The Upside of Anthology-Making
[with Proper Warning]
I've never been the bridal type. I had issues with weddings.
The white dress, the long veil, I just didn't buy it. When
my boyfriend proposed, I said yes. But neither one of us was
ready to set a date. We had a long engagement. Whenever anybody
would ask us, "When are you getting married?" We'd
look at each other, smile and say, "Spring." We
said "Spring" for three years.
Instead of planning our wedding, I decided to work on an anthology about weddings. I put together a proposal for ALTARED: Bridezillas, Bewilderment, Big Love, Breakups, and What Women Really Think About Contemporary Weddings. I began to contact other women writers to ask them about their weddings. How did they get married? What happened? Did they elope? Did they have big splashy affairs? How did they make their weddings work for them?
I heard from writers like Jacquelyn Mitchard who wrote about her surprise five-day engagement and the successful marriage that followed. I heard from Lara Vapnyar who wrote about how she convinced herself that she needed to find the perfect wedding dress – on a $14 budget – or she couldn't get married. Amy Sohn wrote about the fights she had with her family over who would pay for her wedding. Rory Evans wrote about her mental meltdown due to bridal planning. I heard from twenty-two more writers about how they dealt with their weddings: the good, the bad, and everything in between.
The more I worked on the anthology, the more I got over my issues with weddings. The more essays I edited, the more ready I became to take the plunge. Halfway through editing this anthology, I finally decided to set a date for my wedding. I got married last spring in my side yard, among three rose bushes and blue hydrangeas. It truly was one of the best days (and nights) of my life. We were surrounded by friends and family. We danced and drank until past dark. I truly felt "crushed by love," as Julianna Baggott wrote in her essay for the collection – one of many essays in the collection that makes me misty-eyed every time I read it.
Working on this book helped me finally realize that I could throw a wedding on my own terms. And that's what I hope the book does for readers as well. That it opens the conversation about the state of the modern wedding. That it shows you can throw a wedding and not lose your identity. That it explores the many ways the modern wedding is about being ready to take a leap of faith and being ready to say, "I do."
A word of caution to fiction writers,
however:
Editing an anthology takes a lot of time. Much more time than
I ever imagined. I pitched the idea for Altared shortly
after my first novel, Whores on the Hill, was published. I
thought editing the anthology would be an interesting project
I would work on for three months while I geared up for my
next novel. Instead, editing the anthology has taken over
a year and a half and I'm still not done yet.
I work full-time to pay the bills and my writing time has always been from 5:30 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. every morning before I go to work. For the last year and a half, that time has largely been taken over by the many duties of editing an anthology. Instead of writing fiction, I used my morning time to land contributors, to work on topics, to edit the essays. Instead of writing fiction, I spent my time wrangling with agents, securing permissions, sending out release forms and more.
As a fiction writer, you have to be vigilant about your writing time. Everything will take it away from you – your job, your family, your kids. Be wary of an anthology project if you still want to write fiction at the same time.
Working on books is a gamble. You never know if it will be "worth" it. Worth the time and the personal investment you put into it. You often don't know if the book you're working on will get published and if it does get published, if it will get reviewed or if it will sell. You have to set your own goals for why you are working on a book. And those goals differ from person to person, from book to book.
I learned so much from working on Altared. I think readers will too. It made me finally ready to get married. And for me, that's the point of working on books: to understand yourself and to understand the world better. But, like a marriage, a book is a commitment. It takes time and energy and can take up a big part of your life. All you can do is take a deep breath and believe it will be worth the gamble.
