Пересказ: The First Door That Opened

The First Door That Opened

Источник: https://barbaraoneal.substack.com/p/the-first-door-that-opened

It’s the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, cloudy and dark. As I stirred blueberries into my oatmeal this morning, I remembered it’s the anniversary of my first book sale.

I’d pretty much despaired of ever selling my work. Despite trying everything I could imagine to get a toehold in some door, anywhere, I had not sold a single thing in the 4.5 years I’d been earnestly trying to find my place, my voice… something. In six more months, I would have to get a “real” job — most likely in newspapers, where I’d earned a degree and even interned successfully.

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But I desperately wanted to write fiction. Specifically novels, for no other reason than that I loved (and love) them madly. Being a bookworm doesn’t always turn into being a writer, but in my case, it felt like the most magical possible life. And I wanted it with a fire unmatched in any other part of my world. As a working-class kid, I’d learned to be wary of wanting too much, but there seemed no end to the ferocity of my desire to be a working novelist.

That blustery, cold pre-Thanksgiving Tuesday, I was coming down with the flu my little boys had given me. My dad fetched me because we didn’t have a phone, and an editor had called his number and wanted to talk to me. She bought my first book, a romance novel called Strangers on a Train.

My joy was unequaled. I felt like Cinderella — though of course it had been four hard years of learning markets and honing craft, not a glass slipper and a prince who had delivered the sale.

Someone said to me, “Well, at least now you know you’ve done it, sold a book.” As if it were the only time. As if this was the threshold, and now I could get on with living a life like other people.

I couldn’t think of anything worse. I imagined myself old, with that single published novel to my credit, and my determination to live a life as a novelist intensified a thousandfold. I set a goal to sell a new book before the current one was even published, a goal I held for a dozen years.

Of course I also wanted to learn — to be better, to find my deepest voice and my readers — but some part of me knew that would come if I just kept writing day in, day out. If I kept exploring the ideas and times and places and people that called to me.

All these years later, I’ve written more novels than I can truly count. It’s somewhere above fifty: a lot of romances, then the big historicals, and for the past twenty years, the mainstream book-club fiction I’ve been writing and loving.

In the modern world, gatekeeping is far less intense than it was back then, and I think that’s a great thing. The basics are the same — work hard on your craft, understand your place in the market and who your reader is, and keep writing, keep writing, keep writing.

Today, I look back at that young woman who so desperately wanted this very life I’m living — writing novels, traveling the world, talking with all of you — and I whisper back through time, You’ve got this, baby. Keep going.

What I’m walking with this week — How to let my body tell me when to rest — Collage papers for possible art postcards for A Thousand Painted Hours — Having a Thanksgiving that looks different but still offers gratitude back to the universe

What are you walking with?

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