On Building a Writing Life: Spring Office Hours, Part 2

Hello, dear readers,

Last week I opened the spring office hours with questions about getting published in magazines, and talked about pitching, writing cover letters, and knowing when work is ready. A few of you wrote me with questions about agents, book proposals, questions I’ll try to answer here. This week, a new issue of The Yale Review (which I’m executive editor of) is out, and I also did a Q&A with other wonderful editors with the brilliant Alia Hanna Habib of Delivery & Acceptance about publishing in magazines, so my mind is on the ins and outs of publishing. And also on the fact that the huge pile of snow outside my house is finally gone! My car is permanently dented by trying to turn into our driveway and hitting the mini-glaciers left by plows and shovelers, but at least spring is almost here, and the daffodils and crocus tops are peeking up and out.

This winter, I happened to give a number of talks to a variety of audiences, from high schoolers to MFA students to lifelong writers, and I was struck that often what people ask me about (or just want to talk about) is the large, hard question underneath all the practical ones, which is simply: how do you build a writing life?

There’s no one answer, of course, and anyone who promises to have “the” answer is full of hogwash, a word my kids like to say. (I just realized I didn’t know the orign of that word—it turns out that the original 15th century meaning was “garbage food you’d give a hog,” which turned quickly into “garbage communication,” as it were.) There’s no way to game the system. The time you spend alone with your work — uncertain, revising, not yet sure what you have — is not wasted time. It is, in fact, the only time that is entirely yours, and the only time in which you can keep improving the work on your own terms. Hasten slowly, as Emperor Augustus reportedly said.

With that as the frame are a few questions you’ve asked and my attempts to answer them.

I’ve seen so much skepticism about agents and publishing here on Substack and surely some of it is merited. But I can also say from many years in publishign as a magazine editor and a writer, my sense is that editors and agents really do want to discover new writers, that nothing beats that feeling. That doesn’t mean everything is read perfectly or that there is no advantage to trying to make social connections in the world of publishing. It can mean that when someone turns you down, they have a reason for doing so that isn’t just that they don’t know you or haven’t read the piece. A lot of teh successful writers I know are very persistent; it didn’t happen right away for them, but they kept writing.

I’ll start with agents, behind the paywall.