Maybe You Need to Dig That Old Idea Out of the Trash?

Back when I was a delusional youth, living in Manhattan under the mistaken belief that a writer should live near her publisher and agent, I was working on what I imagined would be my third novel.

While I looked successful on the outside—I was regularly shuttled in Town Cars to the Fox News building to give my not-that-interesting take on many things1—the reality was pretty bleak. The publishing industry was just beginning to fall apart: publications that had recently paid me $2 a word were now asking me to write for free, my second book deal was for half the amount of money as my first and I’d been replaced by an alcoholic mannequin on the TV show where I’d been doling out advice for three years.

Also, it turned out my agent and publisher couldn’t have cared less that I was nearby—this wasn’t Sex and the City and I wasn’t Carrie Bradshaw. Also, it occurred to me too late, Carrie’s publisher and agent weren’t characters on the show—probably because they don’t need to interact with their clients in person.

My agent was a straight shooter. She’d found me when I was a magazine columnist and cold emailed me to tell me she loved my voice and that I should let her know if I ever wanted to write a book. I had just finished writing Party Girl that week so I sent it to her and she sold it the next week. She was so good to me—before I lived in New York, when she was going on her honeymoon, she let me stay in her apartment2—but I blamed her for the fact that my career wasn’t going the way I thought it should.

One night a few months after I’d moved to New York and some time before my second novel was released, she asked if we could go to dinner. Finally, the Down with Love sort of scene I’d been waiting for! I pictured (sober) cheers-ing and general ebullience, but instead she wanted to share a thought she’d been having about me: would I be interested in writing under a pen name?

A pen name? I spit out. But why?

“It’s a way to get around disappointing sales of a first book,” she responded, not at all unkindly. “Being an unknown can be better.”

I don’t remember exactly what I said but I’m going to guess that it wasn’t enthusiastic. I probably blustered on about how Party Girl had gotten more media attention than I could have even imagined and didn’t she remember the intense bidding war over the movie rights and did she not understand that I’d spent years building up my name and the thought that she considered it a hindrance was insulting?!!! What I know for sure is that this was the last time she and I broke bread.

As time went on and my second book was released to more oh-so-dreaded disappointing sales, I warmed to the idea of a pen name. I even started to think that I could go full JT Leroy and write under a male pen name. In college, I’d been a Catcher in the Rye obsessive who wrote all her stories from the point of view of a cynical male youth. And when I was on contract at magazines and therefore not allowed to write for any publication that would be considered a competitor (but I still needed money), I would write under the name Benjamin Fairway (my middle name and the name of the street I grew up on).

And so, shortly after that final dinner that I didn’t know would be a final dinner with my agent, I started channeling my inner male to write my third novel. Sexual Healing was about a suave, wealthy dude in New York who becomes obsessed with the one girl who won’t sleep with him. Then he finds out she’s going to a rehab in Arizona for sex addicts and is convinced this is why she won’t have sex with him—that she’s an addict and is scared she might become addicted to him. So he shows up at the rehab, pretending to be a sex addict himself (the irony being that he pretty much is one), only to discover she’s a sexual “anorexic” who also happens to be seriously pissed off that he’s followed her there.

Writing the plot out now, I can see why I abandoned the book. It’s not that captivating a story. I was trying to do a send-up of the ridiculous world of people who take their recovery a bit too seriously and it was based on this wacky experience I’d had when I went to a workshop at a place called the Meadows in 2005 (an experience I still resent, which is perhaps an excellent example of me trying to punish through the pen and realizing it doesn’t produce great results).

I will stand by the fact that the book was very funny, though a bit crude (there’s a scene where the protagonist Will jerks off to a picture of the woman he’s obsessed with but the computer freezes on a picture of her with her dad and he ends up destroying his computer—a scene I read aloud at one of Rachel Kramer Bussel’s In the Flesh nights at the Happy Ending Lounge; if you were in New York in the aughts, you know the significance of this). The characters were well developed, especially my favorite, Will’s assistant Molly, who had a penchant for caftans and a Dutch pot dealer boyfriend.

And I meticulously plotted this book out. My first two books, Party Girl and Bought, I’d written without outlines. There’s a word for this kind of writer that I didn’t know (being a pantser and not a plotter) but I was essentially someone who wrote books, assuming I’d figure them out as I went. With Sexual Healing, however, I wrote out elaborate notes for each scene.

I also joined a writing workshop run by a woman who’d written a hilarious first book—a book that had actually made me want to be a writer. Her book had attracted such a cult following that she drew in a steady stream of aspiring writers to her Washington Square apartment for writing workshops.

I’m sure I had major attitude in that workshop. I was the only member of the group who’d had a book published and another coming out—both from HarperCollins. I remember thinking this group was beneath me…wanna-be’s who wanted to debate every comma. And so when I shared my precious pages, I probably only wanted to hear how brilliant I was and how my writing couldn’t possibly be improved.

Still, I remember feeling like the workshop leader was harder on me than she was on the other people and everyone kind of worshipped her so she would say something and then they would all just kind of parrot it. Eventually the feedback and the sycophantism got to be too much for me and even though I was more than halfway done, I walked out of that workshop and away from the book. Benjamin Fairway was not, as it turned out, going to get his debut.

Now and again, I’d take a look at Sexual Healing. When I moved back to LA and signed with a manager in 2010, I told him the plot and he said it would make a great movie and so we worked on the script version. But the script was bad so I abandoned that, too. Occasionally, I’d think, Just finish it. It’s probably 75% done so why let it go to waste? But then what? I’d think. Go through the hell of having my agent submit it to publishers only to hear that I didn’t have enough Instagram followers to warrant a book deal?

Also, in the 15 years since I’d started writing the book, I’d realized not only that traditional publishing was dead but also that novel-writing was not a practical pursuit. I love reading novels—I review them on TV and occasionally write about them for LA Magazine—but the simple fact is that they’re creative volunteer work since they can’ help you build your career as an authority and thus won’t earn you money. At Legacy Launch Pad, we’ve turned down every novelist who’s ever wanted to work with us because I don’t want to take money from someone I don’t think can earn back 10-100 times what they pay us.

But now that LLP is established and I have the luxury of remebering that I can write for fun and for free, I decided I wanted to try doing a novel again. I told you guys about the novel that I asked Chat GPT to help me brainstorm ideas for but what I didn’t tell you is that the characters are Will, Alison and Molly—those same fabulous folks I created back in New York in 2009. I remembered them and loved them and though they now have different jobs and different relationships with each other, they are them. And they’re them in a much better plot.

I had no idea in 2009 when I wanted to murder the people giving me the useless feedback at the writing workshop, or when I decided to abandon the book, or when I was working on the script with the manager whose name I can’t even remember anymore, that I would end up using these characters one day. I hadn’t thought about them in years and if I had, I would have assumed they were lost to the ether. But they’re back and I didn’t even need to re-read an old draft of Sexual Healing to remember them; I’d created something that had lasted inside of me and so they’re as familiar to me now as they were 15 years ago. Bringing them into this new book makes me realize I never left them.

Maybe you have something you abandoned long ago that’s just waiting for you to breathe new life into it, too. And maybe, just maybe, this post is a sign that you should.