Reality TV Broke My Sophomore Slump
No one wants to write a sophomore novel. Mostly no one wants to read one, either: the shine of a debut tarnishing into lackluster sales and one-star Goodreads reviews. If I had my way, we authors would squire ourselves into obscurity after book number one and not come out until book four or five. You spend your entire life gearing up for your first novel, snuffling out, like a truffle pig, hidden truths about human nature, and then, boom, the dirt isn’t even dry on your nose when people start prodding about what’s next.
(The Book That Took 18 Years to Find a Home.)
“What have you been working on?” my editor asked me over wine and cheese the day before my first novel hit bookstores. Later, I turned to my agent in a panic. “I was supposed to be working on something?”
For some people, a question like my editor’s might prove motivating. Me, I heard my mother’s voice: “WHY HAVEN’T YOU CLEANED YOUR ROOM?” Shame over my lack of progress + ambition + delusion + finite skills + a desire to prove myself + a desire to disprove my mother soon led me to a writing project of preposterous breadth.
“It’s about technology,” I would say. “But it’s a comic Western road trip slash food novel mixed with magical realism that functions as a treatise on American politics.” I read de Toqueville, Tristram Shandy, Wallace Stegner, Ellen Pao’s autobiography, and the Book of Mormon. I watched a reality show about start-ups and listened to oral histories of transnational Korean adoptees and considered—this is not a joke—adding a Mrs. Whatsit-like character from A Wrinkle in Time.
I sent pages to my agent and waited to hear back. And waited. When she finally called, I asked, “Do you think it needs work?” And she sighed and said, “So much, Sally. So much.”
You might think a hard truth like this would siphon some of the gas from my tank, but it didn’t, not at first. For what is a novelist but someone who lives in a reality of her own making? No, what stalled me out on the Great American Sophomore Novel was the pandemic, coupled with George Floyd’s murder, which happened just a mile from my house. It was a dark, sad time. I wrote more pages, which were dark and sad. Pretty soon I wasn’t writing a novel at all, just backstory, remembrances of things past. Which incidentally is what life became: I would daydream, staring out the window, waiting for the Amazon delivery guy to arrive and recalling the good old days of in-person grocery shopping.
“So what do you think?” I said to my agent the next time we talked. I’d sent her a ream of new pages, none of which took place in the present tense. She just sighed.
With a growing catalog of instructional writing videos available instantly, we have writing instruction on everything from improving your craft to getting published and finding an audience. New videos are added every month!
Then I got a weird phone call, so weird I forgot I was at least partially responsible for it happening. A reality TV production company was booking me a flight to Sweden to film a genealogy show about Americans finding their roots. Did I want window or aisle? “Window?” I said, and recalled that, back in 2019, I’d filmed an audition for this show on my iPhone during a late-night lapse in literary confidence. I told my agent that I wouldn’t be able to work for a while, and a month later I was hurtling through the air toward Stockholm.
The program in question, which airs on Swedish public television and whose title translates to “Everything for Sweden,” functions as a crash course in Scandinavian culture, a deep dive into family histories, and a hokey yet educational competition à la The Amazing Race. Filming was not unlike writing a novel: There was a lot of dicking around, waiting for something to happen, interrupted by bursts of adrenaline and sobbing fits. It was awesome. I stayed for five weeks, eventually winning not a cash prize but a reunion with long-lost Swedish relatives. I returned Stateside euphoric, not from my victory but from my travels and new friends.
“Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it amazing?” I burbled to my agent once I got back. “That no matter where you are or who you’re with you can find a way to make the best—”
“Sally,” she said gently, the way you might approach a friend tripping on mushrooms. “Why don’t you try writing about this?”
So I did. Into a banker’s box went my Great American Sophomore Novel, along with all my lofty ambitions. I made an outline and set about writing the silliest book I could think of, a book about reality TV, about a tiny Nordic country few Americans could point to on a map, about pickled herring and smelly car rides and how much I liked talking to strangers, even strangers from Florida. I couldn’t believe my agent was interested in this nonsense. Every morning when I went to my office it felt like I was getting away with something, similar to when I worked a desk job in my early 20s and spent all day G-chatting with friends.
Now this thing I got away with, this trick I pulled on my agent for months on end, has a title: Big in Sweden. It has a publisher and a hard cover and an ISBN, but what it has most of all is my enthusiasm, which unlike ambition is made to be shared. Who would have thought reality TV would teach me to be a more generous writer? Some truths really are stranger than fiction, and thank goodness, for my imagination isn’t big enough to make this story up.
Check out Sally Franson’s Big in Sweden here:
(WD uses affiliate links)