Be Your Own Creative Path

On finding your "third thing"

Photo by Alev Takil on Unsplash

So much of the real joy of being a writer lives inside experiences we never share with anyone—it’s the writing in the wee hours with only the first chirping birds (or the hush of night), or the thrill of an idea that strikes on your lunch break, or the intimacy of revision, noodling over a sentence until its rhythms hit. Writing can be such a privately joyful experience.

Other than gaining access to readers, I don’t know too many writers who love when the private must become public—whether that’s the challenges of publishing, or the business and marketing.

Yet if you listen to the dominant expectations of publishing at almost any writing conference or in many ‘how to’ guides, you’ll hear a set of guidelines for “how” you should and can be a “successfully” published author, which often has very little to do with the joyful, quiet parts. It took me a long time to see how much those expectations are steeped in capitalism—and that’s only gotten worse since authors have been pushed to become media personalities and influencers.

If I say that the traditional demands of writing and publishing have always left a bad taste in my mouth, you might hear sour grapes because I never quite made the Great Big American Book Deal Dream. But oh, I came close. My first novel scored me Gillian Flynn (of Gone, Girl fame)’s agent. One of the publishers we submitted to told me she “stayed up all night to finish it!” but that ultimately she “didn’t know how we’d sell it”-- I was genre-straddling long before it was popular. Another of my novels was direct-delivered to an editor at Counterpoint Press who loved it and felt it deserved publishing but his team didn’t all agree. Editors who told me, “almost” and “next time” and agents who “loved” my voice but felt the market couldn’t bear what I was selling. I’ve stood on the precipice of “traditional Big Five” success many times and not quite tipped over.

Rethinking Failure

Unfortunately, close equals “failure” in the marketplace, but I find it’s a common theme among artists, because art rarely fits neatly into prescribed boxes. That doesn’t make rejection feel better in the moment, and I won’t lie—even having published books on the craft of writing with a small but mighty traditional publisher, and as someone who teaches writing and edits manuscripts, I felt like a fraud for a long time. Those who can’t publish, teach, eh? used to run through my brain.

Unsurprising that I started to experience “writer’s block,” I’m sure.

It’s really only in this past year, when I turned 50, that something bound up has begun to unlock. The ravages of midlife and hormone changes has scoured away what has been scabbed over— I stopped trying to chase a dream that has never come to fruition, to bang my head against doors that will only just crack open. I would make my own path. I will be my own path.

My own path has led me to sweet collaborations with groundbreaking small presses, like Sibylline Press, satisfying writing community, and to meaningful work that allows me to focus on what I most want to write (and just yesterday, to my publisher at Running Wild Press submitting Fallout for a National Book Award—with a lightning-strikes-a-lottery-winner’s chance in hell, but it really is the thought that counts).

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of success looking only one way. I’m exhausted by letting rejection discourage me from the thing I love to do most. I am just done trying to monetize my creativity.

Which brings me to YOU.

A Third Path

My path isn’t your path, either. But is there a third path, something carved and sculpted by you? I know people who’ve run the gamut in their creative “third things”—writers and filmmakers and visual artists and dancers who stepped off the expected path and stumbled into a wilder, or more honest, or truer little side alley that became a portal to something much greater. What would it look like if you didn’t wait for someone else to approve your art, your words, your practice?

What would it look like if you connected to your own purposeful engine first? I know writers who’ve sidestepped rejections to start their own publishing houses; artists who put on their own art shows outside of gallery approval; academics who left behind the institution to teach in truer ways.

If you aren’t sure you have one, look to what hungers at the edges of your life—sometimes it’s a sneaky little minnow you can’t see by looking at it directly. Sometimes you can only catch it when you’re doing other things—work and bill-paying and carpool driving. If you have a sense of what your third “thing” is… tell me in the comments.

If these turbulent times tell us anything, it’s that “usual” ways often, inevitably, fail us. Make a new path. BE that new path.

GET ON THE LIST FOR A VIRTUAL LAUNCH PARTY, Sunday May 26, 11 am PT/ 1 pm CT/ 2 pm ET. For anyone who can’t make my in-person book events, please join me for a Virtual Launch party via Zoom. You can attend by sending me your email address via this form.

What I’m Reading

Reading with eyes: Death of the Author, by Nnedi Okorafor

Reading with audio: The Dryad Storm, by Laurie Forest

Otherwise, latest news:

You can pre-order Women in Red’s e-book, and the paperback will follow soon! It releases from Sibylline Press on May 2^nd!

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New Events Added On the Fallout Book Tour…

APRIL

FALLOUT LAUNCH PARTY!! Saturday, April 26, 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. Fallout book launch party at Margarita’s restaurant in Morgan Hill, CA, sponsored by BookSmart of Morgan Hill.

MAY

Lit Crawl Sebastopol: May 17, 12-6. Very excited to be part of this event with dozens of other authors in my old stomping grounds!

Book Passage: Saturday, May 31, Jordan in conversation with author Nina Schuyler (author of In This Ravishing World): Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA. 1-2:30 p.m. PT.

GET ON THE LIST FOR A VIRTUAL LAUNCH PARTY: For anyone who can’t make my in-person book events, please join me for a Virtual Launch party via Zoom. You can attend by sending me your email address via this form.

JUNE

Bay Area Book Festival: Sun June 1. Bay Area Book Festival, signing at the Sibylline Books Booth

Annie Bloom’s Books: Thursday, June 12, 7pm PT. Jordan in conversation with Michael Keefe, author of All Her Loved Ones, Encoded. Annie Bloom’s Books, Portland, OR.

Gallery Books. Thursday June 26, 7 pm. Gallery Books, Mendocino.

JULY

Trident Booksellers: Tuesday July 29, 6:30 p.m. Trident Booksellers, Boulder, CO. In conversation with Steven Dunn, author of Tannery Bay (with Katie Jean Shinkle), Potted Meat and Water + Power.

SEPTEMBER

Readers Books: Weds, September 10, 6pm. Readers’ Books, Sonoma, CA. Writing at the Root. In conversation with Rebecca Lawton, author of What I Never Told You.

Central Coast Writers Conference, September 26-27.

OCTOBER

Elk Grove Writers Conference. 9am. October 25. Elk Grove, California.

LitQuake. October 25. More details to come!