Only the Instrument

My debut novel is publishing this June. Ten summers after I wrote my first manuscript.  

I wrote to stay afloat. I was eighteen, and my parents were going through a brutal divorce, one that I never ever saw coming. In spirit and in body, I was broken.  

I couldn’t understand why God would do this. What good could possibly come from this destruction? I blamed Him. That is, on the days I could still believe in Him.  

Panic attacks and insomnia dominated my senior year of high school. My mom, in the midst of her own agony, would sit at the edge of my bed for hours, counting breaths to help calm me. “Inhale – one, two, three, four,” she’d say, stroking my back as I gasped for air. “Hold. Exhale – one, two, three, four.”

I ended up in the ER after one of my cross-country meets because I was wheezing so badly. The doctor prescribed an inhaler for asthma. But I didn’t have asthma. I was just holding so much stress that I couldn’t breathe. 

Except when I wrote. Words were my oxygen, soothing me when nothing else could. 

As a kid, I was constantly conjuring up stories and poems. Writing – creating – has always felt like a calling. But I never had the catalyst to devote myself to an all-encompassing project like a book. Not until I experienced an all-encompassing pain. 

The stakes were high. I was quite literally fighting to keep the light inside me from flickering out. Somehow, some way, I needed to eject the darkness and devastation. 

So, I dumped it all onto the page. In three months, I churned out a 450-page manuscript about a girl who was falling in love for the first time as her parents were splitting up.  

That’s when I realized the power of writing fiction. How it allowed me to get closer to myself while simultaneously helping me escape my own reality to explore parallel universes and play with alternative endings. 

Over the next year, I workshopped the manuscript in creative writing classes at Dartmouth. And in my spare time, I read everything I could about how to get published. I learned about how literary agents were the gatekeepers, and what a query letter was (a cold email you send agents, distilling your entire manuscript into two overly simplistic paragraphs).

I poured so much of myself into that first book. But it never did get published. Neither did the two other full-length manuscripts I wrote and relentlessly revised in college. 

Often, I cried and spiralled into self-destructive loops when the form rejections came through. And more commonly, I cried and spiralled when I didn’t get any rejections at all. When my query letters were simply lost to the cyberspace slush pile.

On the rare occasions I did get real feedback, it went something like this. My writing was strong and beautiful. But I didn’t have a “platform” (meaning I wasn’t a celebrity or influencer) and my books didn’t fit on the shelf. They fell in between genres or explored “too many” themes.  

My manuscripts didn’t follow the slick commercial formula, and it seemed no one wanted to take a chance on me. I was getting dejected. Though still in my early twenties, I felt like I’d been doing this for years and without any success. 

 Maybe it wasn’t my path after all. 

So, I took a job on Wall Street after graduation because that seemed like the smart thing to do. Working ninety-hour weeks at Goldman Sachs, I became a shell of myself, a walking zombie punching numbers into spreadsheets. Sapped of all imagination, I didn’t write a single word that first year. 

I was so far from God, and therefore so far from myself. 

Then another wave of pain hit and dragged me under. I lost a college friend to suicide. She was also working on Wall Street at the time. It broke me, and it also broke the lock I’d had on writing. Once again, I had to write to be able to breathe.

So, I spewed out one hundred pages about a woman who lives out her friend’s bucket list after the friend passes away. But the emotions were too raw, too clouded by grief. I set it aside to return to it down the road (and still hope to). 

The writing floodgates had been opened, and I physically couldn’t stop. I filled my iPhone notes with ideas that burst in during the day, and I jotted down poem fragments in a Word doc on my work computer (titled “Due Diligence Notes” in case anyone saw it).

I scaled back how much time I spent working for Goldman and ramped up how much time I spent working for myself. Plunging into projects, I started a poetry Instagram account and networked at bookstore events after work to ask authors for advice on getting published.  

And when I was twenty-five, I started a new manuscript.

It was a season of life when female friendships were my everything. We were navigating our twenties together in Manhattan, laughing and crying on each other’s shoulders through the ups and downs of dating and adulting. (The book’s original title was The Volatile Love Market, later renamed The Heart of the Deal).

It’s not a true story, factually speaking, but I tried my very best to make it emotionally true.

While writing the book, I had the opportunity to help produce Sean’s Exchanges at Goldman Sachs podcast episode where he talked about struggling with imposter syndrome and how he hoped to be a lighthouse for others.

It was a total God moment. This was something that mattered – not financial models and EBITDA multiples. Covered in goosebumps, I was reminded of the power of stories, and it helped me keep going. 

 Every morning, I “word vomited” at the Starbucks across from my office between 6am and 9am. I was Creative Lindsay in those hours, losing and finding myself in flow. Then I’d abruptly transition to Corporate Lindsay all day, which felt like wearing a costume. (Cue the Hannah Montana theme song.) 

Still, I was grateful for the stability my day job offered. Living frugally, I saved up for the day when I’d be able to go all-in on my writing. I could feel that time coming, though it wasn’t here yet.  

I wrote the second draft of the novel without even looking at the first draft. To me, first drafts are an opportunity to explore and get to know your characters before worrying about the arc of the plot. 

And even in final drafts, I’m not that concerned with the plot. I care less about what happens and more about how things happen and how they feel while they’re happening. 

I like to let stories evolve and sprawl naturally like they do in real life. That’s when I feel connected to a heavenly energy source. When I’m delving into the glorious humanity of it. 

 From years of trial and error, I knew this manuscript was the best thing I’d ever written. I knew it deserved to be published. But would it be?

Defying convention, I reached out directly to big publishing houses, trying to see if I could cut out the agent middleman. (I didn’t love the idea of splitting my royalties with an agent if I didn’t have to.)  

Most publishers wouldn’t look at my manuscript without an agent, but one house did. The editor loved the book and said she could see it being a bestseller. The other editors agreed, and I thought this might be it – the big break I’d been waiting for. 

 But then at the last minute, the Head of Marketing nixed it because he didn’t think the hook was sensational enough to stand out in a competitive market.  

It was disheartening to feel like after all this, I was being thwarted by one reductive sentence. And I didn’t want the book to focus around an extreme or unusual plot point. I wanted it to be woven from the poetic poignancy of everyday moments – that was the whole magic of it. 

But I was feeling hopeful too. A group of editors had fallen in love with my book. Others would too. So, I stayed true to my vision and kept going. 

In Fall of 2020, I signed with an absolute gem of an agent. She understood the book right from the start. I did a round of revisions based on her spot-on comments, and then she sent it off to publishers.

The rejections started rolling in. Everyone had their own opinion about what the book was or wasn’t. What it should be or shouldn’t be. What it had too little of or too much of.  

Pacing my bedroom / living room / kitchen / home office (they were all the same room…welcome to New York), I’d called my mom when I’d start to spiral. “What if it never happens?” I’d wail through the phone.

“It will happen,” she’d say, soothing me like she’s always done. “This book is going to get published. It’s going to happen.”

And she was right. It’s actually finally happening. 

This summer, my debut novel will be published by a traditional NYC publisher that’s sold through Penguin Random House. My book will be in Barnes and Noble and bookstores around the country, and I’ll get to do signings from New York City to my Kalamazoo, Michigan hometown. One of Hollywood’s top talent agencies is representing me for the TV / film side of things. I’ve quit my corporate job and signed a second book deal. 

It’s truly a dream come true.   

But I already feel myself moving the goalposts. Saying, “If only I could hit this bestseller list, if only I could be featured in Reese’s Book Club. If only…” 

The list goes on. My definition of success keeps shifting. I keep trying to control the outcomes and manipulate my gifts to serve my own ego instead of serving God.  

For so long on this writing journey before I had an agent or publisher, I felt completely by myself. But perhaps that’s only because I was focused on myself. 

Now, after a decade of banging my head against closed doors, I’m congratulating myself that one has finally opened. As if I got here all alone. As if God wasn’t with me this whole time. 

Because it’s never actually been writing that has saved me or healed me or helped me breathe. It’s always been God, even when I didn’t have the awareness. Writing is one access point to help me connect with the divine, but it is not the divine itself.

So, as I attach my identity to my writing or its achievement, I’m missing the whole point. I don’t need to put all this pressure on myself to become somebody when I already am somebody.  

Because no matter if the novel flops or does fabulously, if people despise it or adore it, I know in my soul that it is exactly what I was supposed to write, exactly when I was supposed to write it. 

And if my book keeps even one lonely heart company for an afternoon, that is success.  

If even one child of divorce can look at me and feel inspired to turn to writing or art as a positive outlet to help them through the hurt, that is success.     

If my mom can see her name on the dedication page and know how much she’s helped me believe in myself, in the book, and in goodness, that is success. 

These are lessons I’m still learning. I’ll need to keep repeating them to myself in the months ahead as the noise ramps up and my book is released into the world. Please hold me accountable. 

And remind me, too, that though it will be my name on the cover, I’m never really the author, only the instrument. God is the one who continues to write and right the way through darkness and into the light. He is the only true creator. 

If we’re able to be changemakers (looking at you, Sean!), it’s only because we’re conduits of His love that already exists and will always exist. 

The last chapter of The Heart of the Deal starts with the dialogue, “God, I’ve missed you.” It’s a secular book, and the reader will likely interpret it as the protagonist talking to New York City as she gazes out on the illuminated skyline. 

But my intention was that she’s actually talking to God (whether she knows it or not is up for debate). Her intuition – the holy spirit within her – has led her to this place where she can freely walk in her own truth.

 Like I’m trying to walk in mine. 

Looking back, I can start to see the way that the light really does shine in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.  

If I hadn’t been shattered by my parents’ divorce, I never would’ve written that first manuscript which led to everything else. If I’d never endured the tragic loss of a friend, I might still be toiling away as a cog in the corporate wheel, hardly sleeping, let alone dreaming. 

I do not believe that God makes bad things happen. I think He is good, all the time. But I do believe that when suffering does come our way, He can help us heal and grow and become better than we were before. 

I think back to my eighteen-year-old self, gasping for air at 3am as she sweats and shakes in bed. 

I want to give her a hug and a journal and tell her that it gets better. No, she’ll never get over the hurt, but she’ll start to move through it, and it’ll become part of her story. A story that someday she’ll be able to share as encouragement when she’s telling people about how she became an author. 

But more than that, I want to thank my younger self for her bravery to feel so much. For keeping her broken heart open when it would have been so much easier to shut down or build up walls. For continuing to love, unconditionally.  

Because above all else, that is her calling. My calling. Our calling. And thank God for that