By Jenna Blum
This past week I was doing a podcast interview for my new thriller Murder Your Darlings with a friend I hadn’t seen in about ten years. The first thing he said when we both hopped onscreen was, “It has been such a joy to follow your career and see your incredible success.”
I smiled and thanked him instead of caving to my first response, which was to scoff.
“I guess that means my PR is working,” I said.
What it also meant: he was seeing only the public side of the revolving bookcase. You know the kind I mean: the bookcases that in Gothic novels, thrillers, and Indiana Jones movies flip around when the hero leans on them by mistake and catapults that person from the drawing room into the dungeon.
In writer life, the drawing room is your public face, conferences and festivals and socials, oh my.
And the dungeon is what it’s REALLY like.
It’s not that what you see in the drawing room is a lie. It’s not. It’s true! I’ve published five books. Had the great good fortune of speaking at hundreds of events and book clubs. Founded an author interview company that puts writers and their new books online.
On my social media channels and IRL events, you’ll see plenty of red lip/ big bling earrings/ jazz hands/ huge smiles. None of that is fake.
And on the flip side of that bookcase, there is this:
Months in yoga pants. Migraines caused by too much screen time. Waking in the night worrying about money. Resisting the urge to read my reviews (I don’t; the book’s already done; what good would it do?). Succumbing to the urge to scroll other writers’ feeds, burning with FOMO and wondering: Why am I not in Hawaii at that conference? Why am I not an instant # 1 NYT bestseller? Where is my movie deal?
And what we all, ALL, know as writers, which is: endemic doubt. I think this is the most painful part, knowing that you and you alone, ultimately, are responsible for the decisions you will make about your book; you can crowdsource as many workshop opinions as you like, but in the end every choice you make will choke off another narrative path, and WHAT IF YOU HAVE CHOSEN POORLY? What if because of your well-intentioned but limited mortal vision, you wrote your book the wrong way and condemned it to the remainder table, to be sent back to the publisher, to the attic or drawer?
That’s the dungeon.
What I thank God for: we don’t stay on the dungeon side of the revolving bookcase forever. We flip back into the commerce/business/drawing room, and even though the intersection of art and marketing is often fraught, there’s great stuff there. Interacting with readers, for one.
And I try to keep in mind, whenever the bookcase flips me back into the dungeon, that no matter what I see in my feeds, on stages, on the bestseller lists and big screens, that we all, ALL, have to visit the dungeon sometimes. Well, actually there are like three writers in the world who I suspect have never visited that room. I bet you know them, too.
But for the rest of us, I think there’s only one thing to do: Be kind to each other. And yourself. Because it takes a Herculean amount of energy, and love, and ego, and humility, to try to write books and then get them out into the world, and we have that revolving bookcase thing going on all the time.
I’ll see you there. On both sides.
