On trying and failing and trying and failing and trying and failing again

and then, sometimes, finally figuring it out

(illustration by Geeta Ladi)

Years ago— seven? eight? It’s hard to keep track except I know I was at a coffee shop near Union Square that I went to for a short while and then never went to again. Maybe I had a therapist over there? A yoga class? Maybe I just needed another neighborhood to slip into for reasons unknown, reasons that pop up and vanish quickly— a mood, a creative impulse, a certainty that I’ve unlocked some key to happiness that isn’t actually the key to happiness but works, for a while. Whatever the reason, I was at a coffee shop in Union Square and it was evening— not the time of day I usually do much work— and I decided I wanted to write a picture book.

I hadn’t read many picture books, at least not since I’d been a kid and then a babysitter, but I liked the idea of them. That I could distill a whole set of feelings into something smaller than a novel, that I could tell a focused sort of story, and tell it to the kind of reader who would really be listening. So I wrote a picture book about a family of people who had major talents, and the one kid in the family who wasn’t sure they were much good at anything at all, except making a mess.

My agent sent it out and editors said no, or said this is sweet but no, or said this is quiet so no, or said maybe someday but no, and I think I was supposed to move on but, fortunately or unfortunately, who can say really, moving on isn’t my speciality, when it comes to stories. People, I do okay with moving on from. I have a lot of practice. Toxic circumstances, sure. Romantic relationships? I have had multiple breakups on the phone, never seeing the loved on again, a sort of cowardly method that honestly, I stand by. I walk away. I don’t look back. Except to tell the story of it all again and again and again.

The story, I just don’t know how to let go of that. I hang on to stories. The lived ones, the written ones, all of them.

So I didn’t let go. I read some picture books, and tried again. I wrote about clouds that looked like animals in the sky, and how real imagination feels, when you’re a kid who needs to have a big imagination so as to get away from the things that are a little too real.

More editors said no. Or they have something like it already, so no. Or they love my novels, but no. Or try again, with a bigger hook, but this one is a no.

I read some more picture books. And then I had a kid. And read A LOT more picture books. Piles of them, for hours at a time, and i wasn’t studying them, exactly, but I also wasn’t NOT studying them, because days upon days upon days with a newborn/baby/toddler can make you brain pretty eager for learning, for analyzing, for something cerebral and yours, and I didn’t always have time to read a weighty novel or non-fiction book or an article on something Meaningful or to go to a class, so reading picture books was sort of a two birds/one stone situation that I embraced, sometimes making notes in the middle of story time, revelations about how the stories worked, and what I liked about them, and what Fia liked about them, and anything else that sparked for me.

I kept writing picture books. Ones I thought were perfect and ones I knew weren’t, and ones that I hoped someone might think were ready, someday, but none of them were.

My wonderful editor, Mabel Hsu, chatted with me, generously, about picture books, and what a picture book by me might look like. She didn’t tell me what it would look like. Rather she asked me, what a Corey picture book was, and I remembered, as I always seem to have to remind myself to remember, that the answer to why isn’t this working? is always some combination of:

1. Because you haven’t learned enough yet and

2. Because you haven’t been you-enough about it all yet.

I was learning, that was happening, But I wasn’t remembering the me of it all. That whole heart thing. Where you burrow down and try to figure out what it is, exactly, that you care about most. Where you remember your particular lens and how that lens makes something your own.

Yes, I’d written about things I’d cared about in those first bajillion attempts, but not in a way that embraced the way those things feel to me, or not in a way that felt, when I read it back to myself, like oh yes, there I am again.

Then I started working in therapy on the bigness of feelings. Mine. My kid’s. And how it felt to have to have those feelings in a world that wanted them to be smaller. How it felt— feels— to be messy in a world that wants me to be neat. I talked and talked and taaaaaaaaalked about how I have re-found my bigness, in my adult years, happening upon myself again, the me I was when I was ten and directing my poor friends in a movie that I’d written myself, when I was a theatre kid in a room full of adults being called precocious like it was sort of a compliment but maybe also a warning. I thought about how things happened that made me try to fit into those smaller and neater boxes, until I was so small and neat that people might have called me a wallflower, an introvert, a quiet, pretty girl who seemed sort of sad and needed more friends.

Still. I was drawn to big personalities, friends with loud voices and warm hugs and large families and the sort of energy I’d been told was wrong, was too confident, was too much.

And then somewhere along the way, I turned back into myself.

And in that turning, the stories poured out, too. The more I was me, the more I had to say and the more I knew how to say it in a way that was my own.

“I thought I was too much,” I said in therapy. “I was told I was too much, and I tried not to be so much, but actually what if instead of still trying to listen to that impossible demand I just….. learned to like this person that I am, this too much sort of girl who is, fancy that, also the sort of girl I am trying to raise?”

And then I wrote it down in a story.

It was a picture book, because I needed it to be clear in the way only a picture book can be clear. I wrote about messy, too much Mara who lives in a world where there’s a place for everything…. except her big, messy, too much feelings.

And I gave her the heartbreak of that. And also the joy of letting those rules go.

Is every book I write a book about me? Yes! Of course! Are they all about big feelings and trying— and failing— to be perfect? Yes, yes they are! But this one, this special one, is a picture book. But it is also a memoir. It is a memoir of what it is to be too much in a quiet, tidy house, in a world that wants you to be easier to contain, and how it isn’t your job— it isn’t my job— to fit in.

It’s my job to fit myself. It is my job to find me, over and over and over, and act from there and write from there and parent from there, and be from there.

In the same breath that I’ve grown comfortable with my too-much-ness, I’ve found comfort in the failing. Being too much is a lot about failing, actually. I did not know how to write a picture book. So I wrote a lot of picture books— a dozen at least— and I let the world say no. I let the no be not a reason to stop but a reason to try again. I let the no be a reason to learn more and ask more questions and hear more feedback. I let the no be not an ending of something but the middle of a process which is the process of learning how to do something new and hard and uncomfortable and exhausting.

Also, it must be said, that the nos were all because I was too little, not too much. Too quiet, not too loud. In writing, too much works. In writing, I am at my best when I am the most amount of much.

And how often, really, do we get to do something that hard and uncomfortable and exhausting and new? Not so often, really, in the midst of laundry and dishes and school pick-up every day at the same time, with the same fight about going on a scooter or walking home with this friend or that one and whether or not there’s a cookie waiting for her at in the kitchen. Not so often, while we watch something okay on Netflix that other people really like or get lost in a podcast or make shrimp scampi for dinner again, because it was good last time, even though this time it wasn’t quite as good. The opportunity to be bad at something, to find something nearly impossible, to be brand new, isn’t so common, really.

Newness and bigness and failing— they’re all the same. Things that seem bad and maybe people say they’re bad and maybe the world is telling you to not do those things anymore, but actually they’re kind of the whole point. The bigness. The newness. The failing. It’s the whole point, of writing and also maybe of living, which, when you get right down to it are one in the same. If you want it— writing, life, whatever— to be more than subpar shrimp scampi and laundry and the fight about the scooter, there’s going to have to be newness. And bigness. And failing. Mostly failing.

I’m proud of every book I publish, but this is the hardest I’ve ever worked for it, this is the most I’ve had to learn, this is the least I’ve known how to do something and the worst I’ve been at trying it out.

And then, lo and behold, seven or eight or a million years later, there is, somehow, a picture book that is also the memoir of my life, the picture book of everything I am trying to teach my kid and, in the same breath, myself. It is the things I didn’t learn when I was little but am trying to learn now. It is the world exactly as I see it: big feelings and little moments of magic. It is called A PLACE FOR FEELINGS, which is right, because really, the book— the writing of it and the failing at it and now the finished draft of it— has been the exact right place for my feelings this whole time.

News

As shown above, my amazing editor Mabel Hsu at Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins will be publishing my debut picture book, A PLACE FOR FEELINGS, in 2024. The story will also be told by the beautiful illustrations of Geeta Ladi, whose work I am madly in love with.

Recommendations

One of the books Fia and I are reading the most frequently right now is OUR FRIEND HEDGEHOG by Lauren Castillo which is…. just perfect in a classic children’s book sort of way. It’s full on enjoyable to read out loud, a really charming and sweet and cozy book that I can’t recommend enough for you and your early chapter-book-aged reader.

I needed a rom com in my life, and this one really hit the spot. Funny and a little wacky but not too, and also quite classic in a way that I hope is coming back in vogue because there’s nothing like a classic romantic comedy film.

This podcast is sort of everything I want from podcasts these days— good storytelling that is also just a conversation among friends. It’s entirely unique in conception, but also feels sitting-down-with-my-friends-for-coffee familiar. A real treat.