How Did You Get Into Writing And Getting Published?

how did you get into writing and getting published?

I’ve always loved writing.  I wrote poetry and stories all the time when I was a kid.  I have piles and piles of notebooks at my house full of decades’ worth of everything from fanfic smut (decades before I had the internet and knew that “fanfic smut” was a thing) to terrible poetry to novels in progress.  I didn’t know that being a writer was a real job people could have, I just liked to write and make up stories. 

I went to college to study theatre because I thought I wanted to be an actor (as it turns out, I VERY MUCH did not).  My school didn’t offer playwriting on the regular, but we had a visiting professor for a year who was a playwright and I took his class, and he was the first person who said to me, “You know, if you wanted to do this, this is something you could do.”  I wrote my first play for his class (reblogginhood was in it!) and kept writing after that. 

Then at some point in my twenties, I don’t really know why, I stopped writing.  I think I hit a point where I had kind of decided, “okay, this isn’t practical, this isn’t a real career, I need to figure out how the fuck I’m going to pay my electric bill, I need to give up this dream and go, like, be a regular human.”  So I did that for awhile.  I got into the world of arts management and worked for a bunch of different theatre companies doing marketing and fundraising and things like that.  And it was fine, I was good at it, I met a lot of people in the theatre world and all my friends were cool artists and it was great, but then it made me really sad because there was a part of me that felt like they were living this great exciting life I wasn’t living because I had stopped trying to even have that. 

Then a friend of mine asked me to help her write grants for this new project she was starting, which was a citywide new play festival that anyone could be in.  You didn’t have to be fancy or famous, you didn’t have to even be any good.  You just had to write a play, and show up.  So I signed up and I paid my fee and for seven years in a row, every year I wrote a new play for the festival.  I just kept writing and writing and writing and writing.  It was a huge amount of hard work.  I lost money on every show because I was paying actors out of my own pocket and printing playbills at Kinkos.  I borrowed coffee shops and warehouses from friends, anywhere I could perform for free.  I directed the shows myself if I couldn’t afford a director.  I ran sound off my iPod.  I tore my own tickets at the door.  I was working two jobs, around 60-hour weeks, and then writing until like 2 in the morning because that was the time that I had.  And then slowly, I got better.  My crappy amateur plays, where I was trying to copy the voices of other, better writers improved because I started to figure out what I really cared about and what I really wanted to say.  I applied for tons and tons and tons of awards and grants and fellowships and residencies.  I won a couple of them (maybe one out of every 50 things I applied for) and that helped get other people to take me seriously, but the most important thing was that I just kept writing and writing.  I had a new play in the festival every year, so slowly people started to know who I was and recognize my name.  Not zillions of people, but handfuls at a time.  The first show had like 30 people in the audience each night; I worked my way up to being able to fill a 200-seat venue.  Then I got asked to join a company of local playwrights who produce one show a year by one of their member writers; they had watched me busting my ass over the past seven or eight years and knew that I was a hard worker and had been watching my work get better and then finally one day they asked me to join and offered me a full production of one of my plays.  (That’s happening next month.) 

In between writing plays, I wanted to challenge myself, so I tried a few times to do National Novel Writing Month.  I never finished, but I had a few chapters of a time travel science fiction story about Watergate that I was noodling around with that I really liked, and from time to time I would pick it up and play with it some more in between theatre projects.  Then one day my brother, who is an L.A. film editor, called me to tell me that a company he worked with was branching out from film into publishing and was looking for science fiction novels.  I didn’t have a novel, I had like four chapters and some shrapnel, and was reluctant to show it to anyone, but my brother sent it off to his friend anyway, and they called me three days later to tell me they wanted to publish it and would pay me an advance to finish it.  (It’s coming out this summer.)

There are an infinite number of different directions a writing career can go, and no one writer’s path to success is necessarily replicable by any other writer.  I’m fully aware that my story of how I got a novel published is a weird one with a strange combination of luck and coincidence and circumstance and privilege and a million other forces I can’t control which resulted in my unfinished novel landing on the desk of someone looking for just such an unfinished novel.  But the important part is everything that happened before that, all the years of staying up until three in the morning or skipping happy hours with friends because I had to write, all the years of staged readings of mediocre plays where I was paying actors in pizza and hugs because I had no money, and even all the years of working demanding and tedious marketing and fundraising jobs for theatre companies, because that was how I became a writer.  There’s how to become a writer, and then there’s getting a book published.  Honestly I still cannot tell anyone how to get a book published.  “Have a brother who knows someone starting a publishing company” isn’t a career plan.  But I can tell you how to be a writer.  You just have to write.