This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.
Your first novel is the crappy scarf you make with acrylic yarn that doesn’t come out straight or even. It looks more like a river on a map than a bridge. That’s ok; you’re still proud of it and you even wear it once or twice. Eventually, it finds its way into a drawer.
You make another scarf and this one comes out better but mostly because you learned to rip out the rows that were wrong or wonky and redo them, even though that sucks and you hate it and you mourn all the wasted time it represents.
Your next couple scarves improve on that first one. Maybe you try a shawl or a more complicated stitch. You finally realize how much the quality of yarn matters and you invest in nicer stuff. But when you get home to cast on, you find that nicer yarn is the wrong weight for the project you want to do.
You’ve learned so much knitting those scarves, so you set your sights on a sweater. It’s the most advanced pattern you’ve ever tried, but not completely out of your league. You take your measurements so it has a chance of actually fitting when you finish. You love the yarn, but as you’re making progress you worry the color looked better in the shop than made up into a whole sweater. Or people don’t ohh and ahh like you thought they would when you show them your progress.
You finish the sweater. You take a selfie and put it on Instagram and it’s your most popular post ever. Everyone thinks it’s lovely! It looks so good! You could be a professional and sell them on Etsy! People would pay so much money for your sweater! You start looking at others who’ve made this pattern and theirs look….better. But this sours your experience a little. You take a little time off knitting.
Then you find another pattern you want to try, one that pushes your skills a little. You know that if you can master this one, it’ll be easier to do the next. There’s a lot of counting in this one. Some gnashing of teeth about unclear instructions until you watch a few YouTube videos. You redo the sleeve fifteen times. But you finish and you love it and you post it and you get almost the same number of Likes as your first one, but this time you used some hashtags and people you don’t know like it and give you compliments. You wear it with pride. When people ask where you got it, you relish saying I made it. You make more sweaters and some work and some don’t and that’s ok because knitting is a life-long craft and you’re always learning.
This is not about knitting. This is about writing books, which is a craft itself, but one everyone thinks they should be able to do perfectly right from the jump, that every book we write should sell, and that when they don’t, it’s something wrong with agents, editors, readers, and not us. Because we were taught to write sentences in elementary school, we think that we should be able to combine enough sentences to constitute a book and those sentences should make a functional, interesting, worthy document people will pay money for.
The act of finishing a book, a sweater, doesn’t make it perfect.
But why? Why don’t we see writing as a craft like knitting? Ask any writer and they will say of course writing is a craft, and they’ll point to all the books they’ve read about this. But ask them again quietly, off the record, they’ll probably say that they’re shocked every time a book they write doesn’t work, isn’t published, or isn’t praised. They finished the whole book. Isn’t that enough?
I am a writer. I have written five picture books, two novels, and two non-fiction books, most of which my agent sent out to editors at Big 5 publishers. Only two have garnered book deals, so far. Nine sweaters; two that fit. Is this bad? Good? Am I a good or bad writer? Those numbers don’t reveal that information.
I am also a literary agent, and have worked in publishing for over 20 years. You’d think being a literary agent would have given me some cheat codes, some inherent knowledge that saves me from dropping stitches, gotten me a book deal for my own writing faster. But it didn’t. It took seven years and many submissions before one of my sweaters fit. I’ve already made another that doesn’t fit since my first book came out. The door isn’t thrown wide open for me, just because I know people and just because I sold a book already.
The act of finishing a book, a sweater, doesn’t make it perfect. When you can look at each word you write like a stitch in a sweater, one that might have to be torn out and redone, one that might be out of place but still lovely, one that might not add up to be a beautiful, useful, praised sweater, that’s when you become a writer who can stand the test of time. I’ve watched writers wither away because their early attempts did not meet their expectations. I’ve watched writers gnash their teeth when the book was not the one that got the big deal, hit the list, won the award. I’ve watched incredibly talented people chase sure things in a desperate attempt to make the sweater fit, only to find it was never going to fit them. The ones who make it are the ones who can redo their stitches. Step back and look at the project as a whole, not just the yarn and pattern and intent, and think about how this one will work, on its own. Those previous sweaters don’t mean anything, except what you learned from them. And the next one isn’t guaranteed to work either.
That writing is a craft is not just a fancy thing professors say in MFA programs. It describes writing that is work, that takes practice, that is hard, and takes time. If you expect to never drop a stitch again after you finish one good scarf, you’re going to be disappointed. One complete book does not make you a master craftsman. And this is what the master craftsmen know.
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Write Through It: An Insider’s Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life by Kate McKean is available via Simon Element.
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