I Found Two Questions Writers Should Ask Themselves In A Killer Book

"Everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are." ~Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

On March 26, 1959, Charles Bukowski got up, showered and went to his job at the post office. He hated that job. Said it was hell, told his friends the post office was nailing him to the cross. But he kept slogging. Working by day, writing poetry by night and sending it to magazines. Hoping one day, one day. Forty nine years old, hoping. He was nine months from the biggest break of his life, but he didn’t know it yet.

Same day, 1,960 miles away in Biloxi, Mississippi a young man pulled his car over at the side of some random road. He was twelve years from the biggest break of his life, but he didn’t know it, either. He got out of his car, stuck a garden hose in his exhaust and put the other end into his car through the window. Then he got in the car.

He’d spent two years working with Simon & Schuster editing his book because they said it was good. Really good. But they changed their mind. Dumped him. He brought the book home and tried to put it out of his mind. But his mom believed in him so she sent it to another publisher. When they sent a scathing rejection, he was the one to open the letter. Threw him into a black hole he didn’t know how to crawl out of.

He was thirty one and his name was John Kennedy Toole. He said that book was the best thing he had in him and if it wasn’t good enough, then he wasn’t good enough. Losing him pitched his mother into a black hole it took her two years to crawl out of. Then she started sending the book to publishers and she wasn’t going to quit until she found the person who saw how good it was. She found him. Twelve years later, 1981, John Kennedy Toole was awarded the Pulitzer for that book. Posthumously.

His story was one of the most tragic but a lot of writers we laud today were discovered posthumously. Died never knowing how loved their work would be.

Kafka. Keats. Thoreau and Lovecraft. Jane Austen, Zora Neale Hurston, Herman Melville, and William Blake. Stieg Larsson and John Kennedy Toole. Sylvia Plath and Edgar Allan Poe. All died broke, with broken dreams clutched in cold arms.

At the end of 1959, at fifty years old, Bukowski finally got the break of his life.

A publisher offered to pay him to write. The founder of Black Sparrow Press said quit your job, I’ll pay you to write and we split the profit and Bukowski couldn’t quit fast enough or write fast enough. Said he didn’t know how long it was supposed to take to write a book so he just wrote like crazy. Afraid the opportunity would be ripped right out of his hands, afraid he’d have to go back to the post office.

Whether you like his work or not, he wrote over 45 books in his lifetime. That itself is astounding. Fifty year old man, writing his butt off. Poetry. Novels. Whatever showed up. His last novel, Pulp, was published in 1994, right before he died of leukemia.

As Bukowski lay dying, 1,970 miles away in Madison, Wisconsin a young man sat down and started writing a book. His name was Patrick Rothfuss and his trajectory would look different from many of the writers he grew up reading.

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Yesterday morning I spent a bunch of time on Notes. Not posting. Just scrolling and trying to puzzle out what I was seeing. Kind of like when you see a shadow off in the distance and you keep looking, trying to figure out what it is you’re seeing.

Oh there was all the obvious stuff. Political posts. Feminist posts. Neil Gaiman, Donald Trump. Omg, Michelle isn’t going to the inauguration. Books quotes and literary quotes. RIP David Lynch, as if we’re charged by the word so we can’t bother typing out Rest In Peace. RIP, RIP. Tons and tons of people restacking their own posts, of course. Lots of funny memes and pithy heartfelt statements. But also?

I saw a lot of notes that had little messages that go something like this.

… Good has nothing to do with it. Just create

… You don’t need spelling or grammar to say how you feel

… Just make it exist, you can make it good later.

Sometimes they were typed out in plain text. Other times they were created as catchy images with pretty backgrounds and the text laid over top, probably in Canva.

… You aren't writing for likes, you're writing to tell your story.

… You will write things no one reads. That doesn't make them less important.

… Writing isn't about being heard. It's about being honest.

I saved a list of them. It was obnoxiously long. It got stupid, and I just kept pasting more and more of them into a document, scrolling, pasting, scrolling, pasting.

They always had so many hearts. Because — you go! You tell your story. You make something, who cares if anyone sees it, what matters is that you did it, you made something. You fought the fear and did it. Yay, you! Hearts and more hearts.

On some level? I get it. I do.

At a very, very beginner level. Because starting new things is scary.

I hear that from writers every day. That beginning stage, when you’re afraid to hit publish. Afraid to put your words into the world.

But at the same time? They made me a little sad.

Because the truth is we do care.

We do. We care if someone sees our writing. We care if people like it. We check back over and over, hoping someone will say something nice. Say it moved them. Say they agree. Say something. Because there is nothing more beautiful than connecting and there is nothing quite so disappointing as publishing to crickets time after time.

If we really, truly, from the bottom of our hearts didn’t care, we’d be writing in a notebook and shoving it in a trunk where no one can see it. Some people do.

That’s when it came to me. Something Patrick Rothfuss said in his first book is what I was seeing. The shadowy figure in the forest I was trying to bring into focus.

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Patrick Rothfuss is one of my favorite writers of all time. One book. One book did that. It’s called The Name of the Wind. I read that book and that was me, done. I’d buy anything that man writes. And I have. Everything he’s written so far.

His first novel took fifteen years to write. Know why? He said he was a hot mess as a writer. His skill as a writer kept growing with every rewrite. He had a great idea for a story, but he didn’t have the chops to write it yet. So he rewrote the book over and over. Cleaning it up. Making it better every rewrite. He finally released it in 2007 and it won a Quill Award and was listed as a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year.

There’s a line in that book that says:

“Everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

Struck me that “it doesn’t matter” is a pretty sad story to tell ourselves. Especially when it does matter. When it matters so much we can’t even admit it out loud.

That line is what I think of every time someone tells me they’re struggling because they’re a writer not a marketer. They’ve told themselves a story about what marketing is, doesn’t matter if they’re confusing it with sales. It’s their story.

That line is what I think of every time someone tells me only the people succeeding at writing are the ones selling courses on how to write. They’ve told themselves a story and doesn’t matter if the leaderboards make a lie of that story. It’s their story.

That line is what I think of every time someone says it doesn’t matter if you can spell or write a clear sentence as long as you’re telling your truth. It’s their story.

That line is what I think of when people tell me Medium doesn’t boost poetry, or no one reads poetry or there’s too much competition or anything I can counter by pointing at someone doing what they said can’t be done. It’s their story.

We all have a story we’re telling ourselves and it makes us who we are.

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The Name of the Wind is the first book in a trilogy. Anyone wants to complain how long it took Netflix to wrap up Stranger Things, nah, Rothfuss wins the game on slow releases. Seventeen years after the first book, the third book isn’t out yet.

The second book came out in 2011 and went New York Times bestseller instantly. It’s called The Wise Man’s Fear and it’s the story of a storyteller. There’s a quote in it that strikes me maybe it’s the key to changing the story in our heads.

“It's the questions we can't answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he'll look for his own answers.” ― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear

We don’t live in the same era that Keats, Kafka, Poe and dozens of others who died broke and unknown lived in. There was no self publishing unless you were insanely wealthy. Man like Thoreau spent his life savings to publish his own book, but there was no reach. There was no Substack, no Medium, no social media, no internet.

We have so much more opportunity today but we still have gatekeepers and mostly they are us. Gatekeepers of our own minds, trapped in the stories we tell inside our heads. But maybe he’s not wrong that questions are the key to the gates.

And I think there are two questions writers need to ask themselves.

1. What story have you told yourself inside your own head? And…

2. What questions can’t you answer?

It’s not rhetorical, I really want to know. Maybe if we talk about stuff like this, we can change the story in our heads, define our questions, and make some progress. Instead of just hearting pithy comments on Notes and publishing to crickets yet again.

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“Words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.” ― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

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