Writer beware

Publishing that first novel often brings more terrors than thrills.

By Samantha Gillison

Nov 30, 1999 | Last spring, shortly after I published my first novel, I met a very famous author who referred dismissively to a fiction writer's first work as autobiographical throat-clearing. "You must get beyond it and get over yourself to find your true work," he told me. "Even first published fiction that has great artistic merit is only valuable to its author as a stepping stone in her creative life."

Seeing your first publication is supposed to give you a vantage on a career, on how to construct a lifelong project of a body of work. But, as I had just learned from my own initiation, many writers experience their first publication as a profound letdown that obscures many of the original reasons they wanted to write. Some authors whose first work is greeted with great excitement (or lack thereof) find that it permanently freaks them into silence or worse (much worse), mediocrity.

"There is an expectation now that the writer's first effort must be their best or at least spectacular, that you must cash in while you can, and that the whole culture is rooting against you when you're established in your career," says Newsweek book critic David Gates, the author of two highly acclaimed novels and the recently published short story collection, "The Wonders of the Invisible World." "Many of the [current] literary biographies tell the story of early promise and some success and then the long slide down, and now writers dread acting it out."

Lan Samantha Chang, author of the award-winning short story collection "Hunger," was so wary of the phenomenon Gates describes that, she says, "I delayed showing anyone my work for five years from when I could've. I wanted to be old enough to be certain of my artistic vision, to be able to withstand whatever happened when my first book came out."

What is it about the publication process that can be so disorienting? "Shortly after my book came out I realized that my relationship to my writing had changed forever," says Jhumpa Lahiri, author of the widely praised story collection "The Interpreter of Maladies," whose work was selected for the New Yorker's 20 under 40 summer fiction issue. "There were so many people attached to getting my book established in the world, so many new people who were in my life. All of a sudden my writing acquired a [new] seriousness ... I started feeling that all of those eccentric, hibernating writers made sense. They weren't weird anymore."

Yet, if by definition an artist wants to communicate with an audience, shouldn't getting her work out there be thrilling, especially for a first-time writer who's been dreaming about being published for years (if not most of her life)? Not necessarily: Even when the world responds in a good way, the noise can threaten to creep into a writer's head and silence her talent. This is famously the case with writers like Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger -- the latter told Joyce Maynard that he left New York because he couldn't stand going to one more cocktail party and having someone come up and tell him about his characters.

For some writers, the rigors of publishing a first book harden their resolve. The late Robert Bingham, author of the edgy short story collection "Pure Slaughter Value" and the forthcoming novel "Lightning on the Sun," said, "One of the darker experiences of my book tour was walking into the Cambridge Barnes & Noble with my friend Ed Hemingway [Ernest's grandson] and being greeted by a sea of empty gray folding chairs, with only two people sitting up at the front waiting for me to read ... It was an image of complete horror."

Next Page: Fitzgerald's debut made a splash, but Hemingway's didn't

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