Follow Up on the College Post

Note: Read this first.

I’m beginning to suspect that there is a new “get into college” book out advising teenagers that one way to stand out on their applications is to publish a book. I can’t imagine what else it is, because I’ve gotten a bunch of emails to this effect in the past few weeks. And I guess it’s not too surprising. I remember one piece of advice I read in one of those books, way back in the mid-nineties when I was applying to college, was to learn to play an unusual instrument, like the hammered dulcimer or the mandolin or the accordion, on the off chance some college admissions committee person would go, “wow, we really need a hammered dulcimer player in the freshman class, how many of those applied?”

Another theory is the “noble cause” theory. Most authors get letters from aspiring writers looking for advice. YA and kidlit authors, because that is their market, get letters from child and teen aspiring writers. There have been lots of articles out recently about how authors are inundated with such requests. Perhaps this whole, “I need to get published now to get into college” thing is an attempt by the aspiring writer to explain why their situation is more urgent and desperate and important than all the other aspiring writers’. I’m not like every other writer who needs all the answers so I can be published nownownow. I’m different. I need to be published nownownow or I won’t get into college.”

Thing the First: I Do Understand.

I know exactly how you feel. Every single day that I wasn’t published, I wanted to be published. I would look at the people who were published, and I would wonder why it wasn’t me. (For many years, it was because I didn’t have a manuscript, for the four years after that, it was because I didn’t have the right book at the right time in the right place.) It’s really, really hard to be patient. I know I don’t have the personality for it. The 27 months I had to wait between selling Rampant and seeing it on the shelves? Y’all, it almost killed me. Especially the last six.

But, looking back at it, I’m glad things happened the way they did. I’m glad I didn’t sell some of those earlier manuscripts, and that they can lie there under my bed on my hard drive, secreted away from the rest of the world. It was really really hard and every day I wanted to sell and every manuscript I wrote I wanted it to be my first sale… but as it turns out, there were more important things at stake.

There are a lot of people who sold back then, during those four years I was trying desperately to sell a book — who aren’t selling books anymore. There are people I know who sold books in bad deals where there book was put out with no support whatsoever and they haven’t been able to sell another book since. They are in a worse position than people with no books out, because they have the bad sales of that last book haunting them. It’s harder for them to sell something new than if they were just starting out, unpublished. The day I sold my first book, my agent called me up and asked me what I wanted out of my career. I said I wanted to write and sell books for a living for the next forty years. I’m in this for the long haul and every sale of every book I make I’m thinking about that goal. The same goal — to make this my career. To do this on a steady schedule and with an eye for growth, like any other business.

You only get one debut. Better make it the best that you can. I’ve talked to a lot of writer friends about this, and they all agree that they’d rather wait more years and come out with a really stunning debut that makes the world sit up and take notice rather than get whatever published, indifferently, and disappear into the morass of books that don’t even make a blip on the radar. It’s really hard to claw your way out of that. Which brings me to

Thing the Second: Getting Published is Not a Publicity Stunt

One does not “get published” as a way to “get into college,” and the more I hear this option being bandied about as a viable, and indeed, desirable path of action, the more I’m reminded of people who “get caught on a sex tape” as a way to “get famous.” Perhaps the association exists in my mind because the one person I ever heard of who chose to “get published” in order to “get into college” (as I talked about in my last post) was Kaavya Viswanathan, and she ended up with an enormous and horrific scandal on her hands. Probably more of a scandal than a sex tape.

Getting published is the start of a career. It’s MY career, And if you want it to be your career, too, you should take it seriously.

Thing the Third: Why “I Need to Get Published So People Know I’m Serious About My Writing” is Wrong

Alongside the “I need to get published now so I can get into college” emails are ones that are similarly phrased. These aspiring writers still feel they need to get published to up their college admission chances. However, they feel that, rather than a straight up publicity stunt, that they won’t be able to convince colleges that they are serious about wanting to be a writer unless they have something published.

No. Those are two different elements. One is something you control; the other is controlled by some people in an office building in New York City. One is the amount of effort you put into something, another is the level of success you have achieved. I am not as successful as other writers in my industry, some who have been working in this field for way longer than I have, and some who haven’t. Does that make me a less serious writer than they are? Nope.

And, as I mentioned in my other post, I was every bit as serious about writing before I was published as I’ve been in the four years since. That’s why I describe it that way: “I wrote seriously for four years before I got published.” I set aside time every day for writing, I sacrificed other things in my life for the sake of writing, and I pursued it in a serious. professional manner. I treated it like a second job, an apprenticeship, or, probably most accurately, as a course of graduate/professional study. I told members of my family who worried I’d never “get there” that it was like spending a few years in grad school. A career as a writer does not happen overnight.

And during all this time, all these years of laboring away on manuscript after manuscript, using nights and weekends and work lunches and commutes and vacation time to work and attend writing conferences, I was incredibly serious about my writing. I kept excellent records of where all that time and money and energy was going (partially because the IRS may have wanted to see it). There was no doubt that I was serious about it, and people in my life either recognized that fact or I wised them up to it super quick.

And I had a lot of writer friends back then, because I was so serious about my writing. Very few of them were already published. But you know what? They were all just as serious about their writing as I was about mine. Published or not, I found myself making close friends with other writers who were serious about their writing. And you know what else? Most of my fellow unpublished friends are now published, because they were serious about it. These people include: Jana DeLeon, Colleen Gleason, Wendy Roberts, C.L. Wilson, Marianne Mancusi, Elissa Wilds, and Marley Gibson. I have other friends, like Carrie Ryan and  Erica Ridley (whose first book is coming out in a few months) who I met when they were unpublished, too, and I expect to see other friends of mine who are unpublished breaking through any day now. And I look back on those days, when we were all struggling so hard, reaching out for that brass ring, getting rejection after rejection and writing new manuscript after new manuscript, and I think it’s amazing. If I’d decided that those other unpublished people weren’t serious about their writing because they weren’t published, I would have missed out on some of the most valuable pieces of friendship and advice I’ve ever gotten.

Were there some people who weren’t taking us seriously because we were unpublished? Sure. Those people were wrong. Here’s how not to be serious about your writing: be so intent on publishing anything, now, so long as you’re “published” that you sell a book that’s not ready to a publisher that’s not right in a deal that doesn’t have the best interests of either the book or your career at heart.

Thing the Fourth: None of this Means I Think You Shouldn’t Try

By all means, keep writing (or not) as a teen and try to get it published (or not). If that’s what you want to do, then absolutely, you should do it. And as doing it takes an enormous amount of time and dedication, it is also by all means something you should let the colleges you’re applying to know that you are doing. (I talk more about this is the first college post.) And if you do get published in high school, fantastic! Congratulations! You are a very hard working, very talented, very dedicated young professional writer.

But please, don’t go about this as a college stunt. You are not trying to get published to get into college. You are not trying to get published to prove you are serious about writing. You are trying to get published because you want to share your stories with the world and/or you are really not good at any kind of stable career such as dermatology or accounting or horse-shoeing. At least, that’s why I am doing it. I have a sneaking suspicion farriers (horse-shoers) make more money than me. I know dermatologists do.

And if you are a teenage aspiring writer (as I was) and you don’t have any interest in seeking publication at this time (as I didn’t), don’t sweat it. Maybe you’re really busy with your volleyball team practices, or being on your prom committee and student council, or building the sets for your church’s yearly Christmas Pageant, or editing your school newspaper, or becoming an eagle scout, or working an after school job so you can afford to go to college in the first place. Colleges really, really, really like this stuff too.

And, because it must be said, you can still be a writer when you grow up. You can still be a writer when you grow up even if you never write a book in high school or college or whether you never go to college or all, or whether you never put a pen to a piece of paper until you’re fifty years old. There is no law against it, I swear.