I bought a book called The Weekend Book Proposal: How to Write a Winning Proposal in 48 Hours and Sell Your Book, by Ryan Van Cleave. I’ve met Ryan. He’s awesome. Thank you, Ryan! For all you do!
So I gave myself 48 hours, and I’ve just finished my first book proposal…nine months later. Yay!
I feel okay about the discrepancy. Honestly. I needed time to let my ideas range before I narrowed my focus. I needed time to check in with experts—friends and people in publishing. Soon I will test it out, send the proposal out…but not yet, not yet, not yet…I’ll let it rest for a few days.
(Perhaps it isn’t finished?)
I wrote each of my first three books before attempting to sell them. I had a different relationship to writing, at that time. Not better or worse, only different. I was a new writer, then a grad student, then a college professor and a mother. The evolving question is this: How do we best speak to this time and place, from this time and place?
In the process of writing a proposal, I learned so much about my own content, ideas and the process itself. I may write two more proposals—perhaps faster, this round.
I’ve never been a fast writer, though I always aim to pick up speed. I spent ten years on my first novel, Clown Girl, because I was learning tremendously about the novel as a form. I’d read many, never written one. I spent seven years on The Stud Book, while teaching and taking care of an infant who then became a toddler who then became a child going to school…My third book, a collection of linked stories, The Folly of Loving Life, is drawn out of most of twenty years of work, writing and revising, but those twenty years overlap with the years of writing the novels. In between, I’ve written essays, often in a weekend or over weeks.
I’ve come to view writing years, or writing hours, as expansive. A day in the interior world of creating the work is larger than any hours in an external day, the cycles of the planets, the sun. A month is smaller. A year is nothing. It’s all a river. I carry plans and inspiration along with me for ages. I come back to projects and circle ‘round. I break up material and move the pieces. Of course there is always the usual race against capitalism’s threats—housing, healthcare, income, a child’s college fund…no joke, the constructs of this existence. Whew!—but as a writer, I hold on to my own space for ideas, and my own very slow time-space continuum, existing in that place of stories, dreams, memories and emotions. It’s not easy, but I believe that interior world, that river of time, is where the riches of our humanity fully unfold.
I hope you’re doing well. For me, for the day, my big plan is a moment of resting. Walking. Visiting. I’ve finished a project—for now. For the moment.
I’m hopeful. It’s a good space.
Thank you for being here!
Cheers,
M