Guest Post, Douglas Light: My Decade of Writing

Douglas Light

Year One

At age thirty-three, I forged three letters of recommendation, filled out an application, and applied to the Masters program in Creative Writing at City College.

I got in. Quitting my six-figure job in advertising, I focused my full energies on becoming a writer.

My first year in school, I wrote a short story, then another. I wrote and wrote and ended up winning three contests—contest that paid cash—sponsored by school.  This is easy, I thought. I can make a living as a writer.

I didn’t take into account that the contests were only open to students of the program, a very small pool of people. I didn’t take into account that hardly anyone else had submitted work.

TALLY

Career earnings at the end of 2002: $1,800

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Year Two

At the start of my second year in the program, I wrote a story about two young Dominican girls who’d been abandoned by their mother.  I workshopped it.  It was eviscerated.  The only thing everyone could agreed on was that the piece sucked.

I liked the story. I send it out to literary magazine.

Twelve rejections later, the Alaska Quarter Review picked it up. It was my first published story.  No money, only contributor copies. But it didn’t matter. I was thrilled. Finally! I thought. I’m a writer.

The piece went on to win an O. Henry Prize and be included by in the Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology.  Both paid in cash and contributor copies.

Two years into the game and I was on the cusp of blowing up.   This is easy, I thought.

TALLY

Career earnings end of 2003: $2,400 (increase of 33%); 27 contributor copies

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Year Three

I graduated. I never got around to picking up my diploma. It didn’t matter. I was a writer.

My thesis, a rickety, sliver-of- a-novel that made sense in my mind but not on page, was named one of twelve finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship.  This is it, I thought.  $5000 prize money and a red carpet entrance into the big leagues.

I didn’t win.

I didn’t place any short stories that year.

TALLY

Career earnings end of 2004: $2,400 (no change); 27 contributor copies (no change)

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Year Four

Five stories placed in one year. I should have been exuberant. But the joy of getting a story published in a literary magazine is a damp match, flaming briefing before hissing dead. I expected that something magical would have happened by then, that my life would blossom, change. I’d be successful. I’d be the person I aspired to.

It didn’t work that way.  At least for me.

TALLY

Career earnings end of 2005: $2,400 (no change); 42 contributor copies (increase of 56%)

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Year Five

I wrote a lot. I wrote more. I got tons of rejections. This isn’t so easy, I thought.

TALLY

Career earnings end of 2006: $2,400 (no change); 42 contributor copies (no change)

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Year Six

Two years of writing, two fired agents and 40 plus rejection—I finally sold my novel. Not the one I’d written as my thesis, but another, my second. East Fifth Bliss. The publisher was a small mom-and-pop set-up in California, two steps removed from vanity POD. I got a hundred dollar advance, an earful of naive advice from the publisher, and a nagging sense that I’d just bush-leagued my writing career.

But I had a novel.

TALLY

Career earnings end of 2007: $2,500 (increase of 4%); 42 contributor copies (no change)

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Year Seven

The novel came out in February 2007. It hit the market like a concrete birdbath launched into the East River—a small splash, a few ripples, then nothing. Forgotten.

I wrote more.

TALLY

Career earnings end of 2007: $2,500 (no change); 62 contributor copies (increase of 48%)

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Year Eight/Year Nine

I wrote another novel.  Shelved it.  I stalled out at 200 pages on the next, then stalled out at 140 on the one after.  Then I wrote After Lilly. I got my third agent. She’d just hooked a half million dollar advance on a novel by a new writer. Here we go! I thought.

Publishers called. My agent talked. Numbers were tossed around. Then the publishers stopped calling.

My friend and I had adapted East Fifth Bliss into a screenplay. We had interest from production companies, investors.  Named actors read the script.

When I told my agent that the movie was going to happen, she said, “Movies don’t really sell books.”

I let her go.

TALLY

Career earnings end of 2009: $2,500 (no change); 62 contributor copies (no change)

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Year Ten

Big year.  I published three stories. My film, entitled The Trouble with Bliss, got made. It stars Michael C. Hall, Lucy Liu, and Peter Fonda.  I got a chunk of cash plus back-end points for my efforts. My story collection Girls in Trouble won the Grace Paley Prize. I got a fistful of cash and  publication. I sold my new novel Where Night Stops and the reprint rights and audio book rights for East Fifth Bliss.

TALLY

Career earnings end of 2011: $21,400 (increase of 756%); 67 contributor copies (increase of 8%)

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Now

Hollywood hasn’t called. The publishing house that was to put out Where Night Stops and the East Fifth Bliss reprint folded.  I kept the advance. The audio book sales were tepid. The movie was met with brutal reviews, though it did well in Europe and Asia. It may pay-out eventually.

When I first started writing, my desire was for people to read my work.  Now it’s for people to buy my work. If they read it, that’s a bonus.

I have a new agent, my fifth. I’m on to the next thing, the next story or novel or screenplay that will—finally—push me over.

The writing game isn’t easy. At least not for me.

TALLY

Annual earning: $2,140; 6.7 contributor copies

Guest Post, Douglas Light: Connect

The scene:

Doors ClosingIndianapolis, late September, Saturday night.

The hotel brimmed with wedding parties and attendees of the National Black MBA Association Conference.

I was attending neither.

I’d been nominated for an award for my story collection Girls in Trouble—an award I didn’t win—and had just returned from the dinner celebration and award ceremony. Was I disappointed that I came back empty handed? I’ll lie: the honor and a thrill of being nominated was award enough.

Having fulfilled my obligation of smiling and shaking hands and chatting and posing for photos, all while waiting in agony until the winner was announced, my wife and I decided to check out the town.

We hit the hotel, changed, then made our way down the hall.

Waiting at the elevator was a group dressed in gowns and suits.

Nodding hello, I stated the obvious. “Just come from a wedding?”  It was 10 p.m. The reception would have been in full swing. Drinks, dancing, and fun. The group should have been elated. Instead, they were dour. They looked like they’d just been brutalized in bankruptcy court and were now pondering a eight-floor window exit to the parking lot below.

No one responded to my question. So I asked again. “Come from a wedding?”

A grunt. “Yeah,” one woman said.

The elevator arrived. We all clambered in silently.

Guess they’re not in the mood to talk, I thought. But I was cagey. (Was it due to the fact that I hadn’t won the award, the effects of the three strong cocktails, or nasty dessert kicking about in my stomach? I can’t say.) There was no way I letting this group off easy.

When the doors slipped closed, I turned to the young woman nearest me. “What did you do wrong this week?” I asked.

She looked up at me, startled. “Nothing.”

I turned to her friend. “What did you do wrong this week?”

Her face lit with fear. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

One last query. A man in his early 20s. “And you, sir. What did you do wrong?”

He shook his head, refusing to meet my eyes.

The leader of the pack poked me in the back. “You can’t ask that kind of question in a public elevator!”

“Is there any other type of elevator?” I said, realizing that—of course—there was.

But my question silenced him.

“Well,” I announced, “would you like to know what I did wrong this week?”

Everyone turned to me, rapt.

“I lied to my students,” I said.

“About what?” the poker asked.

“Yeah, tell us,” the grunter said.

“Well, I lied about—”

The elevator chimed. The doors glided open. The lobby. “Looks like we’re here,” I said, striding out with my wife.

“What’d you lie about?” they all called after me.

But I didn’t answer.

Yes, I’d been a bit of an ass. And what did that accomplish? Nothing.

But after a day or so, I realized I had been striving for something more.

I was trying to connect. Trying to find commonality in a crowded elevator. But we’d all done something wrong that week—how could we have not? We’re human. I was, heavy-handedly, trying to tap into that fact. Trying to acknowledge that we are all in a fight to be better individuals, and that we all, daily, experience the failure of accomplishing perfection. And it’s the acknowledging and sharing of failures that make us able to relate to one another. It is what enables us to bond, to understand, and to feel we are not alone. It’s how we endure.

Good fiction does the same thing. It connects. As readers, we may never experience an Oklahoma dustbowl, a vengeful ghost, or espionage in a foreign country. But as readers, we have experienced similar joys, heartbreaks, terror, love, and disappoint as the characters in our favorite stories.  And that’s the connection. The bond. The unique universality that affirms our humanity.

And for the record, I didn’t lie to my students—at least not that week.