What I’ve Learned Writing and Publishing Books

Thomas Wolfe wrote in You Can’t Go Home Again, “A man learns a great deal from writing and publishing a book.”

I came across this line while reading Wolfe’s novel for the first time in 35 years. I remember nothing from the previous reading. It’s a sprawling, self indulgent, bizarre, often brilliant, prescient, pontificating mess of a novel that contains some of the strangest and lengthiest digressions I’ve ever read in literature. But I am going to finish it.

It is the aforementioned sentence that I will take away from this reading, because it essentially explains the entire plot of the novel: a writer’s book comes out, and then things began happening to the writer related to the publishing of the book.

I read that line and then set the novel down and began to recall all the things I’ve learned after writing and publishing books. This is different from what I learned about gigging the books, although there is some overlap because I had to gig my books relentlessly to readers or otherwise nothing would have ever been learned because no one would would have ever read them and then responded.

In no particular order of importance, what I’ve learned:

You might meet the best people in the world who will enrich your life, or in my particular case, save your life.

You will realize that most of your friends and family will never read your books, or even women you are dating who were around when you were writing a certain book.

You might a meet dipshit therapist who believes going to expensive therapy is a much better way to solve a person’s problem rather than the free introspection required to write a book.

You will meet some seriously bizarre people.

You will engender jealousy and bitterness from other writers because you finished something and they could not.

You will be asked the secret of your success and offer only three words: Ass to chair.

You will find your best readers because you wrote about something you both care a lot about, like the homeless, a free rock festival, dogs, public beaches, and so on.

You will thank yourself time and time again that you didn’t choose the professor/academic route because these are the most cocooned, petty and neurotic professional people you have ever met.

You will always find inspiration that other writers chose the same unconventional route, like Virginia Woolf and Walt Whitman.

You like the fact that you staged a raucous and unique literary event down by a creek that was attended by homeless people because they were the subject of your book and they all read it with gusto.