The Secret to Showing Up

Over a breakfast burrito and a blank page, I hit gold.

I sold my first book in a 13-way bidding war among all the top publishers in the U.S.

With no followers!

And right at the top of the pandemic!

For a crapload of money!

Photo by Erwan Hesry on Unsplash

Only in hindsight was I able to breathe and consider what exactly I DID that might be repeatable or teachable. What magic I conjured. Some of it was luck, right place right time right idea, but some of it was definitely me. And I’m working that naming-and-claiming muscle: I did a lot right. And it IS teachable.

By “right” I mean the small choices I made at consequential moments to invite myself in, to give myself permission to show up as weird and specific and flawed and excited as I actually am, rather than listen to the voices I’m quite convinced we ALL have in our heads that say some version of “Surely they can’t handle/don’t want the real me.” It’s the echoes of millennia of misfits pushed to the margins, muzzled, made to feel wrong for existing—but quite inconveniently the echoes don’t come with that warning sign. “These messages don’t belong to you; they’re just f*cking with you; love yourself louder than them.”

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I talk a lot about the voice part of permission work—stepping onto that stage, or turning on that ring light, and talking like a person even when the stakes are impossibly high. It’s kinda what my whole book is about. But I think the rightest thing I did over the whole year-long book-selling sojourn was invite myself to the page in a 75-page proposal that I remember

Dan Blank

responded to with “are you kidding me??” Apparently it was quite confident.

I mean, PS Substack is a whole bunch of writers. It’s readers too, and dreamers, and weirdos who can’t figure out their title or their label (HELLO MY PEOPLE). But for the writers among us: inviting ourselves to the page is a little duh. It’s, one might say, the whole entire job. But a proposal is different—it resembles both the writing itself AND self-promotional copy ABOUT the writing. “In this book I will…” was the loop going through my head all year. How do you invite yourself into THAT without getting self-conscious and falling for the echoes? How do you make THAT writing come alive and feel personal and undeniable and 13-way bidding warrish?

I’ll tell you what did it for me.

Because I think this one tiny decision I made one tiny afternoon in August of 2019 changed everything thereafter.

Photo by daan evers on Unsplash

I put money in a 4-hour meter (I’m still amused by this—only on this one random street in the Valley in LA are there even 4-hour meters??) and took myself and my laptop to The Republic of Pie. I had family staying at my house and had written my lit agent that I’d have “pages” for him by a few days from then, so I needed to actually do it. For months at that point I’d been wasting time working dumb dialect coaching jobs (some are brilliant—more on those anon—but the one I was doing that August was SO DUMB I didn’t even have access to my actor to give him notes… was literally stuck on set, scrolling Instagram, waiting to be fired, when my lit agent checked in and I found myself writing him back with “I’ll have pages for you in 2 weeks!” chuckling at myself because that sounded like a trés literary thing to say.)

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Breakfast burrito and laptop open and blank screen and the usual bullshit about “who am I to blah blah” when a fresher thought entered my mind: what if you just said the damn thing, Samara? Specifically: say what makes you furious. Say what everyone else gets wrong about public speaking. Say why it’s staggeringly irresponsible. Say who it leaves behind. Say what’s possible.

I wrote my whole manifesto—excuse me, “proposal cover letter” according to my lit agent heh will always be my manifesto to me—while sitting there. Those words became the backbone of the proposal (and my own backbone) and they exist in large part in the published book’s introduction.

The gold I hit =

Connect to fire + speak for who you love + offer better

It freed me to care out loud. To be weird on behalf of someone besides myself. And to try on the identity of visionary. I mean daaaaamn we should and will unpack all three of those. But for now: what’s feeling stuck for you?

Where can you bring more fire? Speak for who you love? Offer better?

If it feels juicy, practice just one this week and report back—but I do believe all three TOGETHER is what made my proposal work. And the pitching of said proposal. And a billion ways I’ve had to advocate for it since then. Fire, love, hope. The breakfast burrito got cold but the proposal got dangerously hot.

With fire, love, hope,

Samara

PS. The next few weeks comments are open to EVERYONE (helloooo!). After that, it’ll be for the all-access community only.