Author: Kelly Caldwell

Maybe you heard, but Gotham held a Nonfiction Conference recently, where one of the panels was on building a platform because it’s a thing people tell writers they need to do. But they usually leave out what a platform actually is, or how to do it.

And so, first-time authors make a lot of mistakes. In a panic to “build a platform,” new authors have started blogs where they posted excerpts from their manuscripts, which they almost immediately had to take down. (Agents and publishers want unpublished work, and a blog equals publishing.) They’ve started Twitter accounts even though they hate social media, or a newsletter because someone told them they should, sent out a trickle of tweets or issues, then abandoned them not long after.

What all these missteps have in common is an assumption that having a “platform” means having 25,000 social media followers, or a buzzy TikTok, or a Substack (which, according to publishing guru Jane Friedman can be dicey for authors). 

You can see how someone who spent years finishing their first novel might panic if they thought that’s what you need to sign with an agent.

Good news: It’s not.

“With platform, what’s most important is — make yourself easy to find,” literary agent Jennifer Chen Tran said at the conference. “Hang out in the places and spaces you feel comfortable.”

Making yourself easy to find can be as simple as building a website with WordPress or Squarespace, she said. If you use and like social media, great! Do that. If not, don’t.

Author Elissa Bassist said at the same panel that when she (unwillingly) started a platform, she “just did the things I wanted to do and tried to avoid the things I didn’t want to do, while feeling very guilty about that.”

For Elissa, that meant blogging, then editing a humor column at The Rumpus, where she published and ultimately befriended other writers. It also meant doing improv, attending shows, attending readings, making friends.

Also, and perhaps most important: “My therapist at the time was telling me to prioritize my mental health,” Elissa said. “I was just trying to have fun.”

Graphic novelist (and Gotham teacher!) Teresa Wong said she took a similar approach when she started pitching her first book Dear Scarlet. She already liked playing around on Instagram, so she started a project of posting a new drawing a day, for a whole year. She started a Substack, not because she thought she needed one, but because, during lockdown in 2020, “it was a chance to write and draw about the clothes I missed wearing.”

“Nothing ever blows up or reaps rewards right away,” Teresa said. “My goal was improving my skills, not really … becoming an influencer.”

If you’re still struggling to picture what this would look like for you, here’s a hypothetical, using my friend Sherry. She’s a little online, but not a lot. She posts pictures of her kids, and sunsets, on Facebook, but most of her online activity centers on knitting. She’s such a skilled knitter that pattern designers ask her to test out their new ones, the more complex the better. She attends yarn festivals and trade shows, so she’s very active in the fiber arts online community Ravelry. And she’s got an insta full of photos of complicated knitting patterns she’s tested and how they turned out, along with beautiful shawls and sweaters of her own.

When she gets ready to start pitching her sci-fi novel, (note my choice of relative adverb there, Sherry), the last thing she should do is try to start a Substack about speculative fiction, or start a Twitter or Threads account and start posting about books and craft. She’d be starting from scratch, and trying to interact with people she has nothing in common with — yet.

It would make more sense for her to weave (pun totally intended) posts about her book project, or her writing, or what she’s discovering on her creative journey in among her posts about mosaic shawl patterns or roosimine knitting. She could post about ways her two creative pursuits energize one another. She might even start connecting, online or in the world, with other writer+knitters and together they could launch a speculative fiction reading series, where every story has to touch on or mention the fiber arts in some way.

Is this all sounding a little silly to you? Good! I am a little silly, and Jennifer Chen Tran says above all, in this platform thing, “Just be yourself.” And also:

“I want you to know you’re doing awesome, and keep doing the good work and the hard work and if you need to step away for your mental health, it’s OK to take a break.”

Hear, hear.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

Sometimes at this time of year, I like to write to you all about love stories — how not to make them sappy and cringey. Or how to write a good love letter. Or writing a favorite setting that cracks your heart open and makes you feel like you can fly.

Why is love so challenging to write about? My crackpot hypothesis is because it’s so loaded and so fraught. Our desire for it to resonate with the reader, our need for their hearts to swell, or break, is so intense, it can get in the way of us writing these moments well.

Or I could be wrong. Once I asked the author Roger Rosenblatt why writing about love is hard, and he said, “It’s not.”

“There’s nothing special or different about writing about love,” Rosenblatt said. ““You just have to be a good writer—a good writer can write about anything.”

And what’s the key to being a good writer? That’s right. Rewriting.

This week, in her Substack Badreads, the author Lauren Hough wrote something about craft that applies directly to this question, and I love it so much, and it’s so true, I’m just going to share it here in full:

I wrote about it so many times, whatever it is. I wrote about it so that I could practice the reality of it. So that I could see it on the page. So that it could have a place to exist. Then I wrote it again and tried to understand it. Then I wrote it again and tried to make it sound right, the way I wanted it to sound. I wrote it again to punish myself. Then I wrote it to punish those at fault. I wrote it to punish the reader. Because I was angry. Then I wrote it again and tried to see if there was a reason to write it at all. Did it matter. Did it fit the story. Could I write it in a way that I would want to read it. And mostly, when the answer was no, I never wrote it again. But if I thought there was a purpose, I wrote it again and sent it to my agent or editor. Then I wrote it again to make it funnier, or whatever it needed to be.

People love to say there are no do-overs in life. Those people are not writers. We know the truth, though. If you want to do anything well, (like writing), you not only have to believe in do-overs, you have to embrace them.  

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

Every morning, the author Athena Dixon starts her day on a text thread with her parents and her sister: “Good morning.” “Have a good day.” “Love you.”

Here, already, you’re probably thinking, “That’s nice, Caldwell, but I thought this is supposed to be writing advice…?” Wait! It is! Because the Dixon family’s heartwarming daily tradition started after Athena published her book The Loneliness Files last October.

“My family and friends—I didn’t give them enough grace and enough love to understand that they would be here for me in any capacity I needed them to be, because I was so used to being hyper-independent,” Athena said in a visit to my class last month. “It took me putting my words into the world to really ask them for what I needed from them.”

When it comes to writing our stories, and putting them out in the world, it sometimes feels like we spend a lot of time imagining the worst outcomes. Students air their fears about this in class all the time. I wrote about it for the Writer magazine once, and so did my colleague Melissa Petro (who once got fired after publishing one of her stories). Heck, next month, I’m going to moderate a whole panel at Gotham’s nonfiction conference about managing hot-button topics and sensitive family members.

I’m not saying there’s nothing to fear. I’m saying, maybe we don’t talk about the good stuff enough.

And Athena’s experiences with her book are solid evidence that there’s lots of good to talk about. She started out simply trying to chronicle what it was to live alone during lockdown in 2020, but quickly, as most writers do, she found herself examining the experience, and then researching loneliness and its after-effects, the way it’s spreading through our culture.

And that’s the where the first really good thing happened. She understood herself better.

“Writing the book, it allowed me to kind of lay all these things out on a page and for the first time in my life look at them very starkly, and figure out what part was useful for me, what part is a hindrance to me,” Athena said. “Then by the time I get to the end of the book, I’m discovering for myself that I think there’s no solution to my loneliness. But I think there’s usefulness in it. I think I know now when I’m hiding in it, and coming up with my own toolkit on how to navigate that.”

Once she dissected her life and stitched it back together again, a story started to take shape, she said. And then a book. Her early drafts helped her secure a residency at Tin House, where she connected with Hanif Abdurraqib, an editor-at-large with the prestigious independent press Tin House Books. Abdurraqib would eventually acquire, edit, and publish her book. Which led to a book tour, and connecting even more with the writing community. And also to more honest conversations with her loved ones about leaning on each other. And a new family tradition.

Then, most recently, it led last week to Athena signing with an agent, Danielle Bukowski at Sterling Lord Literistic.

I’m skipping over the hardest parts here, especially how painful it is to dissect your own life, as Athena did, as writers do. I’m skipping over the part where Athena struggled with depression during the long, lonely lockdown months. I’m skipping over the many rejections she’s racked up in her career.

Athena doesn’t skip them, though. “Everything that I write that I put into the world is something that I’ve sat with and said, ‘I’m okay with people talking to me about this, I’m okay with people asking me about this, interpreting it, liking or disliking it,’ ” she said. “That’s how I buffer myself.”

The hard stuff, the risks, are always there. And that’s good, in its way, too. Because it’s the hard stuff — the uncomfortable truths we excavate, the failed first drafts, the flashbacks and setbacks — that make our victories so much sweeter.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty