They say having a child changes everything.
Well, writing a memoir about raising your child changes everything about your writing career. At least that’s what happened to me.
I’ve been a professional writer for nearly 30 years. I’ve written about everything, or so it seems, during a decade spent at newspapers, and subsequently as a freelancer since 1999. Along the way, I had personal essays published, and for six years, I wrote Burb Appeal, a New York Post column about living in suburbia. Writing about my life appealed to me, though I continued to take additional freelance assignments to earn income.
Five years ago, I began attending writers’ workshops, where I discovered I had an important story to tell. In 2011, I landed the stellar agent, Linda Konner, at an ASJA pitch. My book Rescuing Julia Twice: A Mother’s Tale of Russian Adoption and Overcoming Reactive Attachment Disorder will be published by Chicago Review Press in a few weeks.
While writing the book, I continued to juggle freelance writing. I was afraid to let go, especially long-term affiliations with editors. At some point I realized I had to release non-related book work, and reinvent my career – even though much of that entailed non-paid work, and I didn’t exactly have a big enough cushion from my advance to make the transition easily.
Financial adjustments were necessary, but that’s another story. More importantly it was an angel-devil struggle to convince myself I needed to spend all my time on my book, which apart from the writing, rewriting, and other publishing demands, meant using the rest of my time building alliances, working media angles, exploiting social media.
In the past year, I’ve written on international adoption for the New York Times, the New York Post, the Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, and countless blogs and literary magazines. I’ve appeared on radio, including the Laura Ingraham show. More importantly, I’ve built a community of like-minded parents, and hopefully potential readers, through my website, a short film I produced on the subject, and through online adoption sites.
Putting in the time pays off. And thank you Google! I’m being recruited to speak on panels, and for a couple of documentary projects, because I’m becoming known as “an authority” on Russian adoption and Reactive Attachment Disorder, a syndrome that affects children who’ve lived in orphanages.
At the upcoming ASJA Conference in April, I’m heading a workshop called “Writing About The Children We’re Raising, and Selling the Memoirs We Write.” Pitching this panel to the ASJA would not have been possible if I hadn’t brought focus to my book, and to building a platform for it.
If there is something you feel passionate about, let it guide your writing life. There may be an uncomfortable adjustment, there was for me, but at some point momentum picks up and you know it’s okay to forge ahead with something that means the world to you.