The Seven Stages of Publishing Grief (or Hello Darkness, My Old Friend)
By Robin LaFevers | October 12, 2012 |
That collective groan and gnashing of teeth you heard Wednesday was the sound of authors reacting to Amazon’s new Author Ranking System—oh joy!—yet one more tool for us to compare ourselves to others. And for any of us trying to separate our selves from our writing? Well, you can just forget about that.
So this seemed like a good time to talk about writers and disappointment. For while writing is one of the most rewarding pursuits in the world, publishing can be a long, slow, painful slog toward the pit of despair, and you can quickly find yourself in the soul sucking land of Major Disappointment. And guess what? This disappointment applies equally to pre-published, traditionally published, and indie published authors alike, so I guess that’s the upside: egalitarianism!
The thing is, we writers are so very good at telling stories—even (or especially) to ourselves. We knew that we were going to be different. We were not going to need 10,000 hours or ten years. We were absolutely positively certain our career was going to be one big meteoric trajectory.
We knew that we would immediately hear back from all fifty agents we queried, and when our manuscript went out for the first time, a hot bidding war would ensue. Oh, we knew we weren’t going to hit the #1 spot on the NY Times list first time out, but we also knew that we would never languish in the midlist, or have our book go OP after only thirteen months.
And not only was Hollywood going to come knocking, but Spielberg or J J Abrams would be making the call personally.
Also? We’d be the very first person to win the Newberry and the Prinz and the National Book Award, all for the very same book! (Talk about genre bending!)
But then, with a great big confidence-shattering crunch, we find ourselves back on Planet Reality, blinking in surprise as the dust of our rosy dreams floats ash-like all around us.
This festering disappointment we sometimes feel is the elephant in the room among writers. We’re not allowed to talk of it lest we come off as ungrateful. We also can’t talk about it because so much of publishing ‘success’ is smoke and mirrors—it’s about creating the illusion of being in demand in the hopes it will make us actually in demand. So if we talk too openly about how our career is really going, well, we’ve just let the cat out of the bag, and everyone will know our true numbers and our career will sink even faster.
Writing in the age of Google, it is nearly impossible to avoid comparing ourselves to other writers. We know so very much about their book deals, their marketing budgets, their promotional roll out. Other writers’ success is right in our face, everywhere we turn. And knowing all this industry stuff is akin to letting the money lenders set up shop in our creative temple, and it can absolutely drain the hope and creativity and contentment right out of us.
So how does a writer cope with the often inevitable, painful jagged edges of our broken dreams and failed hopes?
First of all, it’s okay to just sit with our disappointment. We owe it to ourselves to grieve for the dream career that never quite achieved lift off, to mourn the publishing expectations that have gone on to that Great Shredder in the Sky. But then, how do we move forward?
I would like to introduce you to what I call the Seven Stages of Publishing Grief. Something I have great personal experience with. I’ve gone through this entire process at least three times, and I have no doubt I will journey through it another time or two before I’m done.
Important Note: It’s essential that you don’t get stuck in one of the first four stages for the rest of your life. It is vitally important to your creative soul that you keep moving through them all the way to the Resurrection Stage, for without that, you’re simply stuck in a really ugly place for a very long time.
The Seven Stages of Publishing Grief 
Stage One—Shock and Denial: This is where we still can’t quite believe it has happened to us, and are processing and flailing as our dreams begin to crumble.
Noooo! This can’t be happening! Not to me. I followed all the rules. Met all my deadlines. Never responded to a single negative review (although that Philistine who called my book the worst book EVER WRITTEN totally deserved a response.) I took every marketing and promotion opportunity that came my way, and carved a hundred more with my bare hands and sheer dint of will.
Stage Two—Yearning and Anger: This is where we double down on those dreams and use our anger to fuel some changes. We tend to focus on the externals first. After all, they are much easier (and less painful) to address. And sometimes they are very legitimately the problem.
But I want that, dammit. I want it so bad it hurrrrrts. And I deserve it! My books are every bit as good as Author X. And I work just as hard as Author Y. And my books aren’t even fan fiction.
That’s it! It’s not me. It’s all those stupid readers who don’t know good literature from smut. (Or who alternatively don’t recognize that smut can be great literature.)
It’s my agent. Or my editor. Or my publisher. (It’s important to note that there can absolutely be a bad fit within a publishing team. Sometimes an agent is really good in the first stage of your career, but less so when it’s time to break out of the mid list. Some publishers are terrific with certain types of books, and weaker with others.)
Stage Three—Pain and Guilt: This is the shoulda, woulda, coulda period. It is as filled with regrets as the night sky is with stars.
I should have blogged, tweeted, posted, pinned more often. I should have attended every book festival within a 500 mile 1000 mile radius. Should have written faster, slower, with more plot, with more characters. Should have gotten that MFA, should never have wasted all that time getting that MFA. I should have done twenty seven drafts, not only nineteen.
D’oh! I should have written the manuscript in 12 point Courier!
Stage Four—Anger and Bargaining: We recognize personal change is required, so we begin to look for changes we ourselves can make, but still tend to focus on surface level things.
Okay, well, I’ll write more commercial books. Or more literary ones. I’ll stop dumbing down, or start dumbing down. I’ll write three books a year instead of only one. I’ll try self publishing—that will remove the problem right there.
Hey I know! I’ll write fan fiction.
Stage Five—Reflection: This is where disappointment—like other strong emotions—lets us finally turn inward so we can address the things we have in our control—the book, the writing, our own perceptions. It is the stage where we experience true grief, emotional despair, depression. This is where we have a long hard look at ourselves and start to reevaluate our dreams. Maybe take a hiatus or a sabbatical. A long, intense writer’s retreat. Something that give us some emotional distance and creative white space.
This is where we start evaluating what the NYT List, starred reviews, and awards will truly bring us. This can be a bit tricky because while it is true that being a successful writer won’t change the essence of who you are, achieving something you’ve been striving for can bring a great deal of satisfaction and blessed relief. (Yes, I did it. I wasn’t fooling myself and Uncle Seymour was dead wrong. I do have it in me!) But the emotional baggage you entered the writing journey with will likely still be with you.
The truth is, there usually are other ways to achieve all the ephemeral rewards we thought our publishing dreams would bring us, and again, many of those other routes are often within our own control, unlike publishing. It’s also a good time to ask why we need those things so very badly and poke around in that.
If the issue is money, well, there are other ways to make money. For some, weighing down the writing with the need for income puts them in the fast lane on the road to Soul Sucking.
Now, having said that, I am a firm believer in being able to make a living with our writing. If we elect to do that, we have to make some informed choices. We can still work on the types of books that feed our soul or the career of our dreams, but we have to carve out time for them in between our ‘paying’ writing, just like we did back when we were working in that engineering office.
Stage Six—Reconstruction: This is where it hits us: If our current writing isn’t getting us the career or income we want, we need to change our writing. Or our goals.
Although it’s romantic to think so, we don’t all have only one writing voice. As Barbara O’Neal so eloquently once explained it to me, our voice is like a potato, and we can make all sorts of wildly different dishes with that simple potato. We can make French fries, or garlic mashed potatoes, or potatoes au gratin or, well, you get the idea.
But wait, you say. I love what I’m writing!
Then listen closely because this is really important: Then the rest doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t.
Stage Seven—Resurrection: This is where you emerge from the flames, a different writer than when you first began. Maybe your new self has decided writing isn’t for you. It is perfectly okay to walk away from writing if it no longer feeds you or you recognize you were pursuing it for the wrong reasons. That’s not failing—that’s trying something and deciding it’s not for you.
Maybe you give yourself the gift of time and back off your insistence that you WILL be published by the time you’re thirty.
Or maybe taking a part time job will allow you to take some of the pressure off of the creative process so you can write the books that you long to write—and after this journey through despair, you’re happy about being able to take that heavy load off your writing to allow the creative joy back in.
Maybe you simply find a different way to move through the publishing world. Maybe you don’t turn on Google Alerts and don’t subscribe to Publisher’s Marketplace. And you trust your agent and editor and critique group when then tell you this is good. This is the best thing you’ve ever written.
Or you make a complete break with the sorts of things you wrote before, and embark on an entirely new writing journey.
Because that’s the nature of creative work—we must constantly question and strive and doubt, and then reinvent ourselves in order to keep our work fresh and satisfying, but also to also find ways to build a thick, sturdy wall that the demons of Despair, Disappointment, and Hopelessness cannot breach.
(photographs courtesy of Flickr’s just.Luc and e³°°°)
Robin LaFevers is the author of seventeen books for young readers, including the HIS FAIR ASSASSIN trilogy about teen assassin nuns in medieval France and the upcoming COURTING DARKNESS. A lifelong introvert, she currently lives on a blissfully quiet hill in Southern California.
Robin,
Thanks for laying out these seven stages in such a thoughtful way. The ways in which writers cope with disappointment are critical to future fulfillment. The quicker a writer reaches stages 5-7, the better. Wallowing in pity won’t improve a writer’s work. It is those moments of intense reflection and self-assessment that allow a writer to grow and improve. Attaining success is a marathon, not a sprint and overcoming rejection is part of the growth process
CG, I’m actually trying to decide if quicker IS better. I’m wondering if it’s more important to really experience each stage fully. Sometimes if we skim steps, we don’t get the full cathartic benefit of the entire process.
But I absolutely agree that reflection and self-assessment are absolutely necessary!
Wow – a lot of nerves getting hit with this post, Robin! The deep-down, keep hidden, don’t go there nerves. As CG Blake said – intense reflection and self-assessment may be needed!
Stage 5 – that’s where I’m at and it’s included a very long sabbatical. Time to move on – in some direction with the realization that I need to be in control instead of being controlled. And address those deep-down nerves. Thanks :)
So sorry about hitting those nerves, Janet! Especially so early in the morning. :-)
Good luck with your sabbatical. I hope it bears rich fruit!
Robin, I can see how brilliant this is and I’m not yet published. But I feel like I’ve been through mini-versions of most of these stages already. Getting through stage five and six and deciding I really do love what I’m writing, and come what may, that’s still the vital element, was a big one for me.
My mini-version of Resurrection led to my willingness to tackle an old project anew. I’m sure I’ll go through the stages again, but I’m hoping the lessons learned will stick with me, and I’ll retain my grip on what’s important to me without resorting to fan fiction. ;-)
Thanks for sharing your experience and wisdom!
Thank you kindly for your ‘brilliant’ comment. Thank you also for being such a fabulous cheerleader and community builder here!
And I have a pretty good hunch you will be able to hang on to what’s important to you. At least, from what little I know of you through WU.
I just sent my first novel to be published to my publisher. I see these stages before me… Well, okay. Hope I’m up for it.
Forewarned is forearmed!
I get writer’s envy when I read your posts. :o) Could you do a post on The Seven Stages of Writing Grief? I had one the other day when a relative was visiting, and I was thinking, Oh, he’s going to know just how nuts I am when he reads my book. But by the next day, I was thinking, I’m not writing it for him, but for the faces I can’t see who may need to hear this.
Carmel, do you mean the Seven Stages of Publishing Envy? That would be an interesting topic to explore.
Also, in regards to that relative, all I have to say is: Embrace the nuts. It makes life much more interesting.
Not really. I’m too much into the writing stage at the moment, with all its ups and downs! This is really working, this is awful, why did I think I could do this, I *have* to do this . . .
D’oh! I get it. Writing grief rather than Publishing grief! Missed that the first time.
That’s a great idea! Will put it in the hopper!
I hadn’t considered what you so wonderfully describe. What’s also good is that what you describe is transferable into other aspect s of our lives, such as job loss.
Wow Robin thanks – this was really necessary for me. I’m not published (not even close… Sigh). But I did just have to do a major rewrite and get back to the basics of the entire premise of the story I’m trying to tell.
Last night was full of soul-wrenching rethinking and head-banging. When I arrive at my inbox this morning, bruised and exhausted, but still going with a defiant resilience, this was a wonderful balm. Thank you!
‘Defiant resilience.’ LOVE that! It’s definitely what we writers need!
Very happy to have provided a balm for your battered writerly struggle.
Excellent post about something I think we all go through, unless we are…oh, wait a minute, we are not supposed to compare ourselves to anyone…drat, haven’t learned my lesson yet. ;)
:-)
Excellent post! As a former literary agent and writing teacher, I’ve seen countless writers go through those stages. As a writer myself, I’ve been through them.
Every writer will emerge from the process with different conclusions, as you point out. For me, after decades spent writing my own work and helping other writers with theirs, it comes down to this: Write what you love. A person only has time to write so many books in a lifetime (especially slow writers, like me.) If every book I write represents 2-3 years of my life, then it’s damn well going to be a book I WANT to write. The money is a crap shoot anyway. You can decide you want to write a bestseller, study what’s selling, and write a clone; and by the time you’ve done that, the publishing world has moved on to the Next Big Thing.
Write what you love. That way, whatever the financial results, you’ll have that satisfaction.
Oh Barbara, as a former literary agent, I can only imagine how often you’ve seen this!
And I agree–our lives are so short and precious, I can’t imagine why we’d not spend it doing what we love whenever possible.
Thanks, Robin! I’m going to share. Too many of us get stuck up there in the early stages…
You’re welcome, Shutta! And thanks for sharing!
Oh so familiar! Thanks for saying it so beautifully, and for giving me a chuckle in the process.
I believe life should involve lots of chuckles, Carleen.
I love the potato simile. How true.
Perhaps one of the biggest benefits to blogging, or constructing a platform well before one needs it, is personal experience with this cycle. I’ve been through this a few times, though I know there’s a part of me that whispers, “Your fiction will be different.
Ha! Foolish brain.
Jan, that potato simile was Barbara O’Neal’s, from her fab voice class.
And I’d never thought about the blogging/platform building bringing a similar journey, but you’re right. I can see how they would be similar.
Your posts are always so wise and eloquent, Robin. So grateful to have read this today. Thank you!
Ha! Eloquent and wise? ::gets guffawing under control:: Thank you. That’s very kind of you to say.
WOW! If there is a God, this post must be the voice of it today for me. I woke up in Stage One and got through to Four in about an hour. Texting to all my buddies to tell them all about each phase. Whining, fussing, whining, complaining, whining. Did I mention I was whining? Anyway, I was about to number 5 when I opened my emails. VOILA! Thanks so much for this thoughtful post. WE are not alone, it feels so good know it. Yes, fan fiction crossed my mind. Mark Train did it, so why not? LOL. Good luck to you all in your writing aspirations.
Diana, I’m so sorry about your utterly horrible morning, but very happy to learn that God, if he exists, works in such very mysterious ways (for surely me being his messenger qualifies as mysterious!)
Good luck with the process! And try to enjoy the last three steps. I think that can be a joyful thing–getting to redefine who we want to be and how we want to change.
You *are* God’s messenger, Robin! I think we all are for each other when something happens that we desperately need and it drops into our laps through someone else.
And yes, sometimes he’s very mysterious, too. :-)
Oh, wow. Yeah, been there, still there. I think stages 3 & 4 nearly broke me. Dealing with stage 5 and looking forward to the rest.
Like most things, I think I trickle into the places I need to be when I’m ready. But dragging my ass out of stage 3 has been more than difficult. And required the help of a therapist, because it isn’t all about the writing.
As it is true of most things!
Thank you for the thought provoking post!
Wow, great post as always, Robin.
I often go through all 7 stages in a SINGLE DAY! And way too often I find myself spiraling through these stages when anything negative happens. Or I start getting the jealous imps.
Any advice for permanently pushing past the first few, debilitating stages? Or maybe I’m just so insecure and neurotic I’ll forever be going through the stages. Like watching the Groundhog Day movie incessantly! Yikes!
Thanks again, Robin! Definitely posts like this help calm me down. As well as blogs like Writer Unboxed. Then I don’t feel so alone with my angst/anxiety/fears/ . . . :-)
~Kimberley
Robin, thanks for saying what many of us feel but are afraid to explore, much less blog about. Sharing . . .
Robin-
Excellent post, as ever. You so capture the writers’ emotional rollercoaster.
I have upcoming in a future issue of Writers Digest magazine an essay called (for now) “Why Published Novels Fail”. Of course, novels do not “fail”. At any rate, I’ve yet to meet an author who will use that word. “Disappointed” is more common and more true.
While not letting the industry off the hook, my take is that disappointments can’t be fully explained by publishing snafus or failures of promotion. There are too many cases of success to the contrary.
(Chris Cleve’s first novel Incendiary was yanked from bookstore shelves after one and a half hours, and yet later found its audience and was successful. He went on to write mega-seller Little Bee.)
The Reconstruction and Resurrection stages are particularly resonant for me. You can’t change the industry, you can only change your writing.
But how? Listening is important. Returning to craft, asking for honesty from agents, editors and critique partners, even some reader comments can point the way to strengthening one’s fiction.
I’ve seen authors grow bitter and heard them complain in convention bars, blaming “traditional” publishing for their woes. They never recover. I’ve also seen authors dig in and grow. Those authors succeed. They find the true joy in writing and (maybe not coincidentally) gain some of the rewards they were seeking in the first place.
You can always strengthen your writing. Indeed, if you’ve been disappointed you must. And you will. Thanks, Robin. Your posts are gems.
You’re right, Don–and this applies to self-published authors as well. We get to skip the gatekeepers, but then deal with Robin’s Seven Stages when our ebooks fail to explode on Amazon. Each book has to be practice for the next one or we end up stuck on Stage 4.
Thank you, Robin. You speak directly to and for all of us.
Fantastic post, and one to which every writer, at whatever stage of their career(s), can surely relate.
I had a career as a poet – five books out and counting – before I turned to prose (to pay for my poetry addiction). So I’ve been through all those stages as a poet, and am now heading through them again as a novelist – two books out so far, four still under contract.
If asked, I would say the really important thing is to give yourself permission to get stuff wrong as a writer, or to fail in some way – or even every way. It’s stressful enough trying to cope and contain the damage when things go wrong without beating up on yourself at the same time.
I’m much more mellow now than when I started out, and it’s probably because I’ve failed so many times, I know it’s something I can cope with – because I’ve done it before and hey, I’m still here!
This is quite an industry we’ve chosen to be in, isn’t it? I hope we can all dig in and grow instead of wallowing and becoming bitter in our inevitable disappointments. Thank you for such a great post!
Robin, your post is incredibly insightful. I’m in the reconstruction and resurrection stages. Feeling as brave as Pooh Bear, I am. It’s very nice to know I’m not the only one. Honey anyone?
Thanks for a great post! I’m at stage 6 on the verge of 7, and it’s a good place to be. I love the potato analogy, too. Realizing that I have many voices/ways of writing has been key for me to experience “success” and happiness with where I am in terms of both sales and personal satisfaction with this writing journey. I’m sure I’ll go through all the stages many more times.
Very interesting post. The part about perceived success leading to real success is very telling. Just a couple of months ago I pitched two panel ideas to the AWP – one was pretty mainstream and the other was a hot potato called “My Midlist Crisis.” First of all, several of the writers I approached to serve on the panel trembled at the idea of claiming the term “midlist.” I did finally find four intrepid souls willing to discuss what happens to novelists who aren’t breakout best sellers but who have sold “respectably.” Then I heard from the AWP who accepted my little innocent idea but rejected the midlist idea because it was “potentially upsetting to the conference attendees.”
In other words there’s not only a stigma about being midlist, there’s even a stigma about talking about it.
Catching up on WU and wow this is so true. I’m going to share it with my authors as well as share the heck out of it on social media. I did a personality quiz in the new O magazine – I know, *groan* – and not surprisingly, it said I’m a romantic. But like looking at the silver lining, I do try to find that lesson in whatever happens. I don’t have my head in the ground – except maybe when I’m doing the downward dog. :)