Lifelong Learning with Laura Hankin

What publishing's highs and lows has taught the author of ONE-STAR ROMANCE about writing with gumption, defying formulas, and staying true to your storytelling

One-Star Romance showing off at Bryant Park, where I took myself for a writing date last weekend.

As rosy as it seems on Instagram, the world of publishing can be anything but. It is, at alternating moments, selective, trend-oriented, marketing-driven, divorced from the sense of purpose that drives most writers, and frequently disappointing. It’s also the perpetual carrot dangled in front of aspiring writers - the pinnacle we all aspire to. And for good reason. How else can we put our writing in front of a large audience?

New writers may conceive of publishing as a destination at which one can simply arrive and hang out (preferably draped in accolades and perched on a couch beside Oprah). But publishing is not a place: it’s a journey, with dips and bends that take writers to exhilarating heights and unexpected lows. Learning to manage expectations while on the ride is tricky mental work.

Perhaps one of the hardest things is finding a forum for all the big feelings it elicits. What an author says in public about their publishing journey is apt to differ from what they reveal behind closed doors. Chock that up to toxic positivity, putting on a brave face, or simply trying not to bite the hand that feeds you.

In any case, it can make one feel seen just to engage in honest conversation about the topic. That’s why I’m so grateful to Laura Hankin, five-time novelist, triple-threat (yes, she can sing and act AND write; I’ll get back to you on the dancing), fellow Capitol Hill mom/neighbor, and the voice I feel so lucky to spotlight in this month’s Lifelong Learning. And did I mention she’s a graduate of DC Public Schools? (This fact thrills me to no end.)

Laura’s newest novel, One-Star Romance, came out this summer and I recently devoured it while derailed on Amtrak on the way home from NYC (still a loyal customer: #Amtrak4Life). Like Laura’s other books, I was taken by One-Star Romance’s honesty, joyful humor, and its framing of love as exciting, revealing, and occasionally soul-testing. Laura is a master at marrying real life and escapism on the page, and it was a pleasure to hear her speak about her writing journey and the lessons it continues to impart.

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Author Laura Hankin

I’ve been really excited about this conversation. As I’ve reflected on how much learning is involved in taking on new roles in life, you immediately came to mind. You were an actor who became a writer, who recently became a mom (to one-year-old Rosie). What has it been like maintaining a writing life as a new mother?

Having a baby just amps up the stakes on it all, you know? In the past, if I didn't have a productive writing day, it was like, well, there’s still tomorrow. But now, I feel an incredible pressure to make each day productive and take advantage of the gift of daycare. Pre-baby, everybody said, “Oh, well, once you have more limited time, you'll just get it all done in the little windows of time you have.” As if motherhood turns you into this superhero where you’re suddenly about to write a chapter in ten minutes. But that hasn’t felt necessarily true for me. Sometimes I still need to take a long walk before I can dive into the work.

I'm not good at using ten minutes to do something. I have this narrative in my head that I have to have an hour, otherwise there's no point in settling down. But you're turning out a book a year, so that's a different mentality to adopt. Talk to me about what you were doing before you became an author. How did your evolution come to be?

I always loved telling stories to people. But growing up, I didn’t believe that my words and mind could actually make the stories. I could act them out for sure, which is how I got into theater. After graduation, I moved to New York, and I was auditioning for plays and getting cast, but it involved a lot of waiting in line for hours to audition, then singing for 30 seconds, and checking your email for three weeks to see if you got a callback. Meanwhile, I was working all these random day jobs, mostly babysitting and stuff like that. The kids were wonderful, but it wasn't engaging me creatively, necessarily. As they were getting a little older, I would take them to the park and find myself just sitting on a bench. At a certain point, I felt like I needed something to occupy my brain, so I decided, “Why not start imagining a world and try to write a novel and see what happens?”

How did you even know how to go about finding an agent and the whole business?

It was mostly sheer, unearned gumption. I messaged anyone I knew who had any connection with the publishing industry, from friends I'd gone to school with who were starting out as assistants to agents, to a friend of my dad's who I had met one time who worked in publishing. And I sent out all these emails saying, “Hello, I have a book. This is what the book is. Would you like to give me advice on what to do with it or read it?” And through that, it was passed along to people who passed it along to other people, and I ended up getting a book deal.

That’s the kind of story that serves as a kick-in-the-butt to people who are scared to go for it. Gumption proving its worth. What happened next?

Well, that first book came out and, ultimately, did not succeed. And then I wrote another book that did not get picked up. There was a little bit of a come-to-Jesus moment of, “Okay, maybe now I need to be a little bit more intentional about this.”

That’s a tough blow. In fact, it’s something your main character, Natalie, deals with in One-Star Romance. As a writer, how did you gather the resolve to move forward?

At the time, it was hard because I felt it was the best thing I would ever write. But the feedback I’d received about that book was that it wasn’t commercial enough, and they weren’t willing to take a chance on it since my first book hadn’t sold well. So I decided I would try to write a hit (with a capital H) - something so commercial that it would afford me a two-book deal. And for my second book, I’d be able to sneak my rejected book back in because that was my ultimate goal. But the funny thing was that as I started writing this commercial book, I really fell in love with it, and it still felt like a very accurate representation of me as an artist and the themes I wanted to explore. That book became Happy and You Know It, and at the end of the day, I ended up feeling it was better written than the book people just passed on. And for the second book, I decided to try to write something else instead.

Instead, you wrote A Special Place for Women (which I loved for reasons I won’t disclose here because they’re technically spoilers) and followed it up with The Daydreams, which is so fun and highly influenced by pop culture. This summer you released One-Star Romance. After writing and publishing multiple books before children, what was it like doing it as a mother?

I finished my final edit on One-Star Romance one week before my daughter was born, and it has definitely been a readjustment. I think motherhood has made me more empathetic to every character that I create. I’m always considering that they were all babies once! Another difference is that my daughter is in my head constantly because I want to do a good job for her. Which is great and also terrifying.

One-Star Romance. I'm reading it now, and I love it. It’s made me wonder how much of this story is autobiographical for you. I know it was inspired by a true event: when you had to walk down the aisle as a bridesmaid with someone who’d given your book a one-star review on Goodreads. What an anecdote to pique readers! Likewise, the main character, Natalie, is a writer and she’s struggling with these feelings about whether her writing is serious enough. Is that something you can relate to?

Natalie, personality-wise, is quite different from me, as are many specifics of her journey, including the central romance. But yes, I did have to walk down the aisle with this guy who had given me one star (though we never saw each other again). It can be a tricky issue though, deciding how much to pull from real life versus your responsibility to fictionalize things. Where I stand on it now is that I’m willing to explore situations I've experienced in real life, but very hesitant to try to make real people into characters.

There’s a line in the book, “I can’t win. When I’m having fun, my writing isn’t serious. When my writing is serious, I’m not having enough fun.” How does that connect to your own process of choosing which stories to tell?

It’s something I really struggled with when I was starting out - the question of what stories matter. I want to entertain people, but I also want them to make people think. I always want to find an emotional connection to the story, because if you're writing a book, you're going to have to think about it for years. There have been some ideas that I've toyed with, but wasn’t sure I could fully visualize. There’s no checklist. It's more of a gut feeling.

In terms of the books that you've already written, do you feel any pressure from your team that it has to be a romance or have a comedy element?

I've been really lucky that my team has very much supported me in choosing the projects that inspire me. And I think they're all connected by a sense of humor, complicated characters, interesting women, and their relationships with each other. I would get bored if I was writing a Mad Libs book each time, just playing off the same formula. Candidly, however, perhaps I would be more successful if I had written books that followed a specific formula. Some readers like to know what to expect.

Don't adopt a formula is my advice. Keep doing what you want. Taylor Swift-ing it, as I call it (my description for artists committed to evolving eras).

I will try! But I’ll note that the marketing aspect is hard. Defining a book for readers is tricky. We pitched One-Star Romance as a romance, but some feedback I’ve received from lovely, kind readers has been that they find it to be actually more of a coming-of-age story about your twenties and thirties with a throughline of friendship.

Our brains just love to compartmentalize, but a book can check so many boxes. What have been the hardest growth points for you on this journey as a writer, moments where the growth trajectory was maybe a little painful?

It’s really been about adjusting my expectations of success. I am so deeply proud of One-Star Romance and I had hopes that it would be a big bestseller. Of all my books, this is the one that has generated the most reader messages from readers about its impact. But in another sense, I don't feel like it's done the commercial work that it needs to do, in part because of the genre confusion about it. It’s a fun read, but there are also some painful moments of growth and self-discovery. Readers who appreciate that sort of thing have loved this book, but those who are picking it up expecting something super light may have different reactions.

Damn you for making people think hard. But in all seriousness, thank you for not feeding us formula with One-Star Romance. This is a book that treats its readers intelligently. It’s why I’ve enjoyed it so much.

With every project, there’s a moment where expectations meet reality. I’m learning how to be proud of my work, even if it doesn't accomplish every single thing I want it to, sales-wise. I went to a book club for One-Star Romance at a bookstore in Maryland the other day, and there were 30 people there who had read it and had such beautiful thoughts about it. And it really made me reevaluate my thinking about success: that maybe it could be more than enough, to write books that mean things to a subset of people, even if they don't reach everyone.

What are you learning from this next project that you are still in the early stages of?

I don't even know how to talk about it at this point because it's still so squishy. All I can say is that it has involved learning to write characters in a new way - characters that, by definition, are less interior than I’ve written before.

I have to ask you if you are reading anything that has just taught you something recently.

Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe. Her use of humor is so good. She's able to infuse humor into situations that could otherwise be quite sad, rough, or depressing, and look at familiar situations in totally new ways. I love that her voice feels so lively and fully unafraid to go there.

Tell me something you're proud of. Maybe something you recently pushed yourself to try to learn. For example, my new favorite thing is to teach myself piano from YouTube videos. I know nothing about piano, but it gives me such a little thrill to play my favorite songs badly.

Oh, I love this! This is so small, but we own a cast iron skillet, and I've always been too afraid to use it for cooking because cleaning it correctly afterward seemed very intimidating to me somehow. But the other day, I just thought, “Screw it, if I ruin it during cleaning at least I will have used it once instead of not at all,” and I made a very delicious roast chicken and chickpeas dish in it, and so far the skillet seems fine!

You can learn more about Laura, including where to order her books, and links to her other fabulous work at laurahankin.com, or follow her on Instagram @laurahankin.