the windows and never gaining entry.

I have experienced some real bullshit in the writing world. It’s there. I used to complain and whine a great deal about it. I was sure that I was deliberately being kept out of the greatest party on earth. The truth is, this feeling of being left out came from my own feelings of inadequacy.

Here are some of the myths I had to dismantle:

Myth Number One: The greatest party on earth. Like every party, there are some wonderful people here and some real assholes, and it’s not always easy to tell the difference. But you can believe this: everyone in the house worked their asses off to get here. And if you’re working your ass off too, and feel like you’re not being invited in, let me suggest that the greatest party on earth is really just a lot of sub-parties. Chances are you’re already in and don’t know it.

Myth Number Two: Once invited into the greatest party on earth, you’re always in. This is simply not true. You never know when this magic thing called writing is going to kiss you goodbye. A hot shot writer today might never publish another book. Or the next book might be a terrible flop. Or the whole desire and drive to write might just leave you, and you decide you’d rather be a serial killer than write another word. And then you’d only be invited in as someone’s character (we hope). Again – writing is hard work.

Myth Number Three: Once I am a celebrity life will be easy and I will be respected. Not true. Re. the respect, you’ll never be respected if you don’t respect yourself, and that relates to not worrying about being kept out of the party and just doing your work, which is hard. Writing is hard. But, besides writing being hard work, you know what else is hard work? It’s hard work to have and maintain a public life. It takes a lot of juice to remain visible, to give to the public the best you can think of to give, and to receive from the public both love and criticism. It’s very difficult to do this, and retain the spaciousness and silence to research and write deeply on the next work. All this stuff takes time, but also soul and energy. Sometimes, a person with a public life just needs time and space to herself. Sometimes, a person with a public life must disengage or never write again. And sometimes a person with a public life disengages by degrees. Do not assume it’s personal.

And Then There’s This Truth- I’ve found that talking about the walls only makes the walls thicker. The more closed doors I see, the more closed doors there are. Forget about the hierarchy, which is both real and not real. The less I think about not being in the company of the giants, the more I become a giant in my own world, and the easier it is to see my place in this party called writing, and the more I understand that while we all differ in where we are in the party, we are all important. We’re all cells in an organism. Who’s to say which cell is more important? Who’s to say that someone isn’t struggling, just because we have different struggles? Who’s to say that some struggles are better than others?

Just relax. Writing is hard enough without worrying about whether one belongs or does not belong to a particular club. And believe me every writer has felt invisible at some point. If he or she hasn’t felt invisible, I doubt he or she would be writing.

What fed your soul as a child?

Find it.

What did you do before the serpent of social media?

Find it.

Where were your secret places before you became an adult?

Find them.

What calmed your heart?

Find it.

What quieted your mind?

Find it.

What circumvented the chatter?

Find it.

What is the last thing you picked up off the ground and put into your pocket?

I could go on with this. A plethora of free advice was dispensed to me from complete strangers early in my career, a great deal of it before my first novel was published and a great deal of it before my second novel was published, in that sort of twilight space in which I’d proven I could write, but had not yet proven I could write again.

The free advice used to infuriate me. So much of it felt incredibly distant from the life I lived, and even from the life I was trying to build. Well, I’ve built that life now, and it’s far better and richer than the one I imagined, and the free advice has fallen off. It seems I might have some of my own ideas on how to go about being a writer.

So, here is my free advice to writers, for what it’s worth. Like all free advice, it’s suspect.

Write. Write all the time, even when it is not a project for publication. Write badly. Write just because. Don’t listen to advice from strangers. They are all strangers. Know yourself. Know your work. Know your characters. Listen only to the invisible people in the room. Don’t try to sound smart. Prove nothing to nobody. Make some friends – real friends who are willing to listen to your fears, (although you will not be calling it fear at the time) without judgement. Have friends who can hold up a mirror to show you just how fierce you really are. Grow fangs and claws and wear your heart on your sleeve. Dumb down so that everything is new. Be an expert in nothing. Always begin. Appreciate tree frogs, and rescue them when they get caught between the shutters and the wall. Take walks in the dark. Give money away. Let your stories breathe without publication. Let them breathe with publication. Love senselessly and enthusiastically. Write down everything that crazy fucker at the laundromat said to you. Describe hands. Watch bracelets jangle down wrists as wine glasses are hoisted. Look into people’s eyes. Don’t look into people’s eyes. Visit with snails. Visit the dead. Stand with one hand on the tombstone of the infant daughter and the other on the tombstone of her parents and feel the current. Turn off the TV. Don’t listen to the news. Pay your bills. Live cheap. Work a job that has nothing to do with art. Drive a car with a lot of bumper stickers on it that contradict each other. Have an identity crisis. Quit and start again.