The first hundred pages just spilled out. They were a pleasure and a breeze, and to date that’s the last time writing anything has ever come so easily. One day I mentioned to my agent that I’d been working on something, just for fun, and he asked me to send it to him, which I did, with apologies. It was very rough, I told him. I hadn’t even proofread it for typos, I told him. But he read my scrappy pages and, without telling me, forwarded them to one of the best and best-known book agents at ICM and in the galaxy, Esther Newberg.
I’d only met Esther once, years before. Since then I’ve come to know her as an excellent dinner date and raconteur. Esther is smart, stylish, and a devoted Red Sox fan. But what I knew about her then was mostly that she hailed from the No Bullshit School of Agenting. (This should be an actual school—someone call Shark Tank!) Many agents have attended its sister campus, the Amazing Amazing School, a related but very different institution where even the three lines you had on that Friday night sitcom were so impressive they should earn you an Emmy. These agents are pleasant to deal with, but their comments require some translation on your part. Over time, you learn that “you’re amazing” means you’re just okay, “the ratings are great” means your show is getting cancelled, and “you look fantastic” means you’ve gained weight. I’ll write it all up for you in another helpful chart! No Bullshit is by far my favorite school.
My conversation with Esther went something like this:
ESTHER: I read your pages.
ME: Oh, wow, really? They’re not even—
ESTHER: I can get you a lot of money if I sell this book to certain people.
ME: Are you kidding? That’s great! I mean, I wasn’t even doing it for the—
ESTHER: But I don’t want to sell it to those people.
ME: Oh, no? Uh, okay.
ESTHER: Because you know what else these people would buy from you?
ME: No, I don’t—
ESTHER: Monkey doodles.
ME: Monkey…?
ESTHER: Yes. From you, they’d buy a book of monkey crayon doodles. They’d buy a cookbook covering just nuts. They’d buy the confessions of your split ends. And you know why?
ME: Um, no…
ESTHER: The Today show. [Hi, Tamryn!]
ME: The Today show? [Hi, Willie!]
ESTHER: The Today show. [Hi, Carson! Filling in again, Jenna?] You can get booked as a guest on the Today show. [Hi, Al!] You can get a spot on Ellen. Books are hard to sell, and you have these ways to promote a book, and that’s the main reason these certain people would buy your book. I don’t want to sell this book to those people.
ME (deflated): Oh, okay. Makes sense, I guess. Well, thanks anyway, I really appre—
ESTHER (mysteriously): But there are other people.
ME: Other…?
ESTHER: Well, there are three. Three other people.
ME: In all of publishing?
ESTHER: Three people—editors, I mean—whom I would trust with this. Three people who would only take it on because they believed in you and the book. But if one of them doesn’t take it, I think we should wait. Unless you want me to call the monkey doodle people…
ME: No, no. I wasn’t even—I was just sitting in my trailer one day and—
ESTHER: Well, then, we’ll see what the people say.
ME: Okay! Let me just clean up the pages first, and—
ESTHER: I already sent the pages to the people.
ME: You already—
ESTHER: I’ll let you know. (Click.)
Suddenly my solo trailer project had become a new way in which I’d potentially set myself up for more rejection. Suddenly I was waiting to see if I’d be accepted into another competitive world where people I’d never met would have opinions about my work. Why didn’t I pick up knitting? Why didn’t I take a sailing class instead? Pottery? Why was I torturing myself? I felt nervous and neurotic. Would I be accepted? Maybe we should call the monkey doodle people? After all, an entire cookbook of nut recipes wasn’t a terrible idea. And maybe my split ends would be healed if only they had the chance to speak out!
Writers: how therapists buy summer homes.
I don’t remember if all three editors were interested. (Two were. I think three? Let’s say they all were. Who can stop me? It’s my book—I’m drunk with power!) But the proposal letter sent by my current editor, Jennifer E. Smith, jumped out at me, and made her the clear choice.
Jen is a talented YA author. She’s from Chicago. She talks very fast. When Jen and I first met in person, I told her the story of writing my senior thesis as an English major in college. I confessed that I turned it in late after writing it directly in a word processor and correcting my typos and mistakes with Wite-Out. I just barely scraped by, deadline-wise. Jen—who was also an English major—laughed but looked slightly spooked by this information. She admitted to me that she was so well organized in college that she finished her senior thesis two weeks early, but she lied about it and pretended to still be working up to the deadline because she didn’t want her friends to feel bad or think she was too much of a geek.
She may have been concerned about my deadline issues, but I thought this made us the perfect match. Ever see a buddy movie where one guy is the ne’er-do-well loose cannon and the other guy is too? No? Exactly. What’s the fun of the ne’er-do-well loose cannon without the buttoned-up friend/brother/other cop who’s trying to ensure he stays within the law? I was the Eddie Murphy to her Nick Nolte! The Bruce Willis to her Sam Jackson! The Hooch to her Turner! Sorry—it seems I stopped going to the movies in 1989.
The good news was that I’d been paired with an ideal partner. The bad news was that the minute I sold the book and it became an assignment with a deadline and people counting on me, I sort of froze up. This resulted in writing sessions where I stared at the blank computer screen with my heart thumping and a metallic taste in my mouth—my new definition of the boots of time marching all over me. To cope, I went down Google rabbit holes involving outdoor patio furniture and artisanal Korean pepper sauces. I’d write three lines, erase four, and look up which fish sauce to use when making nuoc cham. (Red Boat 40°N, 50°N if you can find it. Nuoc cham is a Vietnamese dipping sauce that calls for sambal oelek, an Indonesian chili paste, but I also sometimes use the Korean chili paste gochujang, and I find if you chop the ginger very fine you can—NOW DO YOU SEE WHY MY BOOK TOOK SO LONG? Also, the best time to buy patio furniture on sale is at the end of the summer or early fall. Spring is when they get you!)
Jen has become a friend as well as an invaluable person in my work life. Sometimes she tells me I need to throw something out. Sometimes she tells me I need to dig deeper. But early on, the main challenge was simply getting me to fill up more pages. “Just give me something,” she’d say. “Don’t worry too much. If you hit a rough patch, skip over it. You can go back and make it perfect later, but first you need a draft. I can’t edit a blank page.” Eventually I learned that, in the beginning at least, it was better for me to be finished than to try to be perfect. I had to get out of my own way. It wasn’t that the voice in my head—the one telling me my pages weren’t good enough—went away, exactly. I just didn’t let it stop me. An important tool against self-doubt is just to ignore it. Forge ahead anyway. Just keep going, keep going, keep going.