The DIY writing residency

& hot second-novel summer

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1560

Hi all,

When I was in the darkest throes of debut-novel postpartum, I applied to precisely one writing residency. It was a medium-prestige four-day type thing designed for parents that didn’t require any letters of recommendation, and I thought: why not. I spent longer than intended on the essay, paid my application fee, and was summarily rejected a couple of months later.

The standard advice here goes: keep trying. Most people give up. Persistence is crucial. Like most literary advice, it’s fine provided you’re flexible with it, provided you adapt and make it work for you. Dogmatism is generally anathema to creativity. Paradox, however, is its best friend. To me, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again only makes sense in healthy tension with another maxim: madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Hence, while I am all for literary risk-taking, I’m not super keen to make the same mistake even twice if I can avoid it. And when I thought more critically about the residency game, not only was it obvious that I could, but unless my circumstances changed considerably, I’d be better off never applying to another writing residency again. My requirements, interests, identity—none of it was a fit, not only for the program I applied to, but for the vast majority of such offerings. Moreover, I already had a different blueprint for success:

I'm insanely fortunate to have been able to take a leave of absence from my day job to focus on [writing The Portrait of a Mirror]. But I'm also conscious of taking a pretty sizable risk, one that I have little assurance will ultimately work out in my favor . . .

But it basically did. Here’s the full post on what I learned during my first DIY residency. Note some links may be outdated—and “Recursion” was my working title for Portrait until Blake Crouch’s novel came out (I literally wept at the time but wow was that for the best):

Everything clearly pointed to trying again, but not via more applications. With another DIY attempt. Specifically: with hot second-novel summer. The following breaks down the details of my current setup and its rationale. It is intended not as concrete advice, but for consideration in contextual decision-making (including for future me).

Requirements

I try not to be too precious about writing—I’m typing this on my phone right now—but the reality is, at least for me, writing a novel is a different sort of beast, and a far more particular one. I swear to god it’s like trying to get pandas to mate in captivity or something. And the requirements for getting my little mental pandas to fuck are maddeningly hard to come by. First: time. Not four days. Months. Consecutively to get started, and once I’ve broken the beast’s back, at least four-hour chunks of time. Second: quiet. No mama mama mama! No interruptions. Only specific music, and even then only sometimes.

My first two requirements more or less necessitate the third, of solitude. The “community” aspect many formal residencies tout? No thanks, for many of the same reasons I had zero interest in MFA programs, do not understand two-novelist marriages, and generally prefer to read other genres or dead people while I’m in the intense flow of drafting: to keep my mimetic impulses in check.

And yet, egoic external validation is really the only box that the four-day retreat I applied to would have ticked. The box I most want to eschew! I’d applied for all the wrong reasons. Looking honestly at my requirements allowed me to at least start with the right question: what is the easiest way to get several months alone in a quiet room? (Yes, yes, cue Virginia Woolf.)

Interests & Identity

So why not apply to longer residencies? Longer residencies with bigger stipends would tend to be more competitive, not less. It is important to decouple competitiveness from quality here. This is not to say residency winners aren’t doing quality work—I am sure many if not most of them are. However, funds are limited, and competitive residencies largely track with the literary zeitgeist, which currently favors the whole social-utility line of thinking my work chafes against. I like to imagine the writing residency pitches for the kind of books I want to write, and how those would go over. You think Nabakov would have had much luck with a WIP about a charming pedophile? Melville with “there’s a lot of whales”? Beautiful, useless novels tend to be harder to pitch in progress, as their merits are often so deeply embedded in the actual sentences—in the realized work itself.

My person is almost a harder sell than my subject matter. “You are not marketable,” a publishing professional once told me, “because you haven’t overcome any adversity.” I say this not as a sob story—it’s obviously just the opposite—but in a snobbist industry awash with material suffering, what writing residency would want to back a privileged management consultant? The optics are ludicrously bad; I can’t even blame them. She can fund it herself, I imagine them thinking. And it’s hard to argue, because they are right. I can do it better, actually—in a manner tailored to my specific requirements and with less uncertainty.

Economics, Vocation & Avocation

This all brings me to another maxim worth questioning, the one that goes something like: make your avocation your vocation, and you’ll never work a day in your life. It rolls off the tongue better than find a lucrative day job you like well enough to fund your passions, but the latter’s been truer in my experience. It took me several years to fully enjoy museums after leaving the Met—a career path I’d been free to pursue for love of art (and, let’s be real, the institution’s cultural cachet) thanks only to parental and spousal support. When I left for big consulting, I tripled my salary. This was by design. The surprise was I liked the new job better, too—not just a little bit, but a lot. Way more than three times more.

The problem is vocations adjacent to artistic avocations tend to provide neither the material benefits of a traditional job nor the metaphysical benefits of creative pursuits. Better to find unrelated work that pays well and take breaks from it to do the thing you actually want to do. It’s almost certainly less precarious and probably less time-consuming than the alternatives.

There are a couple pitfalls to my strategy, requiring a good deal of what my friend

Luke Burgis

calls anti-mimetic thinking to surmount. The first is facing snobbist literary disdain for your day job as some sullied, disreputable thing. I find it helpful to remember (1) that the foundation of snobbism is literally nothing and (2) the art and publishing worlds are often equally sullied. How many times did I pass the Sackler Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum? Isn’t Catapult capriciously funded by Elizabeth Koch? In a capitalist society, morally pure income streams rarely flow at the level of industry; these are stones tumbling down from glass houses—often underfunded glass houses of envy. I try not to pay them much mind.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the allure of golden handcuffs and the lulling tendency for a lucrative job you like well enough to supplant your passions entirely. This one has been . . . harder for me. I genuinely like my day job, and I love luxury. It is all too easy to wait another quarter, another promotion cycle before going on leave, for accelerating spending patterns and refining tastes to make doing so seem forever just out of reach. So, someday is not a good approach here. I recommend either right now, or choosing an extremely specific date.

Hot second-novel summer

This time I went the specific date route, picking summer both for its being the slowest season at the office and its desirability for renting a second place in reasonable proximity to DC. My first impulse had admittedly been a closer copy of round one and jetting off to Europe. It was my husband who convinced me the Delaware shore was a better tack now—ie, with a four-and-a-half year old. I’d get way more done if I had a whole house to myself (Virginia Woolf was not a parent), and we could all have fun at the beach together on weekends and holidays.

I’m loath to admit just how right he was. In 2016-17 I averaged 5000 words per month on Portrait. This June I wrote 20K—added to the chapter I wrote three years ago, about a third of the novel, which I sent to my agent earlier this week. If I continue at this pace, I could conceivably finish by the end of August before returning to work. We’ll see! Fiction is capricious, and my poor trapped pandas may tire, but it’s the goal.

The house, by the way, is nothing fancy—a one-bedroom cottage with at best a shabby sort of glamour. But it’s across from a park with a playground and a Saturday farmer’s market, a ten-minute walk to the lovely historic town, and ten-minute bike ride to the beach. I don’t miss not having a car during the week . . . I’m mostly just writing, 60-70 hours per. I do miss my son, and my husband—the real lynchpin of this entire enterprise—but it makes our reunions all the sweeter, and the weekends a delightful break.

Because by Friday, I do need the break. Another paradox: novel-writing is hedonistic and a great challenge—especially if you want to sell it, which, make no mistake, I do. It’s the surest path to writing another one.

ANJ