No guest today. Just me, since it’s my paperback publication week for The Wednesday Daughters – a sequel of sorts to my New York Times and U.S.A. Today bestselling The Wednesday Sisters, a writing group novel. The Chicago Tribune, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and the San Jose Mercury News recommend it for summer reading. I hope you’ll have a look at it. – Meg
The history of my own writing starts with a brown paper lunch bag. My first writing teacher – at a college extension class – dumped its contents out over the table and told us to write for five minutes about anything that spilled out. She swore we wouldn’t have to read (just as the character of Linda does in The Wednesday Sisters when she’s pushing the sisters to write at the picnic table in the park). Then my teacher, Jennifer Allen, called on me to read first.
Which is the good news. If she hadn’t, I’d have ducked out before she could. It had taken all the nerve I had just to get to that class, to admit that, yes, I dreamed of writing novels.
To make a long story short from that point, I’m just going to say it: Ten Years. That’s how long it took me from dumped bag to first novel on bookstore shelves. The thing that kept me going: writing friends. Like the Wednesday Sisters in that second novel, none of my early writing friends was published when we started out, but we now count eight published books between the four of us, and a ninth under contract. We’re a stubborn bunch—which, if you’ve read any of the guest posts I’ve been honored to host on 1st Books, seems to be what it takes.
It took me another five years (and a new agent) to get a second novel published after my first, The Language of Light, sold “modestly” despite having been a finalist for the Bellwether Prize (now the PEN/Bellwether). In the interim, I learned the hard way that while just being published is lovely, book sales are important, too. I’ve come to see that booksellers are the front line in helping new voices find audiences, and I do my best to support the booksellers who support writers. Selling books is as much a labor of love as writing is.
And so is publishing. I know the publishing world can seem impersonal. Believe me, I know what a form rejection looks like. But I also know that most people in publishing stay there because they love books, and work really, really hard.
Which leaves me with readers.
C.S. Lewis once said, “We read to know that we are not alone.” It’s a funny thing to think that a solo activity connects us in ways that little else does. But I know reading has made me feel understood, and helped me understand myself in ways that nothing else does. Writing even more so. I hope that my writing will make you feel understood, too. And I appreciate all the precious time you commit to reading. Without readers, there would be no books. – Meg
