On learning big and growing small.
A Rhode Island girl contemplates blockbusters, niche, and everything in between
When I was choosing colleges, I had three criteria.
The school had to be diverse. What I studied was less important to me than who I studied with. I wanted to meet people with different backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs.
(Yay, little Sarah, this one is good!)
It had to have a good basketball team. It was 1996 and my family’s archaic dial-up modem made searching college websites a nightmare. I reasoned that if a college could get their team to the NCAA playoffs, they were legit enough for me.
(Oh, Sarah.)
It had to be BIG. I grew up in Rhode Island, a place where 10 minutes away is considered “far.” (Pronounced “faah.”) A place where it’s less about “six degrees of separation” and more like “Yea, uh course I know ya cousin Lindah, I went to my junyah prom withha.”
Growing up somewhere so small left me yearning for somewhere big. A big university, I imagined, would have tons of choices and plenty of room to experiment.
After a life spent in a town whose every road I knew by heart, I wanted to go somewhere where no one knew me so that I could get properly lost.
Only then could I find out who I really was.
Get lost, I did—both for better and worse.
I took classes in a wide range of subjects at Syracuse University before finding the magazine journalism department at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications—a perfect place for nerds who loved learning and longform writing.
While finding my small home in such a big place remains one of my happiest achievements, I quickly began to sense that the ideas and topics that really got my heart pumping were often niche, left-of-center, and countercultural—while steady employment seemed to be dependent on immersing myself in the commercial and the mainstream.
My first media internship at the alt-weekly The Providence Phoenix—where I wrote about homelessness, community activism, and prison rehabilitation programs—did not pay.
My first media job at the corporate publishing house Doubleday—whose list included a little-known book called The DaVinci Code—did.
Don’t get me wrong. Working at a place as big as Doubleday in a city as big as New York was an incredible education. My colleagues were geniuses at the top of their games. The books we published did not just include blockbuster fiction that spawned cottage industries, but all kinds of conversation-starters, game-changers, and money-makers. Our books were often Important with a capital “I” and Big with a capital “B.”
But there’s a danger to getting your start somewhere so big. When I would pitch ideas, my colleagues were always encouraging but I was frequently told that my ideas were “too small.” While I had some successful “big books,” my confidence in my taste took such a hit that it became hard to discern the difference between what I liked and what I thought I could publish successfully.
I began to internalize a lot of opinions that I heard in editorial board meetings that had a lot to do with how Doubleday operated in the early aughts, but that were not necessarily helpful to my development as a writer—or as an editor whose tastes veered heavily towards work that was esoteric, experimental, weird.
I want to make it clear that no one ever said to me “This is the only way to do it.” But in my naivety I often took offhand comments from executive editors as absolute gospel.
“There is no market for short stories,” is one idea that did a lot of damage, because while many of my peers were gaining notoriety and making connections by publishing short work, I began to focus all my efforts on writing the kind of books I imagined that a house like Doubleday would want to publish.
One problem with that strategy?
I wasn’t a Doubleday kind of writer.
And I may never be.
The other problems?
I began thinking like a follower—chasing after markets that already existed—instead of thinking like a leader or builder.
And I began seeing the rest of the literary world as competitors—each year, the house would pick a small handful of writers to champion, and if your book didn’t make that cut, and if your next one didn’t, and the one after that?
Your work would never find a reader.
If you are the type of creator that I am, then you know that is not an option. You don’t just do your work for yourself. You see your work as a conversation.
Your readers, your fans, your supporters are the point.
I grew up believing that I had to choose between creating the conversations that mattered to me and getting paid. I grew up believing that if someone else got an opportunity, that meant one less opportunity for me.
I try to remind myself all the time that I don’t need to stand for this kind of thinking, or this kind of world.
Here is what else I’m trying to remind myself of these days:
Pay attention to the messages you’ve internalized because of a job you’ve had, a class you’ve taken, a thing you’ve read.
There are so many “truths” floating around about how to create successfully, but the fact remains that everyone’s path is different, and what works for one artist or company often looks nothing like what works for another.
It doesn’t mean that a lot of what what you hear from experts isn’t based in truth—but I hope you’ll be more confident in your taste and opinions than I used to be, and more critical of any ideas that begin to take root in your mind.
I was reminded of this recently when a publishing acquaintance told me she’d recently heard a colleague say:
“We don’t do well with that kind of book.”
I understand why publishing people say that kind of thing. Sometimes editors know they have a gatekeeper colleague who doesn’t “get” a particular genre or category. As a result, it really will be hard for an editor to get the support they need to break a book out.
(Now, that’s a topic for another day—why on earth should any one person have that much power to make or break an artist’s career?)
For now, I’d like to focus on the danger of taking any kind of absolute at face value. It reminds me of a story I once heard from ashtanga yoga teacher Eddie Stern. Here it is in its entirety, but the gist of it is that a great scholar used to tie his cat to a tree while teaching so the animal wouldn’t disturb the crowd. The scholar died not long after—and so did his cat—but the cat-trying tradition continued.
Three generations later, a disciple wrote a paper about the importance of tying a cat to a tree whenever teaching the Bhagavad Gita!
In other words, of course you should listen to the wisdom of your industry.
Just don’t believe a word of it without first doing due diligence.
Explore different business models—big, small, and everything in between.
Since the majority of my 18-year career has been spent working on big books published by big houses, I’m committing myself to learning more about alternative models of creation—in particular, those that give the creator more power and autonomy. Never before have creators had so many platforms on which to create—even if what we make might never appeal to a mass audience.
Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are many people working in corporate publishing doing incredible work. There are many books that have wide appeal and deserve big-house blockbuster treatment. And there are many independent agents, editors, and ghostwriters who are able to make a living precisely because we play a pivotal role in the big system (hi!)
I would be a hypocrite and fool to bite the corporate publishing system that has fed me for nearly two decades and that has made my freelance career possible. But I’m simultaneously thrilled to let go of my rigid thinking that it’s the only game in town when, in fact, there are a lot of other games I’d love to play.
Ask yourself: Do I want to go big or grow small?
These days, I’ve been splitting my time between Brooklyn and a small town on the border of Rhode Island and Massachusetts. I’ve begun coworking at an absolutely gorgeous space called the What Cheer Writers Club in Providence that costs a fraction of what such a space would cost in New York, and I’m falling in love with my small home state all over again.
I don’t think I would have ever appreciated what a smaller city had to offer had I not first had the chance to learn big. Similarly, I might never have seen the benefits of appealing to a niche audience had I not first understood the risks and rewards of trying to appeal to a wider one.
Maybe its’s because my boyfriend and I spend a lot of time thinking about the garden we’ve begun to cultivate—just this morning, I stuck little toothpicks into an avocado pit I hope one day will be a tree—but now I want to take everything I’ve learned and use it to grow the seeds of my ideas into something bigger.
There is something to be said about both big and small, and right now I’m excited to find myself somewhere in the middle.
—Sarah