You always remember your first
Or your second. Or so I hear. As yet 100 percent unpublished in the field of literature, or whatever, I went searching for a little inspiration in the form of others’ suffering. Here’s a quick look at the slow starts of four famous authors, some of whom I have to assume are also relatively rich.
Salman Rushdie
It is fair to say Rushdie’s first published novel, Grimus, bombed. (One critic described it as “ramshackle” and “copiously encrusted” with allusion.) As Rushdie told Dan Webster in a 2005 interview, he’s proud of the fact that he kept trying. He also suggested that, looking back, such a career move seems a little nuts.
You know, my writing career did not begin easily. I graduated from college in 1968. The first time I really had any success as a writer was Midnight’s Children, which was in 1981. So there was like 12½ years of paying my dues. Some writers are lucky that they get there right away with their first book, like Joe Heller with Catch-22 or whatever. But one of the things that I found was essential to the business of becoming a writer was to have that determination and perseverance to keep trying in the face of failure and without any guarantee of success. And if I look back at my young self, battling away for a dozen years, I’m very proud of that. And I’m not sure now, if somebody asked me would I start work in some field where it would take you 12½ years without any guarantee at the end of it that you would be any good at it, I mean I would not do that.”
Dorothy Allison
Allison graduated from college in 1971 and worked as a substitute teacher, maid and Social Security Administration clerk, while volunteering at a feminist magazine and rape crisis center. She spent nights writing the basis of her later works on yellow legal pads, according to Janet Z. Marsh in Twenty-First-Century American Novelists: Second Series.
Allison’s first poem, “Demon Lover,” was published in 1979 in the fiction and poetry supplement to Off Our Backs (a feminist newsjournal that ceased publication in 2008).
Her first novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, was published 13 years later. It was a finalist for the National Book Award. Allison went on to found the Independent Spirit Award, a prize for people who work with small publishers and independent bookstores, with the goal of supporting new writers.
Richard Russo
In a 2002 interview with Robert Birnbaum of Identity Theory, Russo compared winning the Pulitzer Prize to the publication of his first story.
… I remember when my first story was accepted. Back in graduate school and all of us – all of my friends – we were all trying to get published, all trying to get that first story published. My first story was published in a magazine with a circulation of about 300 and I was paid in contributor’s copies. Six or seven of them, not as many copies as I had family members to give them to. But I couldn’t afford more than that and that was payment. I can remember bouncing off the walls when that happened. Because it was the first real validation that I had somebody else saying, ‘You’re a writer.’ Somebody else giving me permission to go on and write another story. I fed off that publication for a couple of years. I had a couple of other really small successes but that first one was astonishing. … When someone says, ‘God, the Pulitzer, that must have been the greatest thing?’ it was pretty wonderful but in its own way, no more wonderful that first story with a circulation of 300.”
Alice Munro
Munro published her first short story, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” as a college student in 1950. The “about the author” material in Folio magazine, possibly written by Munro:
Eighteen-year-old freshette, whose story in this issue is her first published material. Graduate of Wingham High School. Overly modest about her talents, but hopes to write the Great Canadian Novel some day. Has read little modern writing, has travelled scarcely at all, and belongs to no particular literary movement. Plans to major in Honours English, with emphasis on creative writing.”
But Munro soon left school, married and had five children. Her first book of short stories, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” was published 18 years after that first story. That issue of Folio magazine is available for $750.
I feel better now.
This is great. It took Mary Gaitskill about ten years to find a publisher and no magazines would take any of the stories in her first collection Bad Behavior. She was asked in one interview if she did anything to keep her confidence up during that time and she said, “No. I don’t know what I could’ve done. I worked regardless of my confidence level.”
That’s great, what she said, and such doggedness probably requires a high level of maturity and perspective.
This post made me happy. Thanks, Adrian.
I read an interview with Alice Munro recently where she said that for years, her only writing time was when her kids took their naps. There’s something I really love about that (perhaps in part because i’ve done the same recently, though no Alice-Munro-nap-magic has rubbed off on the work).
It makes it clear that if you want to do this work, you have to cram it into your life, and stick with it for a long, long time. like that recent post about Michael Kimball writing a page a day, or whatever, on the subway. That guy is my hero.