Justine Zwiebel for BuzzFeed
Writing a book is a daunting task. Writing a first book seems especially so. Those attempting it may find themselves asking: Am I a good enough writer? How do I fill so many pages? If I do sell it, what if people don't like it? And yet despite so many obstacles, books do get published, lots of books — over 2,000,000 worldwide in 2011 alone, by one estimate. Here, 21 successful writers share the stories of their first published books, complete with many false starts, debacles with agents and publishers, and advice they'd travel through time to give their younger selves.
When did you decide to write what became your first book? What were you doing for a living at the time?
Chuck Klosterman (first book Fargo Rock City): I got a job at the Akron Beacon Journal in Akron, Ohio, in 1998. That was the first time I was ever able to afford a home computer, so that was a big reason why I decided to start writing a book then. I also moved to a city where I didn't know one person so I had no friends. That improves your likelihood of completing a book.
Heidi Julavits (first book The Mineral Palace): At the time I was waiting tables at a restaurant in Soho. It was a horrible place, but the money was, well, better than I probably make now per hour. "No suits after 10" was the rule. One night a Wall Street guy lunged across the velvet rope and bit off the nose of a bouncer who'd refused to let him in. I'm not kidding — he bit off the tip of the bouncer's nose and spat it into the gutter! Luckily, the bouncer was able to get it reattached.
Meg Wolitzer (first book Sleepwalking): I sold my first book my senior year at college, at Brown. It was a pretty intense experience; I wrote between classes. I understood in some way how hard it would be once I got out into the non-college world to find time to write and I wanted to give myself a head start, I suppose, to partly treat college like an artists' colony.
Lev Grossman (first book Warp): It was fall of 1992 and I was a year out of college. I was a temp so I was doing a lot of word processing for hiring, answering phones, occasional light industrial work at warehouses — not very glamorous stuff. I was living in a crap apartment in Allston, which is a crap neighborhood in Boston, and writing short stories that all got rejected. The reason I tried to write my first novel was I figured out that short stories were not actually for me. When I started writing a novel I thought, I'm not ready, because I've only written short stories and nobody wants them, but I also thought, For Christ's sake, what am I going to do? I can't keep on like this. I started writing the novel and I instantly felt like, Finally I can breathe.
Dean Koontz (first book Star Quest): I was teaching under Title III of the Appalachian Poverty Program and tutoring kids from families deep in poverty. And I was likewise deep in poverty. I thought, I don't want to keep this forever because I was selling short stories. I wanted to write a novel, so I took a job at a regular school teaching English. I had been reading sci-fi from about when I was 11 or 12. It was the preponderance of what I had read and that's what my short stories became, and I proceeded to write a novel called Star Quest the summer between those jobs. It was a pretty lame novel. It met the length requirements of a novel but it was like an expanded short story.
Charlaine Harris (first book Sweet and Deadly): I always intended to be a writer from the moment I could read, really. When I married my second husband he gave me the opportunity to stay home and write. I was 28. Prior to then I was a typesetter at Federal Express in the print department.
Sam Lipsyte (first book Venus Drive): I started publishing a few stories in a journal called Open City. They decided they were going to start publishing books, so at one point they called me up and said, "We want to publish your collection." I didn't have a collection; I just had a couple stories. But I didn't tell them that. I said, "Sure, just give me a few months."
Sloane Crosley (first book I Was Told There'd Be Cake): I knew I eventually wanted to write short stories or a novel. I had no intention of writing nonfiction. I was working for Vintage Books in their publicity department. Then I started writing for The Village Voice back when they had the essay section. Eventually an editor approached me and asked me if I wanted to turn the essays into a book about etiquette. Humorous etiquette. This was a laughable idea since I don't really know how to behave, even humorously. I remember meeting this guy at Dive 75 on the Upper West Side and actually slipping off my stool at the suggestion.
Junot Díaz (first book Drown): I was in my MFA program and I had two part-time jobs. You're in a program, so the telos of the program is you're supposed to generate a body of work. I'd also been on a pretty strict reading schedule. For the last three or four years or so, I was trying to read a book every other day and I would write the book down and what I as a reader took away from it — I still have the notebook. What happened was, after a couple hundred books I began to have an organic inspiration about how I might create a book.
Leigh Bardugo (first book Shadow and Bone): I was working as a makeup and special-effects artist at the time and I don't think that's a coincidence. Before that I'd worked as a journalist, I'd worked as a copywriter. When my dad passed away I decided to switch careers. I needed to be away from a computer screen and around people. I think not writing for my day job helped to let that muscle relax during the day so that I felt like writing when I came home at night.
George Saunders (first book CivilWarLand in Bad Decline): Let me start with the one that actually did get published. I'd been out of grad school maybe three or four years and was working at an engineering company and I'd kind of gotten stuck in a realist way of writing that wasn't working for me. I had a breakthrough or breakdown at work where I'd inadvertently written these Doctor Seuss-kind of poems during a conference call. A friend had also come to town and said, "Your favorite piece of mine was something you wrote seven years ago." That really stung. Between those two things I realized I'd been withholding certain things from my work: humor. Something crumbled in me. The next day I went in and wrote the first story from CivilWarLand.
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Was the proposition of writing a book intimidating or crazy-seeming, or were you confident you could do it?
Alexander Chee (first book Edinburgh): No matter the anxiety, I never thought that I wouldn't publish a book.
Meg Wolitzer: My mother is a novelist and I really saw her writing throughout my childhood so it seemed always like a natural thing to do.
Jennifer DuBois (first book A Partial History of Lost Causes): It did feel crazy, though being in an MFA program it seems a little less crazy because you see other people trying to do it. Skydiving probably seems less crazy if you have a lot of friends who are trying to do it. It's like running a marathon or hiking the Appalachian trail — you aren't in shape to do it until you've already done it.
Wells Tower (first book Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned): I didn't necessarily know that I was writing a book. I was just writing one story after another. Ultimately, the stories I didn't throw out accumulated to a book-length quantity of pages, and I sent those out. I think if I'd been concentrating on the volume, rather than each story in its own right, I never would have finished it.
T.C. Boyle (first book Descent of Man): I learned how to write a novel in the way we all do: by writing one. But my apprenticeship as a short story writer really stood me in good stead here. I'd probably published 30 stories or so by the time I started the novel, and that gave me confidence.
David Shields (first book Heroes): I was enormously unsure. I had written stories in college and at Iowa. I could write a story — that was like walking around the block. To write a novel felt to me like getting lost in a big city and somehow walking all the way back home with a blindfold on.
Rachel Kushner (first book Telex from Cuba): No, I didn't know that I could write a novel, and I think going to an MFA program is not by any measure proof that one is up to the task. I knew when I really got going on the book that there were places in the writing that reflected my potential. That's as much as you can ask for as a writer, at least initially. It was a long, long journey. But by the time I had completed a draft of the book, I knew I had something. And yet on the day my agent submitted it to editors I had a mild breakdown and thought, What if nobody wants this? And I spent all these years?
Lev Grossman: I was intimidated by everything, everywhere, including talking to girls in bars and things like that.
Leigh Bardugo: I believed all my life that I could write a book. I thought if not easy, it would be a pleasurable journey. I don't think I could have been more wrong about that. I think that one of the myths we have about creativity is that sometimes we have a calling, that you know that every day of your life, when in truth, half of writing a first draft is very much about failure.
Charlaine Harris: I knew nothing. I had never read any books about how to write. I just assumed I would be able to do it. I was astonished at how difficult it was to find enough plot twists to fill up enough pages (I was writing a conventional mystery). There was a lot I had to figure out that I didn't anticipate. It was big adventure to me; I was excited every day. I was scared, terrified naturally. But at the same time I had this sublime, ridiculous confidence. I knew it would be published.
Junot Díaz: I was in an MFA program at a time when nobody was in an MFA program. I was in an MFA program at a time when no one talked about agents. I was in an MFA program when no one was doing what you're doing right now. Writing was not professionalized. There weren't these 25 million things saying, "Let's give you advice about how to be a writer." (For the amount of writing advice there is, you would think Americans are reading billions of books.) Given that there wasn't all of that information, it was far more of an artist's game. The idea wasn't that we would write a great book, which I think is underlying a lot of this obsessive neuroticism that I think has charged the culture these days; [it was] the idea that we would write any kind of book. I think for us it was a lot easier. There was a lot less fear and a lot less competition and a lot less comparisons. There wasn't a culture of, "Look at this 19-year-old writer, they got a million-dollar advance."
Chuck Klosterman: I didn't know much about how to write a book. I had only an undergrad degree in journalism. I didn't have an MFA or a creative writing degree or anything, so I'd never even talked to anyone about writing a book. I didn't know anyone who had. I didn't know anything about how to structure a book or how the process worked, and I certainly had no idea how to publish a book. I'm not even exactly sure that I believed upon completion if the book it would be published. I guess I was just seeing if I could do it.
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Had you attempted to write other books prior to the one you ultimately published first?
Roxane Gay (first book Ayiti): Oh, there are a few ghosts of sad, sad books on my hard drive — youthful follies that most writers must endure before they get to the books that really should be sent out into the world.
Leigh Bardugo: I tried to write a bunch of books. I would get an idea and I would race into writing. I was so excited. Momentum would usually carry me through 50 pages or so and then I would hit a serious bump or I would lose steam or I would have one of those slow days. That slow day would turn into a slow week and then a slow month and I would step away from it and never come back.
Sam Lipsyte: I had, like most writers, a bad model in the drawer. Something that I'd been working on since college that was really stupid. I finally let it go. As a teacher once said to me, "There's no honor in finishing a bad novel."
Sloane Crosley: I wrote a novel. It's a dark comedy set in rural New Hampshire, where I spent all my summers as a kid. How do I put this? It's got a possessed fichus plant in it. I used to call it my "horticulturally gothic novel." I got an agent with it, which I always feel is a nice tribute to the eye agents have, how they can see a tiny plant growing in a whole lot of dirt and candy wrappers and cans. It will never be published.
Heidi Julavits: I have a habit of writing what I now understand to be a "prequel" to the novel I end up publishing. The prequel takes me about two years to write; then I throw it away and begin the novel again from scratch. I have done this four times. I have published four novels. Some have more in common with their prequel than do others. The prequel to The Mineral Palace was called The Mineral Palace. The characters and the plot and the setting were the same, but the execution was completely different. I was in graduate school at the time, and pretty enamored with postmodernism, and thus wrote the novel in the form of fake interviews and fake newspaper reports or something (it's hard to totally remember). McSweeney's published an excerpt from the prequel (which I'd already tossed in the rubbish) and called it "Shrapnel." It really was a bunch of shrapnel.
Chang Rae-Lee (first book Native Speaker): The first book I wrote, I had huge ambitions for it and it was a disaster. It was a big, baggy monster of a book. I gave my life to it for two or three years. I sent it to an editor friend of mine. She was very kind but she said, "No, this is not working." I think the problem with the book was it was really more like a performance piece in my mind about how clever and smart I was. It was a very intellectual. It was engineered to be "brilliant," rather than to be something that I really cared about. In many ways it was a book to escape; my mother was dying at the same time. But I ended up putting that away really immediately after hearing her and a couple other peoples' opinions about it. I knew it wasn't working.
It was hugely disappointing. It was crushing. It was crushing, but in a way it wasn't a surprise, if that makes sense. I decided maybe to try graduate school, not because I really wanted to try graduate school, but I got a little fellowship and I considered it a tiny little book contract. That's where I started my first published book, Native Speaker. I wasn't thinking so much about publishing it and "being a writer." Impressing people. With Native Speaker I was really focused on writing a book that I'd wanted to write for a while and hadn't. It was honest.
Adelle Waldman (first book The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.): I wrote another whole novel before Nathaniel P. I had previously been doing this column for the Wall Street Journal website about twentysomethings and personal finances. I wrote the last one about how I was going to quit the column, to go live with my parents, sublet my apartment in New York, and write a novel. And I did that and it was the first time that I'd written anything that was at all passable. I did that at 29 in about six months. I came back to New York thinking I'd freelance for a little while and tutor a little bit. I thought that book would sell right away and everything would be great and I'd never need to have a regular job again. Then that novel didn't get published and I wound up tutoring for six years.
Now I'm really glad that novel didn't get published; I learned a lot from it. I'm fond of it, but I'm glad it was in my drawer, not in the world. I couldn't have written the second novel without that. I knew from that I could write something novel-length that had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and I also knew that I liked doing it.
Justine Zwiebel for BuzzFeed
