On Growth, Stubbornness, and Working On a Memoir for (something like) Ten Years

Me, shortly after I arrived in China and Tibet in 1999, at Namtso Lake in Tibet.

Sometimes I feel ashamed when people ask if I’m still working on the same book. Yes, for almost a decade now I’ve been working on a memoir, SEARCHING FOR THE HEART RADICAL, with some periods away from it in between. Most of the chapters originated during my time in grad school from 2004-2006, although many of the seeds of those pieces had already been planted during the years I lived and wrote in China from 1999-2002. And in some respects, you might say I’ve been working on this book since the day I was born.

This book has taught me a ton—about the process of writing and about myself. I have grown so much as a writer over these years that I have felt compelled to go back and rewrite most of the pieces, again and again and again. And because it’s a book about discovering myself during my twenties—and I started writing it while still in my twenties—it’s also a book whose deeper meaning has been elusive and unfolding as I’ve grown as a person.

If I could do it all over again, I’m not sure what, if anything, I would do differently. Initially, I wrote almost every chapter as a piece that could stand alone. They came out that way, and this also made it easier to submit stuff to writing group critiques or literary magazines. Eventually though, and perhaps even from the beginning, I knew I was writing a book. I then spent many years stringing the pieces together, agonizing about whether to call it a “collection of essays” or a “memoir”, submitting it to agents and later small presses, getting sick of it, putting it down for months or years at a time, losing faith in it, and then finally dusting it off, sitting down and becoming obsessed with it all over again.

It’s been a labor of love. Of dogged stubbornness. Of moments filled with doubt (this writing is crappy and self-absorbed), and moments filled with pride (this is a great book that will speak to many!). Yet finally, what’s pushed me on is simply the knowledge that, no matter how many people the book ultimately reaches, I must get it out there, share it, find closure, move on.

In retrospect, it would have been a whole lot easier to have conceived of it as a whole memoir from the get-go, and mapped it out as such, not having to later convert all the original stand-alone pieces. But, that’s not the way my process went. I needed the writing practice, and I needed to let it unfold organically, to just let it become what it would become. I never imagined that it would take me almost ten years to finally get to the point where I feel like the book is cohesive and whole, and where I’ve finally accessed the necessary perspective that I needed in order to infuse the book with a more seasoned perspective.

I never was good at having an elevator speech, and maybe this should have been my clue that I still hadn’t honed what it was about, at core. “My book is about my travels between China and America in my twenties,” I’d say (but it’s not a travel book). “My book is about growing up half-Chinese, and searching for my cultural and spiritual identity,” (true, but kind of vague). “My book is about my longing for language, love, and belonging” (closer, but more vague). Fine, then, my book is about me, I’d say, only sort of kidding. It was all of the above. And then some. Which was it? Was it trying to be too many things? Did I need to lose the threads about Buddhism and Tibet, and focus more on the cultural identity theme, about growing up bilingual, then living in China and entering a relationship with a Chinese man?

Now, anyone who’s taken a course in memoir can tell you that memoir is not autobiography. Memoir is not the entire story of your life; memoir is a story from your life. So pick one theme, one particular thread, and tell that story well. Leave out lots of other important stories and details if they don’t serve the one story at hand. Trust that there will be other books in you; that you can tell the other stories elsewhere. Find your focus.

For a while, I feared I was not heeding this basic advice. I feared I was holding on too tightly to wanting to tell ALL of my story--  my coming of age, self-discovery, spiritual-heart-opening, obsession with language and China, longing for intimacy, and searching for home story. But when I tried to cut out the pieces about my obsession with Tibet and my initial spiritual awakening, it still wasn’t working. Now there were gaps in chronology I was trying to disguise, and, moreover, there were gaps in adequately expressing what was really going on inside of me, on the most intimate level.

My readers/editors wanted it to be a cohesive, linear whole, not a collection of linked pieces, because the blueprint of my story was already there. What was missing was a deeper, seasoned thread of reflection to stitch it all together. Don’t get me wrong, there was plenty of “telling” in the manuscript, maybe too much. But this reflection still belonged to each piece alone and didn’t yet do much in the way of making the pieces speak to each other as a whole. And ironically, the book itself is about wanting to feel whole.

Finally, about a year ago (after taking an awesome workshop with Lydia Yuknavitch on finding your core metaphors), I was inspired to break out the dusty manuscript again (after a mostly motherhood-driven, three-year hiatus), and write a new piece/introduction called “Mirror Face.” In this piece, I went back to one of my original metaphors, first unearthed in a piece I wrote in 1997 for my first college creative writing class. It was a piece about vision, mirrors, reflections, identity and self-consciousness. It’s central metaphor began with me, as a child, looking in a mirror and hating the way my two eyes did not match—the way one of my eyes was creaseless, like a Chinese eye, and the other eye had a fold, like a Westerner’s. It was a piece about how I saw and judged myself, and in turn feared others saw and judged me.

There it was. A new beginning to my book. A new beginning that had existed all along, but that for some reason I’d failed to see belonged. And from this new (old) beginning, I suddenly saw the entire book framed anew. It wasn’t that the theme of cultural identity wasn’t already prominent in almost every chapter, but it had never been introduced in quite the same way. Something about sharing my childhood vulnerability and speaking directly to my desire to overcome my early seeds of self-consciousness, was crucial in informing the linear story at  hand about living in China, and my longing to find a spiritual path and to become fluent in Chinese as an adult. Something about that one central metaphor helped me to tie it all together better, and see and love the book anew. And with a new beginning, I was better able to determine which pieces needed to stay or go, and to write a new ending that helped the book come full circle.

So here I am. Still editing the epilogue and waiting to get feedback from my copyeditor/friend, before we start the process of designing, creating and self-publishing the book. Sometimes I still get hit with pangs of, maybe I should try one last time to get a publisher, after all, the book’s a new and improved animal now, but something about time and motherhood has infused my life with a more urgent perspective. I am ready to get this book out in the world NOW. I do not want to wait again for months to hear back from agents, and even if I got one quickly this time, it could take years more for the agent to place the book, if they even could. And then, after that, another couple years before it would come out. That could be another five years of my life! No, thank you. I have other projects on the backburner, including another book I've already started and received funding to work on, and projects that (I hope) will not take me as long to complete as this one.

But you never know. Maybe I am just one of those slow writers who writes long books and takes a long time to understand what she is truly writing. It doesn’t matter. I trust now that these things just have to take their course. You can be as disciplined about your writing and self-imposed deadlines as you want, but you can’t force the process, the timing, or the way in which your book’s core insights choose to be revealed.

Who knows, maybe I had to become a mother first, to shift my life so radically that I could finally see my whole younger searching period with new insight. Maybe it has nothing to do with any given age (e.g. the fact that I’ve been writing about my twenties and now I’m in my late thirties), but more to do with specific changes that happen in a person’s life that suddenly catapult our perspective into a whole new realm.

In any case, I now plan to self-publish. I will proudly join the ranks of the DIY culture, and do everything I can to create a beautiful, professional product and get it into the hands of as many people as I can. Because this book is important to me. And because I believe it is good. And while sometimes the best advice may very well be to let go of something and move on, there are other times when you can’t bear to do this, and you just have to keep trusting that there is more at stake here, something that you need to see all the way through.

Me, before leaving China in 2002, looking out over the monk's quarters at Labarang Monastery in Xiahe, Gansu Province.

The Journey of a Manuscript, or, Trying to Fit a Circle into a Square

Something quietly extraordinary is happening. How to put this simply? I have been working on a manuscript that I call Searching for the Heart Radical for well over a decade, and I finally feel close to bringing this process to a close.

It is hard for me to say definitively when I started working on this book, for many of the stories and themes in the manuscript have existed in various incarnations for many, many years. I suppose I have had the feeling that I am actually working on a book ever since I took off on my second trip to China in 1999, even if I wrote the bulk of the pieces at least five years later, while in grad school. Most of the oldest writing has been cut by now, but some ancient passages still remain, cut and pasted into newer forms.

For years I worked on individual pieces, writing when I felt called to explore a particular story or theme. I saw how the pieces could one day all be linked together, but I didn’t worry about the greater whole. I wanted to see what kind of structure they fell into naturally instead of trying to impose structure from the onset.

Gradually, I started to get more serious about writing and publishing. I became a better editor, and held my writing to higher standards. I went to grad school and got my MFA, I learned about the competitiveness of the industry, and started to think about how to market my book.

Somewhere along the way I heard (from several ‘in the know’ sources) that “essays don’t sell." Since depending on the piece (or the person), my writing could be categorized as either memoir or personal essays or some even lyric essays, I decided that it was prudent to call my book a memoir, or rather, a collection of memoirs. These days there were plenty of writers who were publishing creative non-traditional memoirs that were non-linear or written in multiple point of views, like Abigail Thomas’s Safekeeping or Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (both of which happened to be amongst my favorite books). So, memoir it was, I decided, as I drafted my book proposal and began to query agents.

Many agents were excited by my query—it sounded like something they might be able to sell. Quite a few asked to see my sample chapters, and then asked to see the entire manuscript (or what I had so far of it, since with nonfiction, the manuscript does not yet need to be completed when you query). It was encouraging. My writing had been workshopped by many, and revised a thousand times. I knew it was worthy of publication. I felt hopeful that eventually my book would find its home.

But then the trail of rejections. The first agent that saw the whole thing (thus far) liked aspects of my writing, but ultimately, could not see it as a whole. Felt it read too much as separate pieces, lacked a narrative arc. But I was convinced that if she could see the whole thing as I envisioned, if she could see how the yet unwritten pieces would tie it all together, she would see that it did have an arc, very much so. So I decided to finish the book before I bothered to query more. Then, if I still got the same feedback, I would know for sure that it was based on the actual writing and not the outline of the writing to come.

This was back in 2007, I believe. And so I kept writing. And writing. And writing. I delved into long pieces about my spiritual evolution, about my youthful involvement with the Tibetan Independence movement, about my history of intimate relationships. I wrote short “bridge” pieces which helped fill in some blanks or explain jumps in chronology. I knew that in order for a memoir to be marketable it needed to have a clear idea, and I admittedly had trouble articulating in a nutshell what my book was about. Geographically, it took me from America to China and back and forth several times again, and so in this respect, it was easiest to describe the journey in a linear perspective. But I knew that this wasn’t a travelogue. And nor was it a book “about China.” Sure, you could learn lots of interesting details about modern China, but at core, it was a book about an interior journey, a spiritual quest, an identity quest, a cross-cultural love story, a coming of age tale—all of the above. I revised my synopsis many times, and finally alighted on a description that I felt did it justice. And yet, there was always some part of me that knew I wasn’t entirely representing it truthfully.

The manuscript grew and grew. It was almost twice as long as it had been when I finished grad school. It had definitely become much more of a proper “memoir”, and yet, inside I knew that many of the newer pieces (or oldest pieces that I kept trying to breathe new life into) weren’t as strong. But if this were to be a memoir with a narrative arc, I couldn’t see how to cut them; I had to somehow make them work.

At a certain point, a couple years ago, I decided to start sending the manuscript directly to small presses where it was more likely to find a home anyway. Again, I got enough interest to keep me hopeful. And yet, now I was pregnant. And soon, I would have a baby. And I knew that I would no longer have the time to keep researching and sending it out en masse. (Not to mention how expensive it gets to send a 350 page manuscript to New York, and how much time it takes-- months and months-- for them to reply.)

So fast-forward to now, almost eighteen months after giving birth, when I finally have the time and presence of mind again to start thinking about this pesky, beloved, dreaded manuscript. I’ve always known, I can’t just abandon it, be done with it. Some kind of closure needs to happen. And I’ve always trusted that this is not just some pipe dream. So what to do?

I’d never entirely rejected the idea of self-publishing, but I considered it a last resort. I wanted the esteem of being published with a real press. And yet, increasingly, I realize that the most important thing at this point is just to share this work, bring closure to this creative cycle, especially since I’ve long since moved on and started working on other projects. And as I’ve learned about self-publishing models that don’t require huge chunks of cash to order a minimum number of books that may sit and mold in one’s basement for years, but that instead people can order via Amazon and that will print on demand, I’ve started to warm up more to the idea. Finally, just recently, I’ve started to feel those first tingles of acceptance and excitement that say, Yes, let’s do this. Let’s go for it, take a plunge, join the do-it-yourself bandwagon and let go of any lingering stigma I might have about self-publishing.

As I’ve decided to do this (I’m like 90% there), I’ve had some major breakthroughs in how I see the manuscript. In short, I’ve been able to let go of my preoccupations with what is “most marketable,” and realize that I only WANT to publish my very best. This realization has thus allowed me to cut back the manuscript even more— in fact, to cut out almost everything that I worked so hard at adding in over the last several years. And in turn, to also call it for what it is: a collection of essays. A collection that, with the exception of a couple pieces, already existed in its entirety years ago.

Oh, the irony! You would think that I’d be incredibly upset at having WASTED years of my life on writing stuff that I inevitably turned around and cut, and yet, mostly, I’m just relieved. Relieved to alight on this new clarity, relieved to cut stuff that would have made some part of me cringe if published, and relieved to start feeling connected internally to the manuscript again, to start seeing it anew and feeling movement again, like something’s finally happening.

I still think there is a narrative arc, but it is not a traditional arc—instead of taking you from point A to point B, the journey I present is more of a spiral, with the same themes and questions echoing throughout on different levels. Letting go of the need to keep it in strict chronological order helped me cut even more pieces, and in turn, certain allegiances to sub-themes (like my love relationship in China) have lessened whereas core themes feel clearer (like my search to feel at peace existing in an "in-between" place, and to find my voice, whether in English or Chinese).

I think I always knew (or feared) that I was trying to fit a circle into a square. The fact that I persisted in calling them ‘pieces’ and not ‘chapters’ should have been a huge clue that inside, I still didn’t feel it was a chapter book—and yet, I stubbornly persisted in this vein until I exhausted that avenue.

Do I regret the “wasted” years? No. How could I? It’s the way it had to unfold for me, I really believe this. No time, no experience, and no writing, is ever wasted. Sure, it is tempting to groan in retrospect at all the stabs I took at trying to get certain torturous pieces "right", but I guess I had to do it this way, I had to go through all that, my own personal laborious process. 

So here I am. A huge amount of work still lies before me before I will be able to get this book into your hands. But the beautiful thing is, I can see it now, step by step, the work that remains. There is no longer the existential question of whether or not the book will one day exist, and in what form. And nor is there the same foggy sense that I am writing myself into some murky rabbit's hole or coyote den or whatever trickster characters might be conjured in this particular lesson I have to learn. 

It's too early yet to articulate just exactly what this lesson is, but you can bet that when I figure it out, I will be writing about it.

Dear Heart Radical: A Free Write

Dear Heart Radical,

You were an idea before you were the title of my manuscript. Book. Collection of Memoirs. Essays. Memoir singular. What to call you?

Does it even matter? Not if I don’t care anymore about “marketability”. I think, truly, you are essays. Searching for the Heart Radical: A Collection of Essays. Or Linked Essays by Anne Liu Kellor.

And what about the old subtitle: “A Journey Between East and West.” Scrap that? 

This is all not important. What matters is to love you again. It’s been so long that all I’ve done is loathe you, fear you, dread you, avoid you. I want to love you again. I want to appreciate all the love and sweat and experience poured into your pages. I want to share you, because sharing you is, too, a part of the writing process. Birthing process.

What is the Heart Radical? It is inner fierceness, not necessarily visible to the eye. It is an inner compass that helps the thinking, doubting part of me make choices that are aligned with the deepest, wisest, most transparent part of me. It is instinct that is allowed to function freely when all mechanisms of self-preservation have failed.

And the Heart Radical is also me, finding my voice. It is contradiction and complexity, demanding to exist and not be easily simplified or packaged for digestion’s sake. The Heart Radical is me, striving for authenticity, striving to walk the path I’m meant to walk, striving to do what my heart calls out to do, even when certain choices may not seem practical.

Because I am a writer, the Heart Radical is also about writing, about me staying true to my need to write, but I do not write about this in the manuscript. In the book, the Heart Radical is mostly about wandering. About revisiting my past through stories and travels. About seeking my roots, both geographical and familial. About risking exposure to find love, or at very least, connection with others. About risking vulnerability, for the chance to be seen and known. About learning to be okay being alone, as well as alongside another.

The Heart Radical is also about articulation, subtleties, and layers of truths. It is about learning to feel comfortable in who I am and what I believe, and learning to be okay with all my shortcomings, weaknesses and mistakes.

The Heart Radical is all of these things, and so much more. I love it as a title, as something to search for, because the Heart Radical is never stagnant and unchanging. Each passing day, year, season of my life, the shade and tenor of the Heart Radical is slightly different. Yesterday’s burning need in my heart is different than today’s subtle yearning. Yesterday’s longing for a lineage that could encompass my spiritual beliefs, is today’s longing for time, simply time, to remember what all those pressing questions were about.

Before I had a child, I used to have so much time—to wander, to ponder, to long and cry and feel lonely. Now I have so little time, and I do not feel lonely; I simply want more time for myself to even remember all those private heights and depths, all that scaffolding, elaborate cathedrals erected around my heart.

These pages are filled with stories and images of other people and places—in China, in Tibet, in L.A. But they are mostly filled with ideas and visions of myself. The book, the journey, is primarily an interior one, even if you are most interested in the parts where I take you to a sky burial or through the streets of Chengdu. I am only partially joking when people ask me what the book is about, and I say, “Me.” That sounds kind of arrogant, so I try to avoid that answer, but still I resort to it in moments of uncomfortableness when I don’t feel like exposing myself. It is also a lie if I say that the book is about “my time in China,” which makes it sound like a travelogue, and does not account for the pieces that are rooted in the States. It's about going back and forth, being in between. And if I say, it is about “exploring my cultural identity, spirituality, and relationships,” well that too is vague and non-revealing.

Anyway, that is all for now, I have to go finish my chores before I pick up my child from next door.

This free-write is just a beginning. A way for me to remember, to trick or cajole myself into falling again for my old lover, for these old stories, essays, occasional misplaced prose poem-- whatever they are, this collection of mine.

And why? Because it’s now or never time. I’m feeling this. It’s put it out there, find closure to this cycle, this part of this journey that is tied to this particular cycle of words, and move on. Because sharing the words is a part of the process for me. For even though they were originally written for me, they are ultimately not for me. To me, now, they are worthless in this form. They fester, they evoke a certain loathing. I need to let them go, set them free, release. Holding on to them any longer feels like a form of selfishness, selfishness born of fear. (What if no one likes them? No one buys them? What if I can’t stand to even read them aloud they feel so old? What if they don’t do justice to what my writing and thought process is like now?) Fears. I hold these pages to high standards. Perhaps you will too. Perhaps you will love them (love me!), perhaps you will judge them (judge me!). Do you see how it’s all tied up in my ego and mind?

That’s why to publish them—and self-publish, because I can’t wait any longer-- is the final act in this particular Search for the Heart Radical. That’s why I must. Okay, so I’ve convinced myself. Now, I just need to do it.

Why Self-Publish? An Interview with Noriko Nakada

Author, Noriko Nakada, reading from her memoir, Through Eyes Like Mine

Lately I have had a bit of time to start thinking about my collection of memoirs again, Searching for the Heart Radical: A Journey Between East and West. Namely I have been thinking about whether I should self-publish. I have worked on this manuscript for more years than I care to go into right now. I've sent it to agents, sent it to small presses, edited, rewritten and restructured it a thousand times, and although I've gotten good responses that have kept me hopeful and thus encouraged me to keep going in my quest to publish with a reputable press, I have not yet "won the jackpot."

It is hard, incredibly hard, to score a book deal these days. Especially if you are not famous, you are not particularly well-connected, and if the book you have written does not have bestseller/movie deal written all over it, and is instead, more of a subtle, quiet, or literary book.

There is unfortunately such a stigma surrounding self-publishing and so-called "vanity presses"; it is true that a whole lot of crap gets published that way-- as do plenty of gems. And it is also true that well-known presses also publish both crap and gems. Any way about it, authors these days have to do their own marketing and promotion (unless you are someone like John Grisham). So what it comes down to are various pros and cons about other people's perceptions, whether I still am hoping to teach in a university someday and thus need the  prestige of a reputable press, what I'm willing to put forward in terms of my own time and money, and ultimately, the question, why do I most want to publish my book?

Increasingly, as the years drag on and as I move on to new writing projects, I care less about garnering the prestige of a known press, and I simply want to get my book out there. I've worked so incredibly hard on it, I know there are damn good stories and sentences in there, and I ultimately still want to share this baby of mine with the world.

During this recent bout of deliberations, I decided to interview my friend and fellow Antioch MFA alum, Noriko Nakada, about her recent experience self-publishing her childhood memoir, Through Eyes Like Mine (TELM).

I've been following Noriko as she promotes her book on Facebook, and I have admired the way she continues to put herself out there, posting excerpts and reviews, giving readings, and generally not letting people forget about her book after it's initial debut. I can only imagine how hard it must be (despite how easy she makes it look) to try and sell your book, your baby that you've nurtured privately for so long, like some commodity. It's one thing to publish it; another thing entirely to keep encouraging people to buy it. It seems it must take enormous confidence, faith, and persistence. And so, I look to my friends and peers for inspiration and advice.

Through Eyes Like Mine is told through the eyes of Nori, a young half-Japanese and half-Caucasian girl growing up in the small (white) town of Bend, Oregon during the seventies and eighties. The book is narrated in first person, present tense, and Noriko does an incredible job of conjuring the voice of her younger self. Each chapter reads like an evocative vignette, highlighting the way a child absorbs the textured layers of emotion and nuance within her own family's tensions, silences and love. Young Nori's awareness of how her family is culturally different than the others around her is also a big part of this narrative, as are her observations of her mother's religious faith, sibling rivalries, and the adult world at large.

Here's what I asked Noriko:

How long did you work on 'Through Eyes Like Mine'? 

I started 'Through Eyes Like Mine' (TELM) during the first year of my MFA program at Antioch University. I finished the first draft as part of my final manuscript, so about two years.

When did you know you were working on a book versus just a series of pieces? 

Once I finished writing most of the vignettes, I had close to 50,000 words so I knew I was looking at a longer work. The trick was then cutting sections and writing new ones to help the reader move through the book. 

What was your writing and editing process like for this project? 

Writing each vignette started with the memory of an incident or a feeling. Then I tried to flush out scenes and determine what I wanted to say with each section. I worked on story order and flushed out themes with some new sections. Then I divided the book into three parts to help provide some needed structure. Once I decided to self-publish, the close editing began. I shared the work with several readers and even though I thought it was close to being done, it wasn't. Each time I read through the pages, I continued to make changes so I made myself read and re-read and re-read until I could read and not make a single edit.

Why did you decide to self-publish?

I actually signed with an agent right after I finished my MFA. She loved TELM and did a great job shopping the work to big houses in New York. Unfortunately editors thought it was too quiet a book so I kind of forgot about it and kept writing and working on other projects. I figured TELM was done and it would have been except I used Amazon's CreateSpace to order a proof copy of a novel I wrote with my students (I teach eighth grade English) and it was so easy I thought, hey why not do this with TELM.

How did you decide which self-publishing press to use?

I looked at quite a few after using CreateSpace to make sure it was the right one for my project and found it was the easiest to use with the lowest out-of-pocket expense.

How does the publishing process work with CreateSpace?

With CreateSpace you create an account and then they walk you through the design. You can create your own imprint to publish from (then it won't read published by CreateSpace) and they assign you an ISBN or if you already have one you can use that. You choose a standard paperback size and then format your book for the look you want (fonts, page numbers, margins, etc.) and then you save a pdf to upload. They have some cover designs you can choose or if you are savvy with Photoshop you can design and upload your own. Once you upload your interior and cover docs you order a proof copy. They send it to you and you decide if you want to make any changes or make it available for purchase. I ordered three or four proof copies before I was happy with it. 

What about costs? How did you know how to price your book? 

The price that you pay per copy is pretty low and you take home a good percentage if people buy it from Amazon. CreateSpace shows your pricing and profits once you upload your files (it depends on the number of pages). I wanted to keep it affordable and easy to sell myself so it's listed at $10. I also highly recommend making it available as both a paper and e-book. I priced my kindle version at $5.99. 

How much were proof copies and your out-of-pocket expenses? 

Proof copies, again depend on the page count but including shipping, less than $10, maybe even $5 ish. I did order several proof copies to try to get reviews, send to Antioch mentors and other readers. Those proof copies are your only out of pocket if you don't need any of their publishing services. It's a point of sale production so you don't pay anything else up front.
 

How much do you end up pocketing for each book you sell?

For profit, if I order books myself, they cost $2.81 plus shipping. So all of the copies I sell myself or that my family sells for me, I make about $7.00. If people order from Amazon I make about $3.20 per copy. I definitely went on the low side because profits were and are less important than getting the book out and into people's hands. 

What do you think are the benefits to self-publishing today? 

It's really affordable if you have some basic computer skills, which is great. But what is incredibly empowering as a self-published writer, is that you can get your book in your hands and into the hands of readers. You also get to control the editing process (which can also be a drawback) and make the book look exactly the way you want. You can also make it available as an e-book really easily and sell it for even less.

What about the drawbacks? 

It's a lot of work. It takes hours and hours to write the book but editing it to be copy ready is really a different level of detail. Designing the look of the book takes time and visual arts decisions can be painstaking. I got to know that book so intimately I kind of started to hate it. And then, after all of that work, some people won't buy it just because it is self-published. There is still a stigma and that is a definite drawback. I just try to remember that I want people to be able to read my book and self-publishing has allowed that to happen.  

What have you done to promote your book? 

Social media networking is where I started. I have a blog so I wrote a post to let people know about my decision to self-publish. Most of my readers are also Facebook friends so I wrote updates of the process every so often whether it was frustration with comma usage or excitement when the cover finally looked the way I wanted it too. Once the book came out, I let people know where they could buy the book. I blogged about it, tweeted about it and Facebooked about it. I asked people to spread the word (or pimp my memoir). This was actually pretty uncomfortable for me. I hadn't asked people to buy anything since I was a Girl Scout, but I figured even if I had gone with a traditional house, I would have had to do the same kind of work. Once the book was released, I set up some readings in my target areas (mostly in Oregon) and I published excerpts of the book on the blog to keep some momentum going. I also teach full-time, so I do most of my promotion during winter and summer break. My family and friends have been great at helping out and books don't sell on their own so everything helps.

Do you have any specific goals with regards to number of sales or the greater audience you want to reach? 

I started with a kind of arbitrary goal to sell 10,000 copies. I'd still like to get there but it's going to take a LOT more work. I think the Asian American and growing Hapa communities would love the book so I hope to do more promotion there.

How many copies have you sold so far?

I have sold about 450 copies in eight months.

 

What advice might you have for writers who are thinking about going a similar route?

Make sure it's what you want. If you are hesitant and still want to go with a traditional press, send queries to agents and test the waters. Also, know if you want to sell a few hundred copies for family and friends or thousands and be prepared to do the promotion. Let go of any stigma you might have about self-publishing and make sure your product is something you can feel really proud of. 

What has been the most satisfying part of this journey to seeing your book in print? 

It has been amazing to interact with readers about the book. Many are able to think back on their own childhoods and understand how my family's story is both unique and universal. Growing up, there were no books or characters like me. TELM illuminates the experience of growing up in a multicultural family and I now a book like that exists.

The hardest or most surprising part? 

The hardest part is motivating to promote. It's hard for me; totally unnatural.

What's next for you?  

I'm actually going to self-publish the next section of memoir. It's a middle school memoir called Overdue Apologies. I hope it will be done in November. I'm also working on a YA novel about a Japanese American family from Los Angeles during WWII called Rice Paper Superheroes.

Thank you, Noriko, for being so generous in sharing your experiences with self-publishing! If you want to read an excerpt or review of Noriko's book, or would like to check out CreateSpace, the links are listed below.

excerpts from TELM  http://www.norikonakada.com/p/excerpts.html
reviews of TELM http://www.norikonakada.com/p/reviews.html
createspace https://www.createspace.com/

What It Takes

A student asked me recently, “How long did it take you to write your memoir?”
How long? That’s a hard question to answer, for it’s hard to say when exactly I started working on it (and it’s even a bit of a stretch to now say I am done). A few of the newest pieces still need some revision, and I’m still not convinced that I’ve found the right piece or note to end on, but all in all, it’s more done than it ever has been, with no obvious gaps of stories that still need to be written, and with a nice query letter and book proposal to go along, ready to send to agents. So for the sake of feeling good and moving on, I’m calling it done.

But how long has it taken me? A few chapters have their inceptions in writing I first did ten years ago, and the themes of the book—cultural identity, bilingualism, spirituality, backpacking, China, America, Buddhism, Tibet, compassion, family, relationships, love and more—well I’ve been writing about those for even longer. While I lived in China from 1999-2002, I wrote almost every day—both in my journal and crafting pieces--, and when I returned to live in the States, I kept writing, joined writing groups, took classes and polished pieces for submission. Then from 2004-2006, I started my low-residency MFA program through Antioch in L.A., and had the privilege of more or less becoming a full-time writer. I house sat for friends, sometimes for months at a time—the most idyllic stint being the few months I spent out in Dungeness, Washington, writing from a room that looked out upon wetlands and out further to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Dungeness Spit. Every day I wrote for hours, kept company by Gracie the old Airedale, and Bonnie the obsessive-compulsive licking cat. By late afternoon, I’d go for a two-hour walk by the river with Gracie or else hop on my bike and ride along country roads and out to Dungeness State Park. At night, I’d pick tomatoes and basil from my friend’s garden, make a nice dinner, pour myself a glass of wine, and look over the work I did during the day, editing here and there, before retiring to books in bed. It was blissful—I saw no one besides an occasional nod to the neighbors, I was in between relationships so had few phone calls or distractions, and I didn’t even feel lonely. Communicating online about writing and books with my grad school companions and sending a packet of my work to my mentor each month was enough social interaction for me. I was as productive as I’ve ever been, working on new pieces at the same time that I edited the old.

For several years, I house sat like this, lived frugally, and polished and wrote what would become my final manuscript—and the core of my book-to-be. In between idyllic housesitting gigs, I lived in my parents’ basement in Seattle (not a highlight in my thirty-some-year-old life) but a way to keep writing nevertheless. Eventually I learned to call what I was working on my “book,” which somewhere along the way even picked up a title: Searching for the Heart Radical: A Journey Between East and West. By now, I’d had enough feedback from writers I respected to know that my dream of publishing was not delusional, and I’d put enough time and faith into this whole writing venture that there was no way I could turn away-- or feel qualified to do much of anything else.

That brings us to the last few years, the last few years in which I seem to have been repeating the mantra: “I’m almost done, almost done, almost done with my book…” only to see another year go by with progress made, yes, and yet still without a sense of completion. There were always still pieces to be written, or some of the oldest pieces (remember those that had their inception ten years ago?) now needed to be completely rewritten. These stories were important to the manuscript, the stories needed to stay, and yet my writing and voice had grown so much over the years, and sometimes you simply can’t breathe new life into old words, you just need to start over (if you can manage to let go of those old versions that are now imprinted in your head); you need to find a new beginning or angle of entrance, try and articulate new meaning out of the same sets of experiences, frame a part of your life through a new lens. Not the easiest thing to do.

And then there was the question of structure, the order in which to place the pieces, and the question of what to call it—a collection of essays, a memoir, a collection of linked stories? I’d heard that “essays don’t sell”, so I figured I’d better call it a memoir. Except the problem was, I initially wrote most of the pieces to stand alone so some were in present tense, some in past; some chronicled a day in the life, others looked back over a period of years; some were told in a straight-forward narrating voice, others were more lyrical. There was a more-or-less chronological order that I could put them in, but there were all kinds of gaps or overlaps in time, there were pieces that stuck out oddly in tone, and some that still felt amateurish.

For months (years?) I meditated on the question of whether I could indeed call this into a memoir. I drew inspiration from writers like Abigail Thomas or Nick Flynn who had fashioned interesting non-linear memoirs told through multiple points of views (e.g., 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person; or some chapters that read more like prose poems). I started editing out redundancies (for example, I’d had to establish the fact that I was a half-Chinese/half-Caucasian American woman living in China for practically every stand-alone piece, and now these repetitions had to go), and I started filling in blanks (i.e. writing “bridge pieces” that would explain why in one piece I’m here, and in the next piece I’m suddenly somewhere else, or seeing a different guy). Or something like that.

Finally, about a year and a half ago, I sent out query letters and book proposals (with sample chapters) to a few agents and one in particular took interest, asking me to send her everything I had. Yet in the end, although she felt the writing was good, she just couldn’t see it—it lacked a narrative arc and/or a singular idea, it still read too much like a series of stand-alone pieces. I was bummed, yet not completely disheartened. What she said made sense, and yet, there were so many pieces that I had not sent her at the time because they were not yet completed. So I decided that I needed to just finish the damn thing before I sent it out again; that way if it was rejected again (which surely it would be-- on the way to that eventual yes), I would know that it was rejected on the basis of the whole, as opposed to on the strength of the book proposal and about half of the total chapters.

So over the last year or more, I’ve worked on writing those bridge pieces, as well as agonizing through the pieces that have been most difficult for me to write-- important pieces that have admittedly been revised to death (and that in ordinary circumstances I would let go of because I’d learned what I needed to learn from that piece and because not all pieces need to see completion much less publication), but in this case pieces that I simply could not let go of because they were so central to my book. I suppose if I’d just given up on the whole ‘memoir’ thing and decided to call it a collection of essays, these pieces wouldn’t matter so much because you, the reader, would have never know what I was leaving out. But the way it is fashioned now, surely you would wonder what the hell happened in Tibet or why I quit my job in Chengdu, stories that I would have to have gone out of my way to not mention or to disguise their presence, which forced me to ask myself, again and again—what is up with these trouble stories? Can I do without them? And if not, am I willing to do the work to get to the heart of them, in a new fresh way?

Now, I’ve finally gotten the manuscript to a place where it feels whole. Now I just need to keep on at it, query more agents, thicken my skin, get prepared for the inevitable rejections, and that one, important yes. At the same time, I need to keep writing new stuff. As someone who values follow-through and needs to have a sense of completion, I’ve been so focused on this book that I’ve put so much other new writing on hold. Now, I need to consciously cajole myself into experimenting with new subject matters, genres, and forms. Hence, this blog. And hence the new book (which feels presumptuous, yet deliciously intuitive to even call a book) which will focus on my inheritance from Frank and Els, sifting through their writing and things, ingesting their lives and stories, and meditating on home, death, impermanence, what we value in life and what we pass on. (See my last post and future posts for more on this.)

So all of this brings me back to the question: how long have you been working on your memoir? Maybe I’ve been working on it my whole life, and maybe it’s only been the last few years that the actual ‘memoir’ has emerged. All I know is, for now I am calling it “done,” and moving on to the next phase of my writing life, whatever this may bring. I will always be Searching for the Heart Radical, I know that much is true. But I’ve also entered a mellower phase, a settling phase, a phase centered around the idea of being in one place and putting down roots, as opposed to the solitary wandering, heart aching, intense spiritual questioning that I lived through in my twenties.

I joke—and hope, seriously now-- that the next book will not take me ten years to write. That maybe I’ll be able to finish it in two. And I certainly do not want to suggest that others need to take as long as I did to write their first memoir. Maybe I am just one of those SLOW writers, and maybe that’s okay. All I know is, you never know what you will be given from the universe to write about-- as a gift, or an urge, or a compulsion—but when you do sense you have something to explore through words, that you have a story to tell, to uncover, and to understand more deeply through the telling, you need to trust in this gift, and you need to follow it.

You can’t know from the onset how long it will take you to get a story right, and whether or not this ‘rightness’ will then mirror the tastes of the publishing world. But if you are willing to ride that exhilarating, yet difficult edge between writing just for the sake of writing, writing for the process and for what you will undoubtedly learn from it—and writing for a greater audience, writing to craft beautiful sentences, paragraphs, and manuscripts that other people can read and gain insight from-- if you can ride this edge, and hold onto your essential love for writing no matter what praise or silence comes of it, then you have what it takes to be a writer.