How It All Began
Or part one of how a would-be professor stumbled into becoming a novelist
My first book was a mystery. A three-paragraph long mystery, but a mystery nonetheless.
I was probably six or seven, and I’m certain that my handwriting still had backwards S’s in it, but my parents remember me coming home from school one day with one of those gray recycled papers with light blue lines on it and proudly presenting them with my mystery novel. It might have been short—and possibly been about a cat?—but it had a beginning, middle, and an end. It was a story.
I don’t know where the idea for writing a mystery came from, although I’m guessing that laying in bed every Thursday night and listening out for the wail of the woman fainting on the PBS Mystery program’s Edward Gory-illustrated introduction was formative. It’s possible too that Mum’s deep love of the crime genre rubbed off on me from an early age.
By 11 or 12, I’d moved on to sweet Kensington Zebra romance novels that featured a handsome couple in Regency dress on the cover, some light flirting for 200 pages, and a kiss in the final chapter. It was innocent stuff, but it was yet another foray into genre fiction.
Perhaps it’s no surprise then that growing up my own stories always fell neatly within the bounds of genre fiction. Ideas for romance, fantasy, and mystery would come to me in hot flashes of inspiration. First I scribbled away in notebooks with pens that made me feel all the more grown up because you could not erase mistakes. Then, when Dad upgraded the family computer at the end of my time in high school, I claimed the old desktop and set it up in my room for late-night writing sessions. I would pop in my hard disk to preserve my precious work and fell as though I was achieving something.
Then I went to college. Pushed by professors in a way that I’d never been in high school, all of my time and energy went into plowing through hundreds of pages of history textbooks and assigned novels. My writing time became dedicated entirely to essays and papers of varying lengths. Working on my own fiction was relegated to winter and summer breaks when I wasn’t working. Looking back on it, it doesn’t surprise me that, in this environment of neglect, nothing substantive grew out of the draft languishing on the Dell laptop I’d taken to college with me.
No matter, I thought as I worked my way through my first year of college. I had decided a long time before that I would be a history professor, so that was clearly where I needed to focus my energy. That is, until my first semester of my second year when, while walking out of Burbank Airport next to my mother, I realized that wasn’t what I wanted at all.
“I don’t think I want to get my PhD and be an academic,” I told Mum. “I think I might want to be a journalist.”
“Thank God,” was her reply.1
And so I went from would-be academic to journalist, still neglecting my fiction for another two and a half years of my undergraduate degree. I applied for graduate school in journalism programs and got in to three. I chose the Journalism School at Columbia University, a masters program that moves at break-neck speed, spitting out baby journalists with MS degrees in ten months flat. The school’s location in New York City was definitely the main draw, as was the fact that I could make broadcast journalism (i.e. TV and radio) my concentration.
One of the side effects of this intense degree program was a hereto unknown to me condition called burnout.
We didn’t recognize burnout as such in 2008 because it was talked about in the mainstream so much less, so I wasn’t entirely certain what was the matter with me. I just knew that I felt completely emotional, mentally, and physically tapped. I was also creatively drained in a way I had never been before. I needed a solution and, to my mind, my two options were watching So You Think You Can Dance and other reality TV shows at the end of every night of working on my master’s thesis or trying to write a book.2
I chose the book.
That book was a historical romance novel and it was fun. Writing fiction was so different than working on my master’s thesis, I suddenly found myself reviving. I had mental energy again. I wanted to come home and work on my book. It was a joy.
That book and I moved from a death trap of an apartment at 110th and Central Park West to the apartment I shared with my best friend and fellow fairly broke local news journalist at 66th and 1st. During my first job as a TV news producer, I kept picking it up and putting it down. I would occasionally work on it during the strange hours of my year on the morning shift with 4 a.m. starts, and I kept adding to it and revising in fits and starts when I moved to the much more humane day shift. However, it wasn’t until I moved into my third apartment in NYC, a tiny tiny studio apartment above a wine shop in Yorkville that I finally decided it was time to get serious and finish the book.
That summer, I worked at my little kitchen table and watched the draft grow. I stopped letting myself go back and edit parts of the book, enforcing a strict rule that I could only move forward, not back. I turned down (some) nights out and worked late after I was done with my day job. And finally, somehow, I finished the book.
The famous kitchen table/desk about a year after I finished the first draft of my first book.
I remember sitting at my kitchen table, staring at this manuscript that after years of work was finally complete. It wasn’t flawless by any means—it wasn’t even all that good—but it was a full first draft. I probably printed it out because I’ve always loved seeing the full stack of pages after completing a project.
The next logical step was to edit the manuscript. I started moving things around, cutting things, rewriting entire chapters. A better book began to take shape, and so too did an idea in my head. I could send this book to agents. I could look up what I needed to do in order to get representation. I could sell this book.
I trooped off to the huge Barnes & Noble at 66th and Broadway (long may it rest in NYC retail peace), and I bought a book called the Writer’s Digest Guide to Literary Agents because QueryTracker didn’t exist yet. Working methodically, I flagged every single agent in the book that represented historical romance, and then I created a spreadsheet power ranking them. As I finished polishing my draft, I began to put together a query letter, synopsis, and sample chapters. Finally complete, I started gathering emails and sending queries out to the agents at the top of my list.
Most of the emails I received back were rejections. Many were bounce-backs telling me that submissions inboxes were now closed until a later date or form rejections from agents who were not interested in representing me. Some were a little more considered, offering words of encouragement. Every time I would receive a batch of rejections, I would send out another batch of queries until I got a request for a full manuscript from one of my top three agents, a woman named Emily Sylvan Kim from Prospect Agency. Thrilled, I sent her the full manuscript and waited.
Emily emailed me a few weeks later when I was working at the TV station, asking if I could speak. I begged another producer to take care of my show, stepped away from my desk, and went upstairs to a quiet lounge area that was so devoid of personality no one ever sat there outside of exhausted producers and anchors sneaking in a nap on the morning shift. She called me and told me that she’d read my book, and she wanted to offer me representation. Then she asked me what I wanted my career to look like. I told her that the goal was to quit my day job to write books. Full-time. She said okay, and she sent me a draft contract to look over.
I met Emily for the first time at a brunch spot on the east side called Penelope’s at 29th and Lexington. (It’s, incredibly, still open more than a decade later!) We had brunch and we signed copies of the contract, passing them over pancakes. I was certain, walking out of that meeting, that I was on my way to publication. I had worked so hard for so long. A publisher was going to snap me up, just like that.
And then Fifty Shades of Gray became a phenomenon.
That story, and more, next week.
This is how I remember it. She probably will tell me that I remembered this completely wrong and she was far less visibly relieved. I like my version of the story, so for our purposes, I’ll let it stand.
I cannot explain why these were the two things my tired brain came up with. Just go with it.
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