5 unexpected lessons I got from the Tucson Festival of Books

I didn't learn which ancient spell gets you a book deal, but these were just as valuable.

This weekend I attended the Tucson Festival of Books, the third-largest book festival in the country. It was my second time at the festival, and having gone to only two author panels last year, I was determined to wring as much value as possible out of my three-day trip. So I attended five panels each day, hoping that at each panel, authors would share whatever secret tricks had gotten them a book deal and a seat on Arizona’s stage.

What are those tricks, you ask? I have no idea, because of course authors aren’t going to sit in front of hundreds of people and detail every tiny aspect of their writing and publishing journey—to do so would put most of Tucson to sleep. (I imagine it would piss off a few publishers, too.) They did, however, share their low points, air their doubts, and otherwise bare their souls to the public, meaning I received some equally important information to that which I unfairly expected walking into the festival.

I took several pages of notes at the panels and workshops I attended, but some of what I heard was so impactful that I’ve been chewing on it ever since, no messy penmanship necessary. Maybe it will be of interest to you, too. Maybe it won’t, and what I see as a game-changing slice of the writing life has been known to you all along. Regardless, I thought I’d share it here.

Art doesn’t need to be urgent.

Intellectually, I know many authors take years—even decades—to write their novels, but I struggle to process that knowledge emotionally. Instead, I feel a sense of urgency around my creative work, worrying that if I don’t get it out ASAP, someone else will swoop in with a similar story, or the “ideal time” for my story will have passed.

Putting aside that this is an obvious symptom of capitalism (which constantly demands that we “produce” things quickly and from a fear of loss), the authors at this year’s festival really reminded me that a successful writing career does not depend on speed or even efficiency. R.O. Kwon’s Exhibit, she said, took her nine years to write. Nell Greenfieldboyce’s Transient and Strange contains essays about personal life events that occurred decades ago; on Sunday, she said she “couldn’t have written about those things” had she turned to the page immediately after they occurred. Several other authors said their manuscripts took years to draft and years to revise and years to publish. If a story rings true, it will make it out into the world—it just might require some patience along the way.

Characters can (and often should) be closely tied to setting.

I’ve thought of myself as a setting-first writer for a long time, but until I saw author Amy E. Casey proudly call herself one at Arizona State University’s Desert Nights, Rising Stars conference last year, I thought this made me kind of an oddball. Saturday’s talk with Alisa Alering, author of Smothermoss, was like a “part 2” to Casey’s validation. Alering described their characters as “native vegetation,” explaining that the characters in their Appalachian novel were so closely associated with their setting that they “could not survive anywhere else.” This, Alering said, ultimately offers a sense of groundedness and texture that a story without a strong tie to setting wouldn’t be able to offer.

You have more freedom after you publish your first book—but that doesn’t mean anything goes.

In a workshop on worldbuilding, Suyi Davies Okungbowa said his publisher required him to cut several “fantastic beasts” from his first manuscript; to include all of the beasts would have been to violate the fantasy/speculative formula. A few books into that saga, though, the publisher became more confident in Okungbowa’s ability to sell a great novel, which meant they cared less about the details of how. Okungbowa got to incorporate his beasts back into the story in the forthcoming third installment of his The Nameless Republic series, and all was well.

But this doesn’t mean authors get to write whatever they want after selling their first novel or two. Julia Phillips, author of the immensely popular Bear, explained on Saturday that her second novel was rejected wholesale by her publisher after the success of her first, Disappearing Earth. It never saw the light of day; instead, she eschewed the pressure to create something “great” and pursued what felt true to her, which ended up being Bear.

Even successful authors experience soul-crushing rejection.

See above.

Branching out is often the fastest way to learn something new.

For the most part, the panels I attended at the Tucson Festival of Books were pretty on-brand for me: nature writing, worldbuilding, short story writing, and so on. I learned quite a bit at these panels, but it was when I stepped outside of my comfort zone that I learned the most. I’m no poet, but a poetry panel called “The Poetics of Place” gave me a lot of ideas on how to infuse setting into a story; a panel with Samantha Harvey, who wrote Orbital (a book I didn’t really like but also can’t stop thinking about), taught me there’s room for genre-bending in virtually any art form. I almost envy the friends of mine who made an effort to really branch out and attend panels on topics they rarely talk or think about, as those conversations seem to be pretty inspiring. Next year, maybe.

What’s been inspiring me lately:

✰ Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. Nafisi is an incredible writer, but what really stunned me with this book was the contrast between a rapidly-developing fascist regime and the lives of everyday citizens of Iran in the 80s and 90s. I found myself bookmarking and highlighting multiple passages that unfortunately felt eerily close to home; still, there was a sense of persistence and warmth throughout the duration of Nafisi’s story.

✰ All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews. I’ll admit that I’m only, like, 50 pages into this one so far, but Toews’ writing style has me hooked. I love the sense of dry humor alongside the novel’s tragic (and personal, for me) themes.

✰ Lady Gaga’s new album. We’re so back.