The Weird Feeling of Getting What You Want

Saturday, my first novel launches.

I have a couple collections of short stories out, and three nonfiction books, most of which sold rather less than more, but this is my first “real book” as I would have termed it up until…now.

I have gotten what I always wanted, and it doesn’t feel like I thought it would.

This post is an attempt to make sense of why.

Starting back a bit. The first serious attempt I ever made to write a novel was when I was 14, in geometry class. The teacher was not good, and I, as a student, matched her in incompetence. So instead of paying attention, I wrote a nuclear-disaster teen novel in which I, as the protagonist, ended up saving the life of the girl who sat three seats in front of me.

That novel reached 63 pages before I abandoned it. I got an F in the class and had to do summer school. The girl three seats up never learned my name. You could, with perfect justification, call the entire enterprise a complete failure.

Attempt number two began when I was 16. The novel was called Break Point (though everyone in my family just called it Thwock), about a tennis player — I do not play tennis — who falls in love with a British princess — I do not know any princesses and have never set foot in England, Scotland, or Ireland — and eventually wins Wimbledon and her heart. It’s utterly awful.

But it’s done. I finished it when I was 23, by which point I was married and had a kid. And then I took twenty years off.

The famous quote is, “I don’t want to write. I want to have written.” That more or less completely describes my mental state for most of my life. I wanted to write, but I didn’t actually do it. What I wanted most was to have a real book on my shelf with my name on it.

And now I do.

I imagined the moment a thousand times. I’d open the box, and there, nestled in brown packing, would be my book, with my name on the cover. I would cry for joy. I’d put it on my shelf next to Melville and Rowling and Lynch, and I would finally be a real boy.

In one sense, I was spectacularly wrong about how that moment would feel. But in another, equally true sense, I was dead right.

At the moment, I have four boxes of my book downstairs in the office. There are three copies on the shelf, one for each (substandard-but-improving) iteration of the text. There was, absolutely, a moment of deep satisfaction when I unboxed the first copy of my book and took it over and put it on my shelf (far more prosaically, next to a physics text and one of my short story collections). But it never approached the rapture I thought I would feel. Why not?

Well, I forgot a couple things when I was looking forward. For one thing, I had never written a novel when I began thinking about how cool it would be. Then I wrote a cartoonishly bad one. Then after 20 years of thinking about it, I sat down and wrote another one, and it was much better. It’s going to get published, actually, sometime next year. I changed a lot in those 20 years, and I wrote a lot.

Then I started writing more. And more. I wrote 600,000 words of new fiction in one year. I got better. I wrote hundreds of shorts and essays. I got better. I wrote twelve more novels. I got better.

I changed.

The kid who looked up at the publishing mountain and said, “Dang, I’d give anything to get to that peak”…did. I gave thousands and thousands of hours and years of my life and money and more words than I can count. Now I’m standing on that peak, and I know a few more things.

I know there are a lot of other peaks out there, and climbing those is not going to be easy.

I know that what I have done, in writing this book, is not as big a deal as I originally thought it was.

I know that what I imagined as a seminal, life-altering achievement is, in truth, not even close to that important.

In other words, I grew up and saw that my childhood dreams were quite childish, when you get a little perspective.

But.

I also know that it was much harder to write this book than I thought it would be. Much more was required than I imagined.

I know that to finish something like this fundamentally changed me. I am not the same person. I am someone new.

I know that the act of becoming the person that could do this was the real achievement, not the doing of the thing itself.

What is important is that I became a writer, not that I wrote.

Two days from now I’ll put my foot on the top of that first peak. I will not cry for joy. But I will feel the joy of it, not as someone dropped there, but someone that fought every step against gravity and fatigue and his own less-than-perfect self to get to the pinnacle. The last step is only the last one, no more important, really, than the thousands of others that preceded it. I will reach a high summit, but I will only, on the day, move upward a few more inches.

And I will be just as happy as I thought I would be. But the thing is, I already am.

It’s not the book that made me happy. It was what the book did to me, in the writing of it.

So yes, we’re going to have a rocking celebration. We’re going to exult when the book sells its first copy to someone I don’t personally know. I’m going to put it on my shelf between Melville and Rowling, just like I told myself I would (Scott Lynch gets his own shelf).

And then I’m going to sit down and put another few thousand words into novel number fourteen. Because I know I can write it. I am a writer. It’s what I do, and what I do does things to me to make me more, and better, than I was before.

I earned this moment. And that makes it not quite as special, in the moment, as I thought it would be.

But it makes all the moments up to now — and beyond — a whole lot better.