Chapter 150: But…What Do You Want?

In early February I wrote about my colleague James Robinson and I posing the question that we ask our students at the start of every semester: how do you define success for this project?

The students had brought to the first day of class the photographs that would propel their reporting for the next two months as they searched for the stories in those frozen moments and assembled them into a book. James introduced them to the idea of identifying and connecting with the audiences who, come May, would hopefully be so intrigued by the anthology of sixteen nonfiction short stories that they’d be willing to buy it.

Over the ten years that James and I have taught together, our students have typically defined success by the number of books they would sell. Could they outsell the 800 sold by the class of 2019? Could they sell 1000? That, and the royalties they’d share equally, would mean success.

But this year’s class surprised us that first day: they were less interested in sales totals than they were in the experience readers would have when they opened their book. They wondered, for instance, whether selling fewer books in hardcover rather than in paperback might be a wiser, more elegantly rendered, course. 

With that they set to work.

Then came April and with it the events that convulsed our campus and, in the weeks that followed, college campuses across the country and world. Our students, many of them eager to throw themselves into the story of protests against the war in Gaza and Columbia’s connection to Israel, spent weeks reporting on the demonstrations_, the encampments, the police raids, and the growing anger that, at its worst moments, pitted student against student and professor against professor.

Some of them worked around the clock covering the story that quickly came to dominate life at Columbia, no matter ones’ views or involvement in the coverage. 

To their credit they continued their work on the book and by the last weekend in April it was published. I sent out a congratulatory email that was a none-too-thinly veiled call to start selling. I had assumed, based on our conversations in class over the months since February, that they were eager to get rolling.

I heard nothing back. I wrote again. Two days later my students – usually so quick to respond – wrote to say, in effect, we have this. I stepped back. By this point we could no longer hold classes in person at the school, and having no desire to return to teaching via Zoom, I held class at my home. 

My students gathered in my living room and were unusually subdued. I began to ask about how the selling was going, though I already knew the answer from the analytics: slowly. I had begun sharing the daily sales numbers with them, believing it might spur them to pick up the pace. That was a mistake.

This class has been a terrific group – as reporters and writers, as well as when it came understanding themselves as individuals and as a team. That degree of understanding of the class had eluded me. They began to talk about the events of the past weeks and the toll it had taken on them. One by one they began to explain that things were so raw right now, and emotions so strained that it felt unseemly to be hawking their book. 

I had committed the journalistic sin of being guided by an assumption. Surely, they’d measure success the way other classes had – and the way I did: by the numbers. But our students were, in effect, telling us that there was something that needed to be asked. So I began to go around the room and asked each of them the same question: what do you want?

I was intentional in the phrasing. I did not want to frame the question in the context of success. Rather, this was about something personal - what they wanted their book to bring them.

Their answers were illuminating. No one talked of reaching strangers, which as James had taught them, is the key to breaking out of the circles of friends and loved ones and achieving that elusive goal of scale. By now they knew enough of how to get there – the thinking, strategy and tools that, done well and with some luck (publishers are forever talking about catching the wave, like surfers) might achieve virality.

But no one talked about connecting with strangers. Instead, they spoke about those closest to them – parents, friends, teachers – whom they hoped would read their book and be pleased with what they had accomplished.

Their wishes brought to mind a conversation I’d had years ago with a writer friend who, to quote the late sports columnist Red Smith’s comment on writing, had “opened a vein” to tell his story. I asked who he was writing for and after some hesitation – like many writers who are immersed in the work itself he hadn’t had time to consider the question – admitted that if there was one reader whom he hoped the book would reach and resonate with it was his ex-wife. Perhaps in reading it she might understand what had gone wrong for him and them.

Circumstance had compelled the sixteen authors of No One Ever Asked: An Anthology of Answers to ask themselves the question that eludes so many writers with years more experience: what is it that I truly want my work to bring me? That is, beyond the outward-looking measures like fame, prizes, money and praise. Praise chief among them. 

Instead, working one last time together, they looked inward and in that shared moment found wisdom that I hope they carry with them. This work is hard enough, and our needs as writers are profound enough, to leave us exhausted and, yes, needy.

The validation we seek from others is part of what drives us. But there is, my wise students reminded me, also something more.

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We’ll be off next week for Memorial Day. See you again on May 31st.

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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every week.