Donna Tartt and the ten-year deadline
After a brief hiatus, welcome to my newsletter 3.0! A little announcement before we dive back in: I’ve gone back to my original title, The Bookmaker’s Guide to Everything. I’ll still plan to send something out each Saturday, but I wanted to reign in the focus a bit more.
I call myself a “bookmaker” because it’s, quite literally, what I do in my capacity as a writer and book developer. But I also like that it’s a term more frequently associated with betting.
What has my creative career been if not a series of gambles?
My bank account would look a lot different if I were the type of capitalist who could package a foolproof system for making books or creative projects that sell. But I’d rather be honest about what we’re doing here: each week, I’m inviting you to make an investment of time and energy that may never come back to you as financial returns.
Still, I do believe that by sharing what I’ve learned in my many years of book making, I can increase the odds that you’ll enjoy the process of creation.
Donna Tartt and the ten-year deadline
I have long been operating under the assumption that I would become a more focused writer with age. Unfortunately, the opposite has happened. I’ve found new genres and mediums to cherish, new skills I want to stretch, and new ways of using my creativity that have nothing to do with publishing or commerce.
I’m no closer to knowing the kind of writer I want to be than I was at 28 or 17 or 9.
I could tell you my life’s story by following any number of threads, but perhaps no arc could tell you more about my artistic desire (and my ongoing frustration) than the thread of abandoned creative projects.
There are many reasons I’ve let go of projects, but looming over them all has been the economic uncertainty that drove me to start each project in the first place. Some of that uncertainty has been the result of poor financial planning on my part (cough cough improv school) but a lot of it is due to working in a relatively low-paying field in a very expensive city.
As a result I’ve often approached my creative work from a frenzied, anxious place. It’s meant I’ve taken a lot of detours into endeavors that I thought would make me more marketable (cough cough improv school) instead of just focusing on writing good. It’s meant setting unrealistic timelines and deadlines in the hopes of selling something quick and “buying myself back into relevance.”
For the first time in my adult life, I’m living in a place I can actually afford and it’s liberated me to just write the stuff I want to write instead of writing things I think I’ll be able to sell. It’s helping me remember that I don’t desire relevance so much as time to write and time to give back through activism, education, and community work. (I built a class around this idea back in March and will surely return to the theme again and again, but I highly encourage every person to see civic engagement and activism as a crucial and necessary part of their creative practice.)
Mostly, the move has allowed me to slow down and ask myself what it is I really hope to create and what I need to help me get there.
What I seem to need more than anything else right now is some structural assistance and accountability. So I decided to sign up for this class on outlining the novel.
But organization is nothing without inspiration, and what better way to launch this new stage in my education as a writer than to turn to the best campus novel of all-time—which, as luck would have it, also happens to be my favorite novel?
It’s been nearly two decades since I read The Secret History by Donna Tartt and I’m pleased to report I waited long enough to have forgotten nearly everything about it, save for its perfect opening scene.
Here’s a quote from the book that is guiding me forward this week. It comes from the enigmatic Greek professor Julian Morrow. While I’m not certain that following Julian’s advice turned out so well for the book’s narrator Richard Papen, it does feel particularly apt for me right now, as I try to narrow my focus and hone in on the kind of writer I’d like to be.
"I believe that having a great diversity of teachers is harmful and confusing for a young mind, in the same way that I believe that it is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”
While Julian Morrow’s need for complete control over the students in his Greek classes is more than a little suspect, I love love love this idea of developing intimate relationships with works of art, and there are many hints from Tartt’s interviews that she’s done just that.
Of course, that’s not the way most of us are taught. When I think back on my college English classes, I remember syllabi crammed with 10-15 books a semester. Yeesh.
That’s not exactly the way to foster artistic intimacy.
And yet, if we are to ever follow in the footsteps of the masters, that’s exactly what we need to do.
Your assignment this week is to start forming an intimate relationship with a work of art. I’ve chosen The Secret History and I’m challenging myself to stop thinking of my “speed-reading” ability as a skill in the way I once did, but rather as a liability.
I’m instead reminding myself that I also possess the opposite skill—as a “close reader.” I’m underlying sentences, I’m reading passages aloud, my eyes tearing up at the precision and elegance of Tartt’s prose. And I’m challenging myself to approach my writing with the same patience and care that Tartt brings to her work.
It’s worth noting that in nearly three decades Tartt has published only three novels, all of them excellent. In a 2013 interview with CBS This Morning, Tartt said she once tried to write a book in a year—and it was a mistake.
“It just wasn’t fun for me,” she said. “And no fun for the writer, no fun for the reader.”
What if instead of looking at my next book project as a way of bringing in some much-needed cash I approached novel-writing as an endeavor that exists outside of commerce?
What masterpiece could I write if I gave myself ten years instead of just one?
I’ll leave you with an essay that feels like a perfect complement to today’s theme from Miranda Chop.
xoxo Sarah