Recently, I learned through a fellow author’s Facebook post that my latest novel In the Fall They Leave has been selected as one of twelve Finalists in the category of Historical Fiction for the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards. I was really pleased to see that four fellow Regal House authors had also been selected as Finalists in various categories: Steven Mayfield, Virginia Pye, Catherine Browder, and Stephanie Cowell. I’m proud to be in their company and thrilled for Regal House Publishing, a wonderful independent press committed to literature and social justice.
Yet this news was quite the surprise. Given the number of entries for the INDIES Awards—in 2023 there were 2,400—I had sent off copies of In the Fall They Leave with about as much hope as if buying a Powerball lottery ticket. Not that I’m in the habit of buying Powerball tickets, by the way, but on rare occasions, entranced by some fabulous and surreal number in the high millions and caught in some glowy vision of creating a Foundation and giving millions to Save the Children, Doctors without Borders, Greenpeace, the Humane Society of the U.S. etc. etc., I have sprung for them—and then re-entered the real world. So it was with the INDIES contest, in a way. A little hope accompanied by a sense of Well, you have to at least try—and then forgetting about it. Which was good, actually. Having serious hopes dashed is never fun.
In the next phase of judging, over a hundred librarians and booksellers will select Gold, Silver, and Bronze Award winners, as well as Honorable Mentions, from among the Finalists in fifty-five categories. So, now—hope, digging in. Unless I can forget about it all again, which I hope to do. A nice irony. Still, I’m happy for In the Fall They Leave. It’s one of my children, after all, and you hate to see them neglected, out there in the big world.
For most writers, recognition has always been pretty elusive, but it seems even more so these days. Why? Simply put, numbers. Consider this one: four million—that’s a four with six trailing zeroes. Four million is a current approximate figure of how many books are published annually in the United States, a number which includes self-published works. This statistic will likely soon increase if and when more and more writers decide to collaborate with Generative AI to produce books faster than ever. As of now, according to wordsrated.com, the number of fiction titles is about 440,000 a year. That comes to about 1,200 fiction titles each day.
So it’s wise, I feel, for a writer not to equate recognition with “success.” Hard but wise. Years ago, when I was first starting out as a writer, I had to teach myself to handle the pain of rejection. It was either that or sink into the sands of depression and give up. As I thought it through in saner moments, I began to see that dealing with rejection meant an attitude change. Success shouldn’t be equated, first and foremost, with external validation but rather with the act of writing itself. Simply sitting down and putting words on paper, day after day. Quietly going about the creative work despite what the world out there is saying—or not. Why hand over autonomy? Why let the capricious world of judges into your brain? In those days, the same story—or novel—might be rejected on 1) good heavy stationery; 2) a signed xeroxed form letter with a scrawled note; 3) an unsigned xeroxed form letter with no note; 4) no word at all. And then, months late, as if out of the blue, 5) accepted by a respected journal or publisher.
During those often long stretches between some type of recognition, lots of words got written, craft got honed, stories emerged and so did novels. Some saw the light of publication; others didn’t. But that was okay. I was the captain of my own little ship and didn’t have to turn back to shore if I didn’t want to. To be honest, this attitude didn’t fully inure me to the sting of rejection or that beaten-up feeling we call depression, but it kept me going. A writer writes. So, as long as I was writing, I was a writer. And that, I decided, was success.
Yet there’s no question that having one’s work deemed a Finalist in a literary competition —or, hey! a Winner—is a real sugar high. But compare that to the high of bringing into existence—out of vaporous thoughts and emotions, scribbled notes, and weak drafts, often over a span of years—a work that’s like a beautiful solid structure, each piece inlaid with precision. Something permanent, it might seem. Something that will delight and move a reader maybe for years to come.
Think of it this way. As a writer, you stuck to the process. You found a way to “mine deeper,” on each go-through—something my teacher John Gardner always urged us to do. And you figured out how to defeat the petty demons of self-doubt by banishing all the negative voices, especially your own. And after you finished the last touch-up and reread your work’s final sentence, you felt a nearly unbearable bolt of pure joy.
And then, you went on to write another work and then another…
That, to me, is success.
