You Can't Tell Anything

I’ve been seeing ads for a writing conference I went to one year ago, with some fairly disastrous emotional results. I had planned to take several days off work to attend the entire conference, but after one day, I was so emotionally upset by my sense that I was doing “everything wrong” and my conclusion that I was “never going to be published again,” that I deleted my time off and went back to work instead of going to any of the other days of the conference. This is not about the conference, which is well run, nor is it about the classes or the teachers of those classes, who were diligent about giving the information they know and have had success with in publishing their own works. This was about me.

Three months after this conference, I ended up selling a three-book deal to a new publisher, through an agent I got after the end of the conference. These three books were books I had mostly already written at the time of the conference. I liked these books. I even thought they were the best books I’d ever written. I was also discouraged by life events (the divorce, mostly) and by the sense that my financial future was in jeopardy in a way that meant I was never going to be a full-time writer again. I felt out of place in a world that used to be familiar to me. I felt like the publishing world didn’t want me anymore and that the quality of my work had nothing to do with my ability to be published. I suspected that I’d had my “run” and now I was a has-been. I thought that it didn’t matter how brilliant my writing was—what mattered was if I was doing the “new thing.”

I am an experienced writer. I’ve published nearly twenty books with national publishers. I’ve won awards and gotten very good reviews. I’ve sold well enough that for a couple of years, I was living the “dream” of making enough through my writing to make a living at it. And none of that mattered to me in this moment. I had a panic attack when asked to write down a list of things I was going to do to achieve my goals. I had to stop listening, though I didn’t do anything as dramatic as run out of the room weeping. I had at least that much control of myself. I did all my crying afterward, on the drive home.

I tried to accept that what I’d done was good work, and that it might have to be enough. Sometimes you only get one chance, or maybe two chances, but not a third. And what I was trying to do was once again reinvent myself. I’d been successful at writing young adult fantasy romances for a decade and then for writing about Mormonism (in fiction and non-fiction) for close to another decade. Now I was trying to write about autism from the inside, from my own experience as a “high-functioning” autistic woman who wasn’t diagnosed until later in life. I excel at some things, and am very slow and resistant in understanding other things. I want so much to be able to write in a way that makes people see autistic women as themselves, as autistic, but also as completely human and very sympathetic. But maybe I was too old to do it. Maybe I wasn’t autistic enough. Maybe I had just run out of chances and people who believed in me.

My point in all of this is only one thing: if you are a creative person, you need to be aware that you are the last person who can judge whether what you are doing is good or bad. Sometimes friends ask me how I can have confidence to keep working on a project for months or even years without a contract or any other evidence that it is worthwhile. And my answer is pretty simple: I don’t. I have no idea whether this project is a good one, at least in terms of whether or not it will sell and other people will read it. That isn’t how I judge my projects. I work on projects because I enjoy them, because I value them, and because I believe that they deserve to exist in the world. Plenty of times, I realize later that they weren’t as good as I thought they were. Or I abandon them midway through because I lose faith or because I can’t figure out how to make them live up to my imagination. But if I were to try to second-guess if this project or that one is “worth my time,” I would never write anything at all. I would spend all my energy telling myself it isn’t good enough.

It’s not for me to decide that. I understand this on a deep level, which is why I keep writing even though I have panic attacks at writing conferences where I was once an celebrated and sought-after speaker and where I no longer fit in because my life has gone upside down. I keep writing because it has never really been about “success” in any external sense. It is just about me enjoying fiddling with words and creating things that only I know how to create. That’s it. That’s all. It’s very simple and incredibly complicated at the same time.