Helicopter Parenting for the Aspiring Novelist

The right way to prepare your kid for a life in letters

Welcome back to Geoff Rodkey’s Bad Advice! Today’s subject is book publishing, thanks to a Literary Mom who wonders:

“What is the best way for kids to get their writing published? And along those lines, what advice can you give kids like my son, who write but never complete the novel that they say they are writing?” 

Great questions, L.M.! As an engaged parent like yourself, and a formerly unpublished teenage writer like your son, I might actually be qualified to answer them. 

Although—and this is a little awkward, because I don’t want to make assumptions about your motives, but I do have to ask:

Is this about your kid’s writing, or his college application? 

Like, does his soul burn with the fire of creative ambition? 

Or did he get bored over spring break, spend a couple hours noodling on a story idea he thought was kinda cool, and when he told you about it at dinner, you got to thinking that Ivy League schools are probably short on English majors these days—especially boys who are English majors—so you figure if he can somehow lay claim to the title of “published author” and dangle that bauble in front of an admissions committee, maybe you can get him into Princeton?

If this is where your head is at, I’m going to be completely honest with you: it’s a smart strategy. 

Especially because in 2024, there’s no barrier whatsoever to publication. He doesn’t even have to finish the novel. He can just feed whatever bits and pieces he’s got into ChatGPT, have the A.I. connect the dots and pad it out to book length, then self-publish on Amazon. Throw a few hundred bucks at one of those shady services that let you buy ratings and reviews so it looks like he actually has an audience, and boom! Mission accomplished! 

Princeton might be a reach, but I bet you can at least get him into Cornell. Then pat yourself on the back! You’re a good mom.

Did fake Amazon reviews of This Side of Paradise get F. Scott Fitzgerald into Princeton? Maybe!

On the other hand, if this is actually about his writing—if he really, seriously just wants to write a novel, for non-cynical reasons, and HE’S the one who aspires to publication—that’s a whole other can of worms. 

And most of the worms are dead. 

But in the spirit of helping you and your kid sift through the corpses in search of a live one wriggling at the bottom of the pile, here are a few observations:

First, you should recognize the limits of your influence on his creative process. Nobody, to the best of my knowledge, has ever written a novel to please their mom. In fact, psychologically speaking, I suspect maternal encouragement is more likely to neuter his motivation than bolster it.

And even if you could somehow spur him to the finish line of a complete first draft, you shouldn’t. Because…

Being in the process of writing a novel is actually the best part. 

This might seem counter-intuitive. Writing a book is a long, slow, grinding slog, and the people who are delusional enough to attempt it—myself included—often console themselves with the thought that once we’re finished, there will be some kind of reward, whether it’s emotional, financial, or reputational. 

And there usually is. But the reward is almost never equal to our expectations, because the only way to get through the lonely, months-stretching-into-years labor of actually finishing the stupid book is by ratcheting up our hopes for it to a point way beyond what the eventual reality can bear. 

Trust me when I say it feels SO MUCH BETTER to live in the imaginary palace of anticipation than the grubby little shack of reality. Until your kid finishes a draft, his novel will exist in a state of pure potential. It could be a bestseller! A phenomenon! A life-changing experience for both him and his readers! 

Let him stay cocooned in that happy place for as long as he can. Because if he ever emerges from it, he’s going to get punched in the mouth by the harsh truth that…

No teenager on earth has ever written a good novel. 

Like, ever. Seriously. Can you think of one? I can’t, although I’m happy to retract this statement if somebody digs up an example. (And don’t bring up the woman who wrote Divergent. I checked; she was twenty-one.)

The best that can be said about a teenager writing a novel is that pretty much everybody’s first novel is terrible, and at least he’ll be getting it out of the way early. Which could marginally increase his odds of eventually writing a non-terrible novel.

But let’s say he actually finishes a draft, and either nobody tells him or he refuses to believe it’s godawful, so he still wants to get it published. 

This is either ridiculously easy or next to impossible, depending on what you mean by “published.”

If you’re thinking “signed to a contract by a traditional publisher,” that’s not going to happen unless he has at least fifty thousand followers on TikTok, and anyway the whole book publishing industry is a hot mess that would’ve already collapsed if it wasn’t being propped up by back catalog sales of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  

Self-publishing, on the other hand, couldn’t be simpler. I’m doing it right now! It took me about ten minutes to set up this newsletter, and at no point in the process did anybody ask me for I.D. I could be ten years old, or a border collie, or a ten-year-old border collie, and I could still publish on Substack.

It’s a lousy platform for novels, but there are a ton of fiction-specific sites like Wattpad or AOOO where your kid can serialize his story, for free, whenever he wants.

Although the odds are pretty good that nobody will read it. Because here’s another harsh truth:

It’s easier to write a novel than it is to get people to read one. 

With enough time and effort, anyone can write a novel.

But there is no comparable amount of input that can guarantee another human being will actually read it. 

And mostly, they won’t. Because reading a novel requires a quantity of time, attention, and interest that even close friends and relatives will be unable to summon on your kid’s behalf.

The best he can do in this department is to be very, very mindful about who his intended audience is, and do his best to make sure whatever he writes is compelling to that audience. 

With that in mind, if he aspires to even a minimal amount of commercial success…

Encourage your son to get comfortable with the female gaze on his work.

Unfortunately for him, your kid was born just a few years too late to take advantage of the nearly six-hundred-year run of blatant sexism in publishing that lasted from the invention of the printing press until about five years ago.

Speaking as a straight white male author, I’m not sad that it’s over. I’m just glad it happened, and I was born early enough to benefit from a couple decades’ worth of unearned masculine privilege in cultural production.

But that time has passed. The overwhelming majority of contemporary fiction is by, for, and about women, as evidenced by the fact that as far as I can tell, there are only three kinds of successful novel in today’s marketplace: fizzy romances, non-fizzy romances, and magic faeries who have hot sex.  

Your son’s novel doesn’t HAVE to fit into any of those categories. But it sure would help his odds if it did. 

Having said all this, it occurs to me that I’m making some very broad assumptions about your kid, mostly through the lens of my own experience. I’ve assumed that, like me, he’s modestly talented but artistically craven, and more than happy to chuck any aspiration to literary achievement out the window in a sweaty, desperate search for a paying audience.

But what if your kid’s better than that? 

What if he has not just rare and precious talent, but the integrity to pursue his unique creative enterprise in its purest form, without catering to the self-limiting demands of commerce? 

What if he’s an actual f***ing artist? 

And if he is, how can you help him achieve his literary ambitions? 

There’s only one thing I can think of, but it’s absolutely critical if he wants to make the lonely, grueling ascent to the pantheon of American letters:

Help him cultivate a substance abuse problem. 

Every great male American writer has been plastered on something, except for the ones who were sex addicts.

Don’t ask me why. I don’t make the ground rules. I’m just explaining them to you. 

So your kid’s going to have to acquire some kind of chemical dependency. And it’s great that you’re starting him early, so you can guide him toward a substance that will offer the right balance of inspiration and dissolution. Here are your prime candidates: 

Alcohol. Whether it’s Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cheever, O’Hara, or Stephen King, this is the standard option. And if you look at the scoreboard, it’s hard to argue with the results. The down side is that over time, alcoholism starts to look pretty sloppy—Fitzgerald in particular had a very rough final decade before he checked out at forty-four—so your kid’s eventually going to want to sober up. Just make sure he doesn’t do it too early. Stephen King got sober, but not until he was already Stephen King.

Opiates. Not a good choice unless your kid also plays guitar. They’re frequently fatal, especially in the fetanyl era, and recent biographical research has called into question whether Edgar Allen Poe even took enough opium to qualify as more than a poser. Which just leaves William S. Burroughs, and honestly, Naked Lunch is overrated.

Cocaine. Also not great, for reasons of both price and pedigree. If your kid goes the Bret Easton Ellis or Jay McInerney route, chances are his books won’t be very good. Although he will get very animated when discussing them at parties.  

Marijuana. On the plus side, it doesn’t cause fatal overdoses. But with the partial exception of David Foster Wallace, no great American writer has ever had a marijuana problem. I suspect this is because, for a person with a certain kind of artistic sensibility, smoking weed will make you feel like you’ve created the Great American Novel without having written so much as a sentence, or even gotten up off the couch.

LSD. Another iffy track record. Ken Kesey wrote one great novel, started dropping acid, and liked it so much more than writing books that it took him thirty years to produce another one. Which leads me to conclude that hallucinogens probably aren’t ideal for long-term productivity.

Amphetamines. This is your kid’s best bet, by a long shot. Not so much for the Jack Kerouac of it, but Philip K. Dick, who created some absolute bangers while wired to the gills on speed. 

Which your kid might already be taking, if he’s got an ADHD diagnosis. If not, get him tested. He’ll pass, because every teenage boy in America has ADHD. And once he’s been appropriately labeled, your pediatrician will hook him up with enough speed to keep a biker gang on the road.

Start him on at least 30mg a day of Ritalin, and if he complains about writer’s block, teach him how to chop it up and snort it. Then sit back and enjoy the literary fireworks emanating from his bedroom.

When your kid finishes his novel—which, if you take my advice, will be a matter of days, if not hours—I’d be happy to read it and offer notes. Although most of my notes will be geared not toward improving the manuscript, but persuading him to go to rehab, followed by some kind of trade school that can set him up for a much healthier and more lucrative career in plumbing or HVAC. 

I hope this was unhelpful! And to those of you who’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! I’d be eternally grateful if you share this column with others, and please submit questions! I’m starting to run low, and I can’t do this without them.