And Why You Don’t Need to Write Everyday To Be a “Real” Writer

In January of 2013, I signed a deal for my first book with G.P. Putnam's Sons, a hardcover division of Penguin Random House, one of the so-called “Big Five” publishing houses. The book is a memoir covering, in part, a time in my life when paradoxically I wasn’t writing at all.

It’s titled The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self and Home on the Far Side of the World, and at heart it’s a story of multicultural love, marriage, and mix-ups between a liberal, independent Bostonian and a traditional Japanese salaryman (aka the shogun, aka my husband). It will be released this summer, on June 30, 2015 (give me a minute and I’ll tell you the seconds between now and then…), and for the next six months I’ll be posting here about the pathway to publication for this most unexpected book deal.

My contract was actually to write a memoir that ended with abandoning my quest to have a baby with the shogun when I turned forty-five, after five years of trying to conceive. I signed the contract, turned forty-five, and six months later, found out I was pregnant. This past February, I gave birth to a healthy, miracle baby at age forty-six and a half, and I handed in my full manuscript to my editor at Putnam—with a new ending.

Now my countdown to publication will be accompanied by endless diaper changes, late-night feedings, and new bifocals for my forty-seven-year old eyes while I navigate my way to my book launch as a first-time parent of a baby girl whom I love ferociously, feel ridiculously lucky to have in my life, but who apparently hasn’t learned to phrase “sleeping through the night” in either English or Japanese.

Here’s Why You Should Stop Feeling Guilty for Not Writing Every Day

I know I got crazy-lucky with my book deal and that there are hundreds (thousands) of writers as talented as (and more talented than) me who just didn't happen to be at the same right place at the same right time. So I don’t mean to suggest that my story reflects the average “path to publication.” But it does show that, even in today’s tough publishing climate, people do get lucky and do get deals when they least expect them.

So in the rest of this first post, I want to suggest that the story of my book deal can be read as an argument against writers’ remorse. My hope is that, if you’re like me and you don’t manage to follow the First Commandment of “You Must Write Every Day To Be a Real Writer,” you stop feeling guilty about it.

In its entirety, my path to publication actually began when I hadn’t written a word creatively for almost a year. I was forty-four years old, living in Osaka with the shogun, and worn bare from years of IVF in Japan (where I barely speak the language) and two miscarriages. I felt awful about not writing, like I was going to go through my early- to mid-forties with nothing to show but a bunch of failures and heartbreaks, and no career or creative advancement at all. But writing was just too hard: to try to create meaningful scenes and sentences amidst the vacuum of not-knowing-if-anyone-would-read-it while dealing with the pain of four years of not-knowing-if-I-would-ever-get-knocked-up.

Then one night, I saw something on the New York Times Motherlode blog about adoption after IVF, and it gave me an idea for a pitch about why my husband and I had decided, after much soul-searching, not to adopt, despite my failure to maintain a pregnancy.

So I sat down and tried to start a brief pitch, and the whole thing just came rolling out of me. I sent it the pitch that night, and Motherlode’s editor accepted it. A few weeks later the post was up, and the next day, an editor from Putnam read it and then contacted me, inviting me to submit a memoir proposal.

Of course, I was convinced she had dialed the wrong number.

I don’t know how interested any of you will be in the steps between when the editor contacted me, when she convinced me she really was calling me, and when I got the actual contract signed, so I won’t detail them exhaustively here. (Especially because they are detailed somewhat exhaustively here; I’ll be discussing some of them more fully in future posts.) But once I had some sense that at least a few people might be interested in what I had to say, it became easier to write.

Anyway, I belabor this point a bit because I frequently hear that what makes a someone a real writer is that they just write, no matter what: they just keep going. And that just hasn’t always worked for me. Maybe I’m not a real writer; maybe I’m just someone with something to say who managed to interest an editor at Putnam and hopefully will interest a few more readers. But either way, I’d like to reassure people that sometimes (or at least this time), it’s not only the people who manage to write faithfully every day who get a book deal. For me, they key was to never give up completely, but to recognize that sometimes things move or succeed when you least expect them to—and go nowhere when you most feel like they should be moving.

In any case, I’d be honored if you’d continue to join me on this experience full of paradox and crazy-good luck, as I learn about what happens when you publish a book with a “Big Five” publisher—and hopefully get to take you along for a peek into the process. Throughout, I’d love to hear your questions, comments, and your own stories about the paradoxes of writing and your own pathway to publication. Also, I’d love to hear if you have topics you’d like me to write about in these posts.

Thanks so much for reading!

Tracy

Tracy Slater is an American writer based in Japan. Her memoir The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self, and Home on the Far Side of the World has been named a Summer 2015 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection and is forthcoming from Penguin Random House’s Putnam imprint in June. Her blog is http://thegoodshufu.wordpress.com, she is on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/TheWriterTracySlater, and she is grateful to be part of the She Writes community.