How long should you stick to writing if you’re not meeting with quick success?
I’ve just read an interview with Cynthia Ozik in The Writer’s Chronicle. The interviewer is Dana Gioia, and I’d love to link to it, but it doesn’t appear to be available online. It’s definitely worth tracking down and reading, though, especially if you’re thinking that the years you’ve put in without yet getting that first novel published are an indication of your talent, or lack thereof.
Ms. Ozick says in the interview that she started her first novel, eventually nicknamed Mipple, at age twenty-one (which, doing the math from other things in the article, was about 1949). “[I]t wound on and on for so long” that she “continued to suck on” it for seven years, breaking off at one point to write a comic novel that “at this moment … must be languishing among the cobwebs in some London publisher’s cellar.” Then, prodded by a notice for a novella contest and thinking she “might just toss one off before returning to the seriously exalted work of Mippel,” she started what she refers to as “my third first novel,” Trust.
That novella grew to eight hundred pages over another seven years, and was finally published in 1966. Which, by my math (subtracting 1949 from 1966), is about seventeen years after she started writing novels.
Ms. Ozick has gone on to publish another four novels and seven story collections, in addition to essays and other nonfiction. She’s been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, and she has won both the Rea Award for the Short Story and the PEN/Malamud Award.
Just in case you’re thinking it’s time to quit because you’ve been writing without getting published for … how many years has it been? – Meg
