Mindy: Today's guest is Caroline Zancan, author of the novel Local Girls, as well as her latest, We Wish You Luck. She's a graduate of Kenyon College and holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. A senior editor at Henry Holt, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their Children. Caroline joined me today to talk about the unique mix of art and business that is the publishing industry.
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Mindy: Your new book is called We Wish You Luck, and it is very much about the creative world, creative people, how creativity and our own personal projects can become such a drive. At the same time, being very much also a story about female friendships. So if you could talk for a little bit as an introduction about We Wish You Luck.
Caroline: Yes, so We Wish You Luck is about an MFA program, a low residency MFA program, which means that students kind of come to campus for these residences that are 10 days long, and they come for residency twice a year. And then they do their long term writing projects off campus and kind of have, like, correspondence with Professor at the times in between. And so it's kind of a little bit like camp. It's almost like writer's camp. This novel is narrated by one class of this MFA program.
Something terrible happens to a member of their class and they only know little bits and pieces of the story through rumor, through gossip, through little bits of conversations that various members of the class had overheard. And they're kind of coming together to piece it together because, you know, they're only on campus ten days a year.
Some of story happens off campus and in between residencies. So it's all kind of happening just beyond their line of vision and their line of knowledge until they kind of need each other to tell the story. So they end up working together to tell it instead of competing with one another the way that writers often do in writing programs.
Mindy: And can you talk for a little bit about that arena of competition. Because it is there. And I think that's an interesting thing to mention. It's not only present in MFA programs, either. Obviously, that is a smaller arena. But in the broader world of publishing, competition is something that, or at least comparison, is certainly something that happens often. So if you could talk a little bit about that mindset within an MFA program, but then also in the broader scope of publishing,
Caroline: I have an MFA myself. And as soon as I got on the campus, it was just so apparent how badly everybody wanted to be good at this thing that it is very hard to be good at. Um, I find writing to be the hardest thing I've ever tried to do. Creative writing, storytelling. There's so many ways to get it wrong. Um, and so it's just kind of like thankless, hard thing to do, and they're on these campuses are people who want it so passionately, so badly, even though it doesn't always make a lot of money. And it can take years of working and grueling over something before it's even has a shot at publication and, you know, wanting anything that badly that's such a long shot can read bad behavior in anybody.
But at the same time, it was so clear that this impulse was coming from a good place. They wanted to write something good because they had been moved or their lives have been changed by something else that had been written beautifully written by somebody else. Anyone who's a writer, even people who aren't writers who are just readers or aspiring writers, you know, can think of a book or a poem or a set of lyrics that completely grabbed them and just shook them up as a person and completely changed who they are. And having that kind of profound experience oftentimes makes people want to have the same effect on somebody else through their writing. There is this competition, but it only comes from wanting to create a wonderful experience for someone else.
Mindy: Moving that then out into the world of publishing. I know that many people outside of the industry have this idea of the writer as a creature that doesn't actually exist. Completely solitary an isolated individual, that is, you know, kind of a manic creative, but also always rich. And the reality is that only 1% of published writers actually can live off of their income. So is that something that you can like address a little bit as far as competition In terms of success.
Caroline: That's funny. Success is a funny word in writing, because what what really measures success? There's getting an agent it's so hard to do, and then getting published is really hard to do and then having it be well received critically, it's really hard to do. And then, you know a different measure of success is like selling a bajillion copies Is your goal to change one person's life by having written something beautifully that you're connecting with one soul?
I personally write, because I just can't not. Like even if I knew no one was going to read what I wrote, I would do it just because it brings me to life in a way that very few things do. Like, there's nothing that puts me in a better mood than just like an hour of really immersed thought and work in a project that has legs. It's just, you know, sometimes the words come and sometimes they don't and a one hour session during which the words like really come, like that's so invigorating and enlivening. It's just incredible.
I would never discourage anyone from writing like, I think writing is so good for the soul. But at the same time, like there's no reason to write, except for because you have to, or you feel like you have a story to tell, or you enjoy it Like if you're doing it to get rich or to get famous, even to have it be your steady income to live. I wouldn't recommend putting all your eggs in your basket for that.
You know, I am an editor by day, and I've read so many brilliant manuscripts that are beautifully written that just there's no market for them or the publishing house doesn't have a vision for how they can break this book out to the people who want to read it. So editors are really buying books not only that, they love, what they think they have a vision for how to sell on market. Even being great is not always, like guarantee that great things are gonna happen to a book, which I don't mean at all to be discouraging.
It's just like you have to write something, um, kind of with that in mind, knowing that you're writing it because you want to write it and there might be, you know, even if it's only a handful of people who need to hear this, you're putting it out there so that those three or five or 100 people can hear it. And in that reality and in this kind of world, you just have to think of success in different ways.
Mindy: It is a hard thing to say. It's a hard thing for people to hear, but it's still true, and that needs to be said. One of the reasons I blog and one of the reasons I started this podcast was because I, too, was someone you know, 15 years ago, I had this idea that if I got published, everything was going to be fine. Your life is magically changed.
Well, you know, move forward like 15 years and you know, I am able to work from home. I am a full time writer and that's awesome. I wouldn't trade it for anything. I am not complaining, but it is a constant hustle. It is not just my book in come that is what I live off of. You know, I'm always traveling. I'm always doing appearances. I'm speaking. I am teaching. I have the blog and the podcast, those are monetized.
Like everything. It's a constant, constant hustle, looking for contests to put your stuff into that will pay, looking for - I do editorial work, freelance on the side. I make it, but it is constant. I think that it's important for writers to know that.
I want to pop back to something else that you said that I think is inspiring. You said that you would write anyway, you write because you have to and I love that statement. I also write because I have to. I was attempting to get an agent for 10 years. It took me 10 years and five manuscripts before I got an agent, and at one point I was like - I quit. You know, I'm gonna go, I have a bachelors. I was like, I'm gonna go get my master's in something a little more applicable so I could make a living wage and go do something else for a living and kind of give up on this dream of writing.
And so I did. I told myself multiple times I quit. But just because I quit trying to get published, it didn't mean that stories stopped happening in my head. And so once, once they were there, I might as well write them down. And once they're finished, I might as well try to get it published. And once I changed that mindset is when I became successful.
Caroline: I'm not surprised to hear that. I feel like that happens for a lot of people - that's, you know, a familiar story. I also even now, having published two novels, I tell myself that the thing that I'm working on right now, like this is for me. Maybe I'll share it one day maybe I won't. I'm writing this story right now to see where it goes. I might finish it and then put it in a drawer for six months and take it back out and be like, this needs to stay in the drawer and let me go write something else or conceive of this other story and put it all together and maybe I'll decide. Okay, to show it to my agent and see what you think you know kind of go from there. But I think that if too many hands are on something to early you have too many grand, like final plans for something before it is what it is. It just kind of stops it from getting to be what it is trying to become. I think you have to kind of let something become what it is before you decide where it's gonna go, where it's gonna end up in what's to become of it.
Mindy: That's a great point because the actual creative process is organic. You can fiddle with it yourself. You can force things. You can, you can do certain things to make it less organic if you choose to. But the actual process itself is organic. Publishing is not. That is a business. And so as soon as you are looking at what you have produced as something that can be marketed. It has changed. It is no longer a work of art. It's a product to be sold, and that changes the way you look at it and how you interact with it.
Caroline: And also, like publishers, are businesses, you know. At the end of the day like, I think it is kind of the halfway point between art and commerce. There's a P&L for every book that is published by the Big Five, which isn't to say they don't care about great literature. They absolutely do. And you know they I think, you know, as someone who's part of this industry and most of my community and like my peers, my colleagues and my closest friends are also part of this community, and we are for the most majorly English major nerds
We didn't go into it as business majors like we got into it for books, and the love of books, and it's like not the highest paying industry and we're there because we love the books. But at the end of the day, like when I read a manuscript, my first question is like, Do I love it? That's always the first question. But then the second question is like, Do I know how to publish this? And then the third question is like, Does my company publish this kind of book well, or is it better suited for a different house? So it's not just, you know, which book is the one that had the prettiest writing? Uh, because it's just, you know, it is a business, and the business is kind of reacting to the marketplace. What people are buying. People don't always want quiet, beautifully written stories, right?
Mindy: And you were saying earlier, What determines success? What's your definition of success? And you mentioned awards and great reviews and things like that. And then you also mentioned selling a bazillion copies. And sometimes in fact, my experience, often times those are two separate things.
Caroline: They are. I think they are separate things. The third thing, seeing a Goodreads review or getting an email from someone being like, Oh my gosh, or instagram post its like - this book made my day or was such great company during you know, it's been a few posts like this was my pandemic reading like it kept me occupied. Like I do it to connect with other human beings. I think that it's the great connector between people who will never otherwise be in touch with one another. And so that's so largely off the page and unseen like I, if someone could be reading my book right now when I would have no idea because reading is something that generally happens in private on the individual basis. So when you do, like, get that connection or the reinforcement that it's happening, it's a really lovely, beautiful thing.
Mindy: Agreed. And as a writer, you get those e mails, you get those tweets, you get those instagram posts, and sometimes it can be what keeps you going through your day.
Caroline: Totally. Totally. It just makes you feel like Okay, somebody... I feel heard like somebody out there heard what I had to say. It's like that for me. That's enough.
Mindy: Coming up. Being both an author and an editor and the often misunderstood author editor relationship.
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Mindy: So you mentioned the pandemic. Obviously, we're all in it, and I myself follow the publishing industry pretty closely just to see what's going on. I'm really curious, like, what do you see as an editor? How do you see publishing being impacted in the immediate, obviously, but also then, like long term, What's the tail on this?
Caroline: I mean, it's so hard to say, because we still don't know. Everyday, it changes every day. The news is different and giving us a different timeline, publishing kind of, it feels like a very safe, comfortable, inviting group of people to work with. I trust that my company is gonna keep me safe and not call us all back to work before it's safe to get on a subway in New York City again. So I have that trust, but so I think that that means we're probably, you know, gonna err on the side of going back later. But what that means in terms of the calendar, I have no idea.
But I can say I am impressed by how quickly we have gotten up and running just remotely. Like we're still here. We're still open for business. I'm still reading submissions. Agents are still sending submissions out, I think throughout the history of the written word and books, the way that people read and the way that people make books has changed. The format books are read and the the way that people decide which books are going to be made and how they make them is always evolving. But there I think that the way we hunger for, and that way we value stories has stayed consistent, like, I think, as a culture and a society. We've always agreed that this is something we value now more than ever. This is important, like we're here, we want to be publishing books, books aren't going away on, and we're just trying to keep up with how that looks like in practice rather than in theory.
Mindy: Yeah, and I'm interested to see because audiobooks, of course, absolutely exploded in recent times, and a lot of that is due to the average American commute. So with so many of us not commuting anymore, I'm really interested to see if there's a medium shift.
Caroline: I think it's too early to say that. There will be like short term trends and long term ones, but I'm curious as you are.
Mindy: So let's talk about being a writer and being an editor at the same time. What's it like being on the other side of the desk?
Caroline: I like to think that being a writer myself makes me a more empathetic editor. It's very vulnerable making to put your work out into the world. It's hard to really grasp how vulnerable making it is until you've actually been through it. So I'm more of a Mama bear editor, I think, having been on the other side of it, I also really love the process. Like I love the editor writer relationship on either end. Like I believe in the editing process. Some writers don't like to be edited, especially ones that are really established.
I actually have gone the opposite way, like the further along I've gotten in my career. The more I'm like, yes, this is needs to be a group project I'm like, actually more loath to finally let go of a manuscript. Yes, this is actually ready to go out into the world they like, want to discuss it even more. Just in general, I love that back and forth between the writer and editor in the collaboration, whether I'm giving the suggestions or incorporating them.
Mindy: My editor is Ben Rosenthal at Katherine Tegan Books, and we've been together for oh boy, I want to say six books now, possibly seven. We've been together a long time, I trust Ben. A lot of people outside of the industry and especially aspiring writers misjudge the editor writer relationship. Whenever I'm teaching or if I am doing a presentation to the general public, I generally get that question - Has there ever been anything that your editor made you change? And I'm just like, Dude, your editor doesn't make you do anything. Yeah, I mean, a real editor, anyway. I mean, I have heard one or two horror stories, but few and far between. It truly is a collaboration, and that's something that is, I think, greatly misunderstood.
Caroline: I mean, an editor's job's really to like to protect the writer from the public. I think more than anything, the way that I look at it, actually. Here's how this is coming across, maybe you mean it to come across this way. Here's what's on the page and here's the takeaway from it. If you want that to be the experience and you want me to have that question, great. If you didn't want me to have that question and you wanted me to know X or Y, you should put that in there somewhere. It's to me... I just want to make sure my writer's expectation of how a reader is perceiving something are absorbing something matches the way that reader actually is.
Mindy: And it's very easy as an author because you have a preconceived notion of what that character's motives are, what they're thinking, how they meant what they said, what their action is supposed to represent. But it might not actually be on the page. It's called Manuscript Blindness. That's something I deal with a lot. Just as a freelance editor, I will have someone say, Well, this character is supposed to be this certain way, and I'm like, Really? Cause it's not on the page. I don't see it at all. That's not how I interpreted it.
Caroline: I feel like there's such a gap between what's in a writer's mind and what's on the page. So it's like, really, that's just what the editor's job is to close that gap.
Mindy: And I think too, having those relationships with your editor, it is interesting because once you've worked with someone on more than a handful of books, they know you, they know how you operate. They know your strengths and they knew your weaknesses. And without exception, every time that I have sent a manuscript off to Ben. I already know what my edit letter is going to say because I know my own weaknesses. I know what they are, but that it doesn't make it any less frustrating when I actually get the letter right and it's and it says exactly what I knew it would say. And I'm just like Mindy, you already knew that you already knew that. Why didn't you just fix it on your own?
Caroline: Well, sometimes, too. They are like a 1,000,000 different ways to fix something, right? So I feel like the editors job is also to be like, Here's the thing I'm noticing. Here are 10 different ways you can fix it and you can choose any one of these 10 ways. You can choose any combination of these ten ways, or you can come up with an 11th completely different way to change all that. Sometimes I as a writer at least need to like go through the 10 ways to fix it that are not the right way to land on the right way. You know, I need to, like, walk through all the potential solutions before I can figure out exactly what the fix is. Even if you knew kind of what you were saying, you knew where the problem lied in your manuscript, the conversation that exists or lies in the editor's letter back to you helps you kind of find that fix.
Mindy: It does. I absolutely agree. Why don't you, last thing, tell us where people can find you online and connect with you on social media and also where they can find the book, We Wish You Luck.
Caroline: I will start with the last part. I think the book is is available wherever books are sold or your favorite local Indy, Barnes and Noble Online. I know that a lot of the Barnes and Noble's are closed right now, but they're still definitely shipping books online. Amazon, of course. I think that there are like delays everywhere because of closing.
But I think it's more important now than ever to be buying books because you know, we want bookstores to be able to open when all this is over, even if you don't want to buy my book by someone else's book. So please buy a book that doesn't have to be mine. And then I'm on Twitter and Instagram. I'm a more active instagram er Caroline Zancan is my name is my Twitter handle and then CarolineZancan82 is my instagram handle. So please, I'd love to hear from you. And everyone stay well and reading. It's a great way to pass these weird, strange, lonely days.