Celebrate Your Successes!
Celebrating the night I got an offer of rep with a bottle of champagne and three pastas for myself. And yes, that is my parking ticket. Ya win some, ya lose some.
Success is not the final result, it is every step along the way.
So you want to be a writer. Maybe you dream of writing the #1 New York Times Bestseller, of Idris Elba starring as your lead in the HBO series (so you can fall madly in love), of winning the National Book Award. If you get there, I hope you swim in a pool of champagne and dance with a hundred puppies. But chances are—and I hate to say it—you won’t, because almost nobody does, and that’s okay. There’s so much else to be proud of, and you owe it to yourself to celebrate.
I was always shy—bordering on ashamed—of my desire to write. Blame my Catholic school, which only allowed students to dress out of uniform on career day as a doctor or a lawyer. “What if I wanted to be a starving artist?” I asked a teacher. I don’t remember her answer, but I think it sounded a lot like ‘Saturday detention.’ Because I buried my dreams for so many years, people only knew a non-creative version of me. I was in law school. I studied hard. I argued about Torts. I told my colleagues I wanted to work for the US Attorney and become a law firm partner. So for me, taking that first step toward owning what I really wanted was terrifying and huge. Even my own husband was surprised when I told him I had signed up for a creative writing class. No, I haven’t been hit over the head, I’m not having a crisis, and this isn’t out of the blue, I felt like screaming, this has always been me! THE REAL ME! Admitting to yourself that you want to write, and eventually telling other people, is a therapeutic breakthrough. I did not celebrate this first step, but I wish I had.
The next major hurdle that deserves a bottle of champagne for one is finishing that shitty first draft. No one says it better than Anne Lamott:
“The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, ‘Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?, you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you're supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go -- but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.”
I remember distinctly the moment I finished my first draft. It was October 2019. I was sitting on a couch in a house in Williams, Arizona, where I’d gone for four days by myself to write. I was working on a scene in what I expected to be the last chapter, but I wasn’t sure how the story would end. I typed a line that said, Her friends didn’t need her as much as she needed them, and my head exploded. That was it. I finished! I opened a bottle of wine and called my dearest friend, favorite person, and beautiful writer Crystal Hana Kim. If you ever need someone to cheer you on, call Crystal. She made me feel like I had truly accomplished something miraculous, and I’m so grateful. That night, I drank wine and didn’t worry about how much work remained on the second, third, fourth, fifth, and infinite drafts. It didn’t even matter when I trashed the last three chapters and wrote a new ending because I’d celebrated that blissful moment of completeness.
So began rewrites. For me, these are two-month stretches of intense focus where I open a blank document beside my prior draft and retype every single word, with some new, some deleted. I forget to brush my teeth, don’t change out of my pajamas, drink too much coffee, and stay inside all weekend. I pay my husband, family, and job little attention. Rewrites require humility, acceptance of hard work to come, and acknowledgement that nothing is perfect. Each one feels ceremonial, and I try to mark the occasion with an affirmation, a little prayer to the universe, or a really good glass of wine (you might be sensing a theme with me and wine). Maybe next time, I’ll buy myself a new pair of sweatpants.
Before reaching the more obvious moments to celebrate—getting an offer of representation, selling your novel, and pub day—there’s another huge moment that deserves a party in your honor: sending your first query. If you structured your querying like I did, this is probably your #1 agent, and you are secretly hoping to receive an instant response like Shari Lapena. News flash: you won’t. But this is still huge. You’ve just confessed your love to the kid at school who doesn’t know your name, auditioned for American Idol, taken a naked selfie! You put yourself out there in a terrifying, potentially humiliating, potentially rewarding way. Dance in your kitchen! Or call Crystal! You deserve it after years of hard work to reach that moment.
Writing is about the process. Just like writing a book to get rich or famous will never work, feeling like a failure unless you win the National Book Award will send you to an early grave. Write because you love to write, write for an audience of yourself, and celebrate every word. If anything, it will give you 90,000 excuses to drink wine.