On Sustaining a Long Career

Photo by Nohe Pereira on Unsplash

I spend very little time looking back over my career as a children’s writer, a career that is stretching toward half a century now.  I almost never reread the books I’ve published.  I don’t even think about them much except as objects on my shelf that require dusting from time to time.

(I believe there are 109 of them now.  I was relieved a couple of years ago to pass the 100 mark so I could simply say in bios “more than 100 books” and quit counting.)

But an interviewer asked me recently, “How have you sustained such a long career?” and though I answered readily enough in the moment, the question hasn’t gone away.

How have I kept writing . . . and writing . . . and writing through all these years?

The first answer, of course, is the one most writers would give.  “Is there another way to live?”

I write because that’s what I get up in the morning to do.

Thinking about the question long after the interview was over, though, I realized that I have written as many books as I have for that reason first.  That I love to write.  That the very act of gathering words fills me with a sense of purpose.  But through all these years I have been pushing as hard as I have, writing as much as I have for the very simple reason that publishing pays my bills.  Certainly that financial necessity has led me to extend my repertoire so widely.

Which leads to the next question.  Was having to publish to survive a bad thing? 

I have long been aware that the term “prolific” when it crops up in a review of one of my books is not quite neutral.  The hidden question behind the descriptor is “How can someone who writes so many books possibly produce quality?”  And each time I want to say to the reviewer, almost always a salaried professional, “Just try living from idea to idea, from sale to sale, from one income-reporting year to the next, and then talk to me about the tension between ‘prolific’ and ‘quality.’”

(The first year I found myself required to make estimated quarterly tax payments against an income I wasn’t certain would appear at all, I was incredulous.  And for most of the years that followed, every time I emerged from settling my end-of-the-year taxes, I took a deep breath and said to myself, “Well, you did it this year, but you’ll never do it again.” And the next year I said it again.)

For the first fifteen years of my career, I didn’t live in this tension because I was married.  My then husband provided a home, food, everything else the children and I needed.  Including unencumbered space in which I could write.  And I will always be grateful for those years and for that support.  They made my career possible.

But in those fifteen years I produced five novels.  Six, including one that was in the pipeline when I left the marriage.  And while those novels were not simply variations on one another, I did little to reach outside my comfort zone. 

In the years that followed, I edited and contributed to Am I Blue? Coming out from the Silence, which proved to be a ground-breaking collection of gay-and-lesbian-themed stories.  I moved into how-to-write books and then into picture books and board books and early readers, both fiction and nonfiction.  I experimented with different kinds of novels, too.  I did this because I had to keep bringing down contracts to survive, and I did this because if I was going to write so “prolifically” I had to keep stretching to survive in a whole different way.  It would have been soul-killing to write a novel in blue and then another in pink and then to move on to purple.

Do I regret the financial pressure that kept me working so steadily and so hard?  Not at all.  Not because I have more books on my shelf as a consequence—though certainly I do—but because through all of these years the fact that I’ve had to keep publishing has forced me to keep stretching. 

And stretching. 

And stretching. 

Maybe I would have done that stretching anyway, without the necessity I’ve lived.  But if I hadn’t, I would be living today with a very different mind.  Less flexible.  Less open.  Probably less passionate, too.  Because stretching to survive has changed who I am.

And who I am today is an old lady who every day finds life more intriguing, more surprising, more rewarding than the day before. 

So much to learn. 

So much to write.

It has been a good, good life.  It is still!