Writing and the Private Soul

In the year 2000 (that sounds like one of those ominous sci-fi prologues, doesn’t it?), when my husband and I realized that adding kids to our family was going to have to take a different route than is traditional, we started weighing our adoption options. For those of you who have never done much thinking about adoption, there are several routes – each with their own pluses and minuses. Step one, really, is to decide between International and Domestic adoption. This step, for us, was not clear cut. For the longest time I wanted one and he wanted the other. Then, my heart changed…and so did his. After two years (seriously, two years!), we finally came to a place of unity on the subject and began trying to decide what type of domestic adoption we wanted to pursue.

Your options with domestic adoption are a) private b) agency or c) foster to adopt. Again you have pros and cons for each that really depend on your family, personality, and particular situation. At the time, we decided to explore private adoption and so we headed off to a seminar put out by a local support group for families who have adopted privately. (If you’re in the greater D.C. area and are considering private adoption, I can’t recommend the FPA seminar highly enough.) We came home with a wealth of information to digest. The first hurdle in my mind was their number one recommendation: tell everyone you know that you want to adopt.

I didn’t want to tell everyone I knew. Heck, I didn’t really want to tell anyone. But with private adoption, you (the potential adoptive parents) are in charge of finding your own placement. This means you have to advertise, you have to put yourself out there, you have to market yourself. As an intensely private person, this made me die a little inside…and ultimately it was a huge factor in our decision to switch to an agency adoption.

Writing is another one of those areas though that seems to be at odds with an intensely private soul. The first rule of novel writing (especially once you hit the stage where you really want to find a publisher and/or agent) is to tell everyone you’ve written a novel, because you never know where those connections are going to be made. I really would rather my writing be like Fight Club–the first rule being, of course, don’t talk about your writing. As with adopting, however, if you’re not putting yourself out there, your book isn’t going to get published. An agent isn’t going to randomly come knocking on your door to see if you have something he or she can rep for you. Publishers won’t either.

If I have to put a reason on why I feel this way, it’s probably to do with a less-than-healthy fear of rejection. Really, that’s why I was so hesitant when we were considering private adoption. When you start putting things out there for anyone and everyone to know, you have to deal with questions and comments – not all of them kind (and with many of them you have a hard time even finding a benefit of the doubt to give. Some people should get their brain’s filter replaced after every 3,000 sentences uttered.) That and I really am a private person – and that’s different (in my mind) from being an introvert. I suspect it comes, to some degree, from a place of needing to be in control. If I control what other people know about me, then I control how much exposure to hurt and rejection I have. But saying I’m a private person is so much nicer than saying I’m a control freak.

At the end of the day, we told everyone that we were looking to adopt. And even though we went through an agency, it turned out to be a mostly positive thing to have people know. (At least some of the obnoxious comments about selfish young people wanting to wait too long to have kids tapered off…of course, those comments were often replaced by folks who wanted to know “whose fault” it was that we couldn’t have kids biologically. But most people were encouraging.) I’m hopeful that the whole fiction writing thing will turn out the same way. I know there will be people who laugh or mutter good luck under their breath (in a sarcastic rather than encouraging manner). But I also think that there just may be a few people who have some positive words to send my way…and I’m almost to the point where the promise of the latter outweighs the dread of the former.