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| THE Bible for Writers |
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| Kevin Larimer and Mary Gannon |
There's a whole lot of books out there about making a career
out of writing, but somehow, at least for me, they leave things out--the things
you really want to know. Like how to go on book tour. How to make a
pre-publication checklist. The things writers don't talk about that we all want
to know--and they come straight from many famous writers' mouths, too. Who else
but Poets & Writers editors Kevin Larimer and Mary Gannon would provide
such an absolute BIBLE to all things writerly?
I cannot thank both of you enough!
This book is absolutely incredible in scope. How did you go
about deciding what would go in, and even more important, where it would go?
Thanks so much, Caroline! In many ways we have been working
on this book for nearly twenty-five years, beginning all the way back when we
started working at Poets & Writers. (Mary started at P&W in
1996, leaving in 2013, when she was editorial director; Kevin started in 1999,
and continues on as editor in chief.) In those years we wrote, read, and edited
a great many articles, essays, and interviews by some of the greatest minds in
the literary, publishing, and bookselling communities all across the country
and around the world. Even before we started working on the book in earnest,
our editor, Jofie Ferrari-Adler at Avid Reader Press, was very clear about
wanting this book to be, as the title suggests, a complete guide—meaning that
no topic was too small, or too large, to be addressed. There was a great
freedom in that permission to widen the lens as much as possible. Of course it
was also a little intimidating: How to encompass something as big as the life
of the writer and do it justice in one book?
Very early on, we hit upon one thing we wanted to keep in
the forefront of our minds while writing: We wanted this book to be human, to
have a pulse, a heart. While the business of building a sustainable writing
career requires hard work, dedication, and careful thinking, writers also have
emotions and insecurities and other responsibilities—to others and to
themselves. Too often authors of resource books can lose sight of the fact that
real human beings are the ones who will be trying to execute the advice and
guidance in those pages. So we wanted to always keep that in mind. It became
our lodestar. And, of course, it matched perfectly the tone and guiding
principles of coverage in Poets & Writers Magazine. As far as
organizing the material, we wanted to offer one version of chronological order,
from inspiration to craft to education to first steps in publishing to book
deals to publicity and promotion, so that readers could follow a trajectory,
from inspiration to publication and beyond. We also included a section of
shorter chapters that look at the world of writing through the lens of some big-picture,
real-life subjects such as time, happiness, money, respect, family, and so on.
That section is positioned right in the middle, which just made sense to us.
Again: writers are real people with real lives, and this section anchored that
theme right in the middle.
What’s so fantastic about the book is the mix. Not only is
there a wealth of practical advice, but I really appreciated the personal
advice from writers, too and on subject after subject. Coming from Poets
& Writers, you must have had an avalanche of material to choose from.
How on earth did you sift through it? What was that process like?
Well, we were pretty familiar with the subjects we were
covering, having had roles in helping to generate so much of it over the years.
From the beginning, we decided we wanted this to be original material—not a
best-of anthology of previously published articles—though we did take a few
sidebars and lists that had appeared in print and updated them for the book. So
we avoided getting too hung up in poring over twenty or thirty years of
magazine issues and instead started from scratch, turning back to magazine
pieces to glean advice only when it naturally occurred to us to do so. Since we
have dedicated our working lives to providing advice and resources to writers,
we internalized a lot, and working on the book was a wonderful way of laying it
all out there again. As far as sifting through material though, there was one
chapter that involved a pretty crazy process. For chapter 4, “One Hundred Notes
on Craft,” we spent weeks revisiting craft books, reading many new ones, and
recalling marginalia from our writing notebooks and other craft essays to
compile a huge collection of wisdom from writers about their art. That was a
lot of fun, but then we had to organize it into a chapter that not only made
sense but would be something that writers would actually want to read. So we
typed up all those quotes about craft, cut them up into separate little ribbons
of paper, and spent an intense day and night arranging and rearranging them on
our dining room table. Once we got them into an order that felt right, we set
to work writing connective tissue for each one—linking one to another using
historical or cultural context that ended up revealing so many interesting
similarities and commonalities, as well as points of departure, among a hundred
writers who wrote about their craft over the past 150 years.
I also love that the book is a kind of inspiring journey,
with a deeply professional perspective. But what other book also looks at the
very personal business of writing, including how to manage time and grapple
with happiness and family, which are all deeply important to any writer who
needs to succeed. “A successful writer is an informed writer.” Can you talk
about that please?
As we mentioned earlier, striking that balance of
professional and personal was deeply important to us, so hitting on the idea of
a section wherein we could look at some of these somewhat existential topics,
such as Writing and Happiness and Writing and Time, felt very freeing, and
opened up our thinking about the life of the writer in important ways.
As for that phrase we
return to again and again—“A successful writer is an informed writer”—that is
something that has always guided us through decisions about coverage in the
magazine. This belief that there is no one way to go about being a writer. So
much depends on your expectations, what you hope to gain, and how you define
success for yourself. Once you figure that out, it’s a matter of figuring out
how things can be done, how things typically work, and then making decisions
about whether you want to follow those well-worn paths or cut your own. There
is no wrong way to write, to create, to publish. But there are systems in
place—writing programs, writing contests, literary magazines, book publishers,
literary agents, and so on—that writers don’t necessarily need to be a part of,
but we think it’s important to know how they work so you can make those
decisions for yourself.
The great thing about this book is that there are actions to
take, especially since, too often, writers are paralyzed and don’t know what to
do. For example in 100 Notes on Craft, a writer could take any one of the
suggestions and put it to use! Twenty-one questions to ask if you want to
pursue an MFA was brilliant. There were
so many positive things to do, including writing a letter or tweet to an author
you admire, which builds community. Which brings me to the word “sustainable”
in your subhead. A sustainable writing career is what everyone wants and what
many writers fear they cannot have. What’s the most important thing you would
say to them?
We sprinkled fifty Action Items throughout the book for this
very reason—to give writers some suggestions for things they can do, some big
and some small, that will keep them moving forward as writers. While it’s true
that the financial reality for the majority of writers can be challenging—this
isn’t an easy way to make a living—there are ways to lead a creative life while
building a sustainable career as a writer who works in academia, or in the
publishing industry, or in the nonprofit sector, or stitches together freelance
or technical writing gigs, or something else entirely. We don’t just mean
“sustainable” in financial terms; we’re also interested in how to incorporate
the writing life into all the other aspects of life, including one’s emotional
life, family, and relationships. Again, establishing and managing one’s
expectations is fundamental; the most important thing is to keep writing.
I want to thank you for having a chapter on surviving
success and failure. (You ask the question: Did selling lots of paintings make
Mark Rothko happy?” And by asking that, it diverts that whole notion of success
to the work, to doing what feeds you without always hanging it on whether or
not you made the NYT Bestseller list. I
think that’s important because careers are not a straight line up or down—there
are many valleys, I think. What do you think is the most important way that
writers can measure success?
Much as we’d like to, we can’t take credit for that Rothko
line: That was Anthony Doerr, who Kevin had the great fortune of getting to
know during a week at the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference in Homer, Alaska, a
couple years ago. But this notion of success is a fascinating one, as it’s
different for every writer, and as we learned from writers like Jonathan
Lethem, it’s a moving target. As he mentions in the chapter “Surviving Success
and Failure,” he no longer has to worry about whether his work will be
published, but that doesn’t mean he lives in a constant state of Success. When
you think about it, failure is forever—it’s always there in front of you, but
there is a way to learn from it, and that is yet another way of measuring
success: how you respond to failure. In the end, if you believe in what you’re
writing, and it continues to challenge you in creative, productive ways, that
seems to us a good way to measure success.
How do you see the writing community changing in the next
decade? And how can writers prepare for it.
We are seeing a slight ebb in the numbers of MFA programs,
so that’s an interesting development that we’ll be keeping an eye on, and I
think related to that is the expansion of online spaces that inspire and bring
together writers. And of course that is taking on an entirely unexpected and
important dimension during these strange times.
What’s obsessing you now and why?
It is what’s on the minds of the majority of the earth’s
human population: coronavirus. Our lives, all of our lives, have changed in
ways that we have no way of comprehending just yet. The only certainty is that
the world’s writers will absorb, digest, reflect, and make sense of whatever
new reality awaits us, and that fact gives us no small amount of hope. In the
meantime, we are turning to literature to provide nourishment for the heart and
the mind.
What question didn’t I ask that I should have?
You should have asked what we think about your efforts
during this pandemic, such as A Mighty Blaze, to give a much-needed signal
boost to authors whose book launches and promotional efforts have been
overshadowed by the crisis. And we would have answered: You are an angel. Thank
you!
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