1I have been working very hard on a book proposal, which, if you’re keep track at home, means I am writing one book while proposing another. This is one of those “it never rains but it pours” situations that I most certainly would never choose for myself. But here is what happened.
I have written two books, only one of which was published, the one you may already know about, with the absurdly apropos title that I promise we chose some time during the summer of 2015. (I know this because I was pacing around my rented flat in Paris at the time, talking on the phone to my editor and my co-writer, anxious to go to dinner, when I was like, “let’s just call it How to Survive the Apocalypse,” and then realized I had, for once in my life, come up with a good title for something.)
The other book I wrote was going to be called Orphaned Believers, and it was about the burgeoning religious sense in American pop culture, from movies like Silence to TV shows like The Americans, The Leftovers, Hannibal, and The Knick. I actually wrote the whole thing, or most of it, a few summers ago. It was going to be short, and it was going to challenge narratives about religion and pop culture. (I have read maybe two books on the topic that I found insightful.)
But the press that had bought it folded, and by then I realized that I just was burned out on the topic in more than article format, and I decided to let it go. Some of that book has been published in bits and pieces, and a chunk of the intro was repurposed into a talk I have given in various places, most notably as a keynote when I was a visiting fellow in Sydney in October 2017. But most of it is in a folder somewhere.
I don’t really like writing books; I am best at about 2,000 words, and I know this because one of my day jobs involves writing enormous numbers of articles that range from 500 to 5,000 words, and I like the 2,000 word length best. Also, I like to be able to scratch things off my to-do list, and writing a book is not like that, or at least it is not for me. There are some big milestones. You write a proposal. You revise and submit the proposal. You write drafts. You revise the drafts. And all that stuff.
But the thing about being a writer is that there isn’t much money in it if you don’t write a book (and there isn’t much if you do, either, but there’s a better chance of getting more stable gigs or speaking invitations or teaching opportunities or larger chunks of money if you wrote a book). And also, there are things that can only be tackled at book length, a fact I begrudgingly accept.
Also, I do not write by hand.
So, in the early summer of 2019, a book editor I know but hadn’t worked with directly emailed to say she was in town and could we have coffee, and I went, like a fool. (This story has a happy ending.) She asked if I had any books kicking around in my head, and I pitched the only one I’m always thinking about: A book of fun but pointed essays about weird Christian pop culture stuff from the 1980s and 90s. Nobody wants to publish this book, and I’m only half sure I want to write it, though whenever I mention it people want to read it, so maybe I’ll get to it eventually.
But as we were wrapping up, I mentioned that I love writing about food, and she got very excited and said to send her some ideas. I did, and she loved one in particular, and asked if I could outline a short book on it. I … tried. For a long time! But realized I didn’t really want to write that book.
Then I came up with a revised idea: That I wanted to write about feasts by throwing my own little literary dinner party, sort of a fusion of Judy Chicago’s 1974 art installation The Dinner Party and that old party question about what person, living or dead, you most would enjoy having dinner with. I made a list of my people and decided that was my book. She loved the idea, and after some refining and noodling around, the book sold in May, to Broadleaf, just a short one at 40,000 words. It’s due in May.
The same week that I sold that book, I got an email from an agent who had been reading my work for a while and wanted to know if we could chat. I’ve talked to agents before, most of whom seemed to have me pegged as a kind of writer I am not. (Christian devotional/inspirational content, or humorous writing — I am rarely funny in longform — or just lightweight kinds of things that I don’t really want to spend years writing.) But we Zoomed, because this is our world (and because she’s in San Francisco), and hit it off, and she mentioned a topic for a book she had been wanting to sell, and it was — truly, honestly — the most perfect topic for me imaginable.
I signed with her and started in on the proposal, but let me tell you something: Deeply researched books are hard to write! Even just to write the proposal. I am accustomed to and familiar with this, since I was a freelance writer for a decade, and I know how much work it takes just to pitch an article to an editor, which is a great reason to get out of freelance writing. But multiply that by about a billion and you get book proposals.
I turned in a proposal to my agent in late August, having taken a week here and there off work this summer to read furiously and write as fast as I can. A proposal consists of many things, like an overview of the book, and a pretty comprehensive outline, and two sample chapters, and other material. It takes time.
My agent sent back notes in late September (having sustained an injury that made typing hard for a couple of weeks!) and now I have been desperately trying to find time to revise it. In the meantime I’ve written about a quarter of the book due in May — it’s not too difficult to write, it just requires finding the time — and trying to do more research for the proposal.
That brings us to today, and to the Virginia Woolf allusion above. The reason it’s taken so long is that we spent all of Thanksgiving weekend painting a room in our apartment that’s been recently vacated by our roommate of 4 and a half years, who moved to Denver; now it’s our bedroom. Our old bedroom has been converted into my office, as of yesterday. I have a new table to work at, and some new bookshelves, and my older, smaller desk is being renovated into a place to podcast, since I seem to do a lot of that these days. It’s coming along.
And it turns out that Virginia Woolf was right. With no kids or pets, just the two of us, in this apartment, it’s not loud or distracting in any way. But just having a designated place to work, and a door to close, and the knowledge that when I walk away from this desk I am not going to be working on this any longer, is immensely helpful. I have gotten through about 70% of the edits I wanted to make today. The books I need are sitting to my left. I’m looking at a screen that’s twice as large as my laptop screen. It’s a huge change.
There is no moral to this story, except that writing books is hard and I don’t really recommend it but sometimes it might be worth it, and if you can find a small table in a little room to work at, it might make all the difference. Also, I hope you are interested in joining in the dinner party whenever that book gets published. And when the time is right to announce the next project, I promise you will hear about it.
Next week in this here premium edition of the newsletter I will start a few weeks of writing on culture at the end of a pandemic year. But in the meantime, I truly hope you are safe, warm, and well.