On Writing Whatever the Hell You Want

Do you remember that brief moment during the pandemic when people on the internet were urging other people on the internet NOT to write about the pandemic?

“Too soon! You haven’t processed it yet!” “People don’t want to read that now!” “We’ll have a spate of bad pandemic novels in 2 years!” “It’s exploitative!” “TOOOO SOOOOOONNNN!!””*

And so on.

These posts and tweets made me angry. Irrationally angry.

We could all die tomorrow!, I thought. Write about whatever you want to! Why on earth would you try to control or take away people’s art when they need it most? Why on earth would the threat of “too many bad novels” outweigh the threat of “no art, because dead”? Exploitative? Of whom? Do poor people have to wait to write about poverty until they’re rich, sick people until they’re better? Prisoners, please keep your memoirs and poetry and political statements to yourselves until freed! You have not yet processed your experience. You are making bad art!*

Picasso’s Guernica, 1937: Too soon????

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Those tweets were surely, in themselves, just another coping mechanism. But they really got under my skin. And after a while I had to admit it wasn’t just because I think pandemic novels are far more likely to help than hurt people. It was because they reminded me of what I always said I’d do, and that I wasn’t doing it. I wasn’t writing whatever the hell I wanted.

*

The seed of the mantra I have been repeating for my whole writing career was planted in Buda, Texas, (population: 16,365), in 2009. I was visiting a friend who’d recently had a baby, and I’d gone along with her to a standing women’s breakfast at a local diner that regularly drew ones, even fives of attendees from the tiny rural community.

The woman sitting next to me in an embroidered denim shirt gave off wise-crone vibes, so I asked, “What do you do?” Her answer: “Whatever the hell I want.”

I leaned forward. “How can I do that?”

As it happened, she was a life coach whose clients flew to her ranch in private jets for their sessions. Needless to say, I could not afford her services. I don’t even remember what she said back to me—something wise, I assume. All I remember is the effect of those words on me: Whatever the hell I want. They blew my mind.

I was in a bad place then, though I don’t think I knew how bad at the time. Shortly afterward, my grad school advisor would look at me during a dissertation meeting and say, “Do you think you might be depressed?”, thereby saving my life. With the help of therapy and meds, I tentatively tried out doing whatever the hell I wanted, moving back to Austin to be with my now-husband and finish my dissertation in a city that didn’t make me want to die. Once there, I was able to walk away from academia, which was killing me, with a hard-won doctorate but no chance at a professor job. Once I felt firmly established as a failed academic, it got easier to do whatever the hell I wanted . I read The Artist’s Way with a small group of girlfriends, covered books and authors for local press, wrote a weekly fashion column (!), pitched and landed a 33 1/3 book, and co-founded a novel-writing group that is still going strong a decade later, thanks to their friendship, trust, and prodigious talent. The Buda woman made an appearance on one of my acknowledgments pages. My mantra and stated goal had become write whatever the hell I want.

In 2015, after writing whatever the hell I wanted for a year or two, the impossible happened. My novel sold to a major publisher in a two-book deal for six figures. It came out in 19 different countries, sold over 100,000 copies here, and hit the German bestseller list.

I had done what I wanted and gotten what I wanted! The system worked!

And that was the last time I wrote whatever the hell I wanted for six years.

*

The first warning sign was the words “two-book deal.” I did not know, though my agent must have told me, that the second book needed to be in the same genre as the first. As implausible as it sounds, I had produced a psychological suspense novel completely by accident, without knowing anything about the genre. In all seriousness, I cited my inspiration as Henry James. The odds, had I but known it, were not good that this would happen twice.

The second warning sign was the phone call with the VP of fiction at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The one who would eventually hire an outside consultant to come in and change the name from Other People’s Daughters to Good as Gone: A Novel of Suspense. I was given all kinds of reasons my title wouldn’t work—it’s typographically awkward! it sounds too vague! and my all-time favorite, plurals don’t sell! These were all bullshit. They wanted it, obviously, to sound as much as possible like Gone Girl, and I had made it a condition of signing that the word girl was not to be included in the title, so they had to branch out into other G-words.

They were probably right from the sales point of view. The book did great. It wouldn’t have sold as well with my original title. But it would have sold different. And it would have felt different. And maybe the next few years would have gone differently.

On that same phone call, I nervously warned the VP that I wasn’t going to write only mysteries. That even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t be able to. I listed off other genres—YA, horror, historical. He stayed silent while someone lower on the totem pole jumped in with some rote reassurances which, when translated from industry-speak, meant, That’s not really a thing unless the book flops, in which case we really don’t care what you write next because we will not be working with you again.

Well, that’s life in the sausage factory, and I wanted to learn how to make sausage. I let them focus-group the cover and cut my one extended metaphor and market me to an audience that pretty much saw through me instantaneously, if my Goodreads reviews are any indication. When I pitched my next book as a #MeToo Stranger on the Train, I already knew it wasn’t the one I wanted to write next—I had something else burning a hole in my brain—but it sounded like the kind of thing I would write, and could write, and it was enough like Good as Gone to pass muster.

But if my best effort to replicate Good as Gone’s success turned out almost nothing like it, the bigger problem was that it was even less like Other People’s Daughters. I felt that difference every day, and despite how proud I am of that book, writing and promoting it felt peculiarly shameful to me. (It is, in fact, a book about shame.) When the book flopped, my one saving grace was that I’d already sold the next one, a dark grad-school satire masquerading as a thriller, called The Habit of Rising Early.

I knew they’d change the title. By the time Bad Habits hit the shelves, I had fallen out of the best habit of all.

*

Then the pandemic hit, and it changed everything.

I thought that course-correcting my career would be a matter of writing my next book in a different genre. I got all the way through a draft and found that I hadn’t written it the way I wanted. I’m not sure how that happened, because I was trying, really trying. But the voices of success were still whispering in my ear, saying things like, hurry up, horror is really hot right now, get out of the main character’s head, stop pretending you’re Virginia Woolf, and where’s the twist? Writing it became painful. I started cheating on it with different novel in a different genre—then another—then another. Every time the voices kicked in, it died on the page. I cried a lot. I gritted my teeth, buckled down, gave up. I started making career decisions more or less at random, whatever appealed to me or inspired me. I didn’t ask permission, because permission killed everything it touched.

I started this Substack to track that journey. I’m getting more writing done than I have in years. I feel like a failure, but I love everything I write. When I don’t love it, I stop writing it and do something else. It’s too soon to tell what this time in my life will amount to. (Too soon!!) But I can’t wait for success to write whatever the hell I want. I know how that plays out. Too soon, too late, who cares? The time is now.

Image: 100 Years Ago, Peter Doig, 2000

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*In a nauseating subgenre of this opinion, deans of colleges and educational consulting firms urged high school students not to write about the pandemic in their application essays, even when the common application included an optional space JUST FOR THAT PURPOSE. As someone who nearly lost people I love to the pandemic-era mental health crisis that is still playing out in teenagers right now, I find this beyond irresponsible.