I met Leah Stewart at the Sewanee Writers Conference years ago, and was one of the first in line for her debut novel, Body of a Girl, and her second book, The Myth of Me and You, and her third, Husband and Wife. So it was a real thrill to get to read her newest, The History of Us, before it was published. I laughed, I cried, and I was very sorry to turn the last page. To celebrate its publication, I’m rerunning an earlier post she did for me. See you in line at the bookstore! – Meg
I went to graduate school right after college, in part because I didn’t know what else to do with myself. I’d thought I would be a journalist, but after summers spent interning for newspapers I knew I wasn’t cut out for the job. Thank God for A. Manette Ansay, who was teaching at my alma mater at the time and who said, “You should go to an MFA program.”
(Me: “What’s an MFA program?”)
So I went, and while I was there I wrote short stories, and I submitted them for publication and dutifully kept a record in a notebook of where I had submitted them for publication. All but one were rejected, some with nice notes, some the usual way. After my first novel came out a friend of mine accused me of “eschewing” the standard route to publication. But I didn’t eschew anything. I just didn’t have much luck. Part of that may have been that, as I’ve come to discover, I’m much more of a novelist than a short story writer. But honestly, who knows. I worked as a reader at Ploughshares and an editor at Doubletake, and the more time I’ve spent on both sides of the process the more I’m aware of the enormous role played by luck. Think of your own reaction to things you read: some stuff you like, some stuff you don’t.
But I’m getting off-topic. In graduate school at Michigan I got hired as staff at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the second summer I was there a published writer suggested I send some of my stories to his agent. He said, “If he calls you, he’ll ask if you’re working on a novel. Lie, and say you are.”
When the agent called I was in Cambridge, staying in a friend’s apartment while my boyfriend and I looked for our own. I remember taking the phone out on their tiny, ramshackle balcony and telling the lie: “Yes, I’m working on a novel.”
“Great,” he said. “When you have fifty pages send it to me.”
Then began a time of working as a secretary and trying to make good on my lie. It probably helped that I was a bit of a goody two shoes, a bit of a teacher’s pet. Having promised this agent a novel, I had no choice but to produce one. Fast forward three years (skipping lots of angst, insecurity, and ordering other people’s lunch) and the agent sold the novel to Viking.
Those are the facts of how I first came to publish a novel, but what I’ve been thinking about lately is the less quantifiable part of the story: How was I able to write it, not really having the slightest idea what I was doing? How many unfinished books, after all, are hidden in people’s drawers? How many brilliant writers find the novel an impossible, unwieldy form? So how did I manage, in my early twenties, to stumble on a story I could tell all the way through? After that first book, while I gained the confidence that finishing was possible, I’ve never found the writing any easier, and in fact my second book was far, far harder to write, an agonizing process I hope never to repeat. So here’s the secret, as I see it, gleaned from my own experience and from working with students trying to write novels of their own: You have to know what the book is about.
Sounds dumb, I know. Sounds obvious. But it’s amazing how often a writer produces three hundred pages without being able to answer that question. I’ve done it myself (see above about second book). It’s easy to distract yourself from the fact that you don’t know what the book is about: you have some complicated characters, you have a vividly rendered setting, things are happening, your sentences are good. But you don’t know why you’re writing it, besides to write it. You don’t know what passions you’re communicating, what emotional or psychological depths you’re plumbing, what you really want to say.
I think, in this way, too, I lucked out with my first novel. I didn’t know how to write a novel, but I always knew what that one was about—a young woman obsessed with the murder of another. No matter how far I strayed from that in the writing, I always had it to come back to when I got stuck. And in that way I managed to reach the end. – Leah
