The sinking writer

Getting ghosted — What is to be done? — Stick around like a bad penny — Cherish your illusions

I recently read a post by Mariah Kreutter about this liminal career state—‘emerging’—where a young writer isn’t successful yet, but people suspect that perhaps someday they’ll be successful, so they’re nice to you and give you opportunities.

In her post, she lists some of the signifiers of emerging writers:

I have 55,781 words of a novel manuscript. I have stories published in niche-but-respectable literary outlets like The Drift and Joyland. I have bylines in places your grandmother has heard of (The New York Times, Elle) and places your ex-boyfriend has heard of (The Baffler, Gawker). As of May 7th, I have an MFA (please clap). More impressively, I have an agent—a good one, the kind with famous clients who can legitimize me, a nobody, in the eyes of others.¹

I was very intrigued by this post. I also liked the one story of Mariah’s that I’ve read, in The Drift, and I have generally enjoyed her forthrightness, a quality that distinguishes her from most of the emerging writers on the internet. Hopefully good things will happen when her novel goes on submission to publishers.

The sinking writer

I have very little experience with emerging. But I know a lot about its opposite.

Because at some point in the life of every writer, you begin to sink.

There is no escaping this. It happens to everyone. And it tends to happen very quickly. All of a sudden, there is some invisible signal, and your career is gone.

Usually, this manifests as an inability to get ahold of people. Editors begin ghosting. Your agent takes six months to give comments on your manuscript. Your publisher waffles on picking up your next book. I don’t know if people formally think, “This person’s career is over,” but they just don’t feel excited about your name anymore. There are other writers who excite them more, and they talk to those people instead.

For a writer, this is very confusing. Because you haven’t changed. You’re doing the same things as you’ve always been doing. Sometimes you’re even doing the best work of your life! You feel like you’re really firing on all cylinders. But the writing world is done with you. Everybody has decided, simultaneously, that you’re not going to be the next big thing, so they see no compelling reason to return your emails anymore.

This is a horrible experience. But…what is to be done?

Well…you can complain about it

I believe you definitely should complain about it. I personally have spent a lot of time in my life complaining about this very phenomenon.

But the problem with complaining is that anyone who overhears you is likely to think, “Maybe you’re just no good.”

That is why, in the midst of these complaints, you must also discover some iron in your soul. You have to go the bathroom, look in the mirror, and say, “I am good enough, and I am going to prove it.”

Now, here is the important thing: you have to forget about winning over the people who’ve discarded you. Because those particular people are a lost cause. It’s like the pretty girl who rejected you in high school—there is no world where she someday thinks, “Wow, I should’ve really kissed that person!” No, because that’s not how attraction works. If someone is done with you, then they’re done.

So if you can’t win over your mental foes, how can you prove them wrong?

Well, what you need is to just commit to showing up like a bad penny. Then, years later, down the line, when your former agent or editor has been kicked out of the industry, or fears getting kicked out, they will come across your name, and they’ll think, “But I was finished with this person! They’re no good! Why are they still around?”

How can you accomplish this goal of showing up like a bad penny?

It’s actually not that difficult. All you need to do is stick around. Because the crazy thing about the writing world is that most people disappear, so if you just stick around for long, you can outlast virtually everyone whom you envy or dislike or resent.

And sticking around is relatively easy. All you need is to find some new group of people to hang onto. Some entirely different group of people who haven’t rejected you yet. Some group of people who have some respect for your accomplishments and (perhaps) don’t even know that you’re a loser! And then you go to these people and you say, “I believe in what you’re doing, and I am willing to affirm it with my life’s energies.”²

In some cases, this might look like joining some new social scene. Or writing for some new magazine. Or writing in a new genre. I don’t exactly know what it looks like for you. But it usually means doing something very different from what you’re doing, and then putting in more work than you think is humanly possible. And then sometimes your effort to find a new group of people will fail anyway! And you’ll need to find yet another group! And while you’re doing it, you tell yourself, “This is the real scene here! All those other people, who are so mainstream, they’re not in the real spot—they’re not doing truly interesting work like we are.” And then you just keep telling that to yourself, until you die.

This sounds very simple! Why doesn’t everyone do this?”

On some level, everyone does do it. Even people who quit writing usually haven’t quit existing. When people quit writing, they often just switch professions and do something different, something where their talents are more appreciated. Most people, when they suffer a reversal, do not just lie down and die. Most people find the strength to carry on, and for the rest of their lives these people tell themselves, “I am a person who persevered after defeat.” Most people, I think, are winners at life, because winning just means that you found a story to tell about yourself that you’re proud of.

In my case, when I started sinking, I told myself that I wasn’t a fiction writer anymore, and that I’d stop clinging to whatever shreds of social status I had from my years as a novelist. Instead, I’d return to amateurism. I’d just give away the bulk of my fiction for free online, and I would devote the majority of my time to building literary community online and directing peoples’ attention to worthy stuff that they ought to read.

This was great, because there’s no way to fail at this. There’s no way that it can ever be bad to give an honest review of a book you’ve read.

Cherish your illusions

You might say, “It sounds like the writing life is just a matter of finding a goal that you can achieve without effort.”

And yes, theoretically, it would be possible to just invent some story (“Writing book reviews is always good!”) and use that story to justify producing throw-away, forgettable work. But there is something Freud called ‘the reality principle’. Which is…there is a part of your mind that always pushes back against your delusions and insists on reality. (The ultimate delusion is the fact that anything you do matters at all.)

For instance, if your delusion is that you really believe that this content you’re putting on the internet is important, then there’ll always be a voice in the back of your head saying This doesn’t matter. And to defeat that voice, you’ll need to constantly work to develop that content so it can be as high-impact as possible.

If anything, it’s much easier to invent a story that’s close to reality (“I have no talent”), because then you don’t need to do anything. But the problem with this story is that it leaves you with no reason to live. Whatever you do, you need some story about yourself that gives you a reason for living. And if you attempt to live without that story, then eventually your psyche will generate one. So whatever story comes up, it’s best to just accept it and to live as if that story is true.

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Source [1, 2]

Land of Drought and Fog

Last week marked the release of T. Benjamin White’s debut novel—a book that I promptly read on release day.

The novel is a literary urban fantasy novel about a wizard who gets hired to help a Beto-like Democratic political candidate in Texas. The book is a thriller about the murkiness of electoral politics and how it’s difficult to fully invest in a candidate, even when you feel like they’re objectively the best possible pick. Also, there are wizards.

Last year, during my Westerns phase, I read a lot of books set in Texas. Not just Larry McMurtry’s novels, but also Edna Ferber’s Giant and Alan LeMay’s The Searchers. It’s fascinating to see the degree to which Texas buys into its own self-image and loves to self-mythologize (this was one of the themes of the Ferber novel, in particular). Now, in White’s novel, it was a joy to see some of these Texas myths updated for 2026.

I am also a big fan of White’s newsletter. He has a gift for writing posts that are both substantive and can hook the reader’s interest—like this genius post, which should really get more attention, where he went to a library and actually read John Steinbeck’s unpublished werewolf novel.

White has written more about his novel (including an excerpt) here.

1. She is correct! I quoted Mariah Kreutter a few months ago for my post on The Drift, and at that point I looked up her agent (Susan Golomb) and was impressed, because Golomb is Jonathan Franzen’s agent.

2. Blake Nelson (another consummate survivor) blogged recently on very similar themes and surely was an unconscious inspiration for this post.