I’ve had that thought about a couple books I wrote, so when I saw a Salon.com article with that title, I had to click. And that’s when I got to know Corinne Purtill’s experience with writing a book. And I got to empathize with her.
The gist: Woman quits day job to write book. Book doesn’t go so well.
Some great excerpts:
Many well-meaning people have asked me, “How’s the book?” This once-innocuous question falls upon my ears today like “How’s your chlamydia?” or “What happened to those lewd conduct charges against you?” The short answer is that I did write a book, I couldn’t get it published, and these days I am much more familiar with failure than talk-show green rooms.
I came back to New York and set about writing, a thing I believed I loved to do. I was wrong. I liked having written things. Writing them was the worst. I wrote and wrote, and could not believe there was so much still to write. I read and reread drafts until I was no longer sure they were in English. I cut pages of useless and boring exposition that amounted to days of work. I was at one point concerned that I had not given enough detail to the process of cashew farming. You don’t need to know what the book was about to know that this is a bad sign. No one, ever, since Gutenberg, has closed a book and wished they’d learned more about cashew farming.
Finally I finished it and sent it to my agent. Over the next 24 hours I refreshed my email every 10 minutes in the hopes that her breathless, joyful reply would surface. After a few weeks of silence I no longer believed that the book was so good she just needed time to compose herself before writing back. The email mercifully euthanizing our contract eventually came.
The book now lives as the biggest file in my Word documents. Eventually I will do something with it, even if it’s just printing copies myself and hiring an off-duty Jehovah’s Witness to distribute them in the park for free.
This was the first significant thing I’ve done professionally that flat-out failed. There have been other undertakings that didn’t go as well as I hoped, but with time and distance I can make them sound like less than the fiascoes they were. There’s no massaging this one. I said that I wanted to write a book, and I did, but it was only once no one wanted to publish it that I realized that what I really wanted was to be a published author, and that I most assuredly am not.
My relationship with writing today is neither glamorous nor exciting. We will not get each other into fancy places; we will not make anyone rich. We have fallen instead into a pattern much closer to the comfortable grooves of love: two homebodies shuffling around the same desk, battling frustration and disappointment, witnessing failure and choosing, against all odds, to stay.