Writing About Writing

I was once giv­ing some­one advice and they told me I should read my blog if I want­ed to under­stand what I was talk­ing about. The dude said I’d prob­a­bly nev­er heard of this blog­ger (who was me) but that he had been read­ing him for years.

I had myself hip­ster mansplained… to myself.

After that I sort of had a lot less imposter syn­drome.

But per­haps a FEW acco­lades won’t go amiss. Just so you don’t think I showed up last week, dropped into the world on a whirl­wind of rain­bow sprin­kles, start­ed writ­ing for a liv­ing, and BAM, was pay­ing the bills lat­er the next day. I’ve been writ­ing since I was ten, and doing so seri­ous­ly since I was fif­teen. My aver­age writ­ing “day” has gone up from per­haps twen­ty min­utes as a kid, to an hour as a hob­by­ist, to between three and five hours as an aspir­ing [work­ing] writer, to around eight to ten hours, these days, as a work­ing writer. So I’ve logged in my “ten thou­sand hours” writ­ing, and at this point I’ve clocked in a sec­ond ten thou­sand just to be on the safe side. I think I’m work­ing on about my fourth or fifth set, hon­est­ly. That does­n’t mean I’m per­fect. I’m not above error. My first drafts are shit­ty. I use myr­i­ad as a noun. I will use the wrong your if I’m not pay­ing atten­tion. Occa­sion­al­ly I write a Face­book post and half my friends find some eldritch mul­ti-clause sen­tence I tried to write as con­fus­ing as all hell.

And appar­ent­ly, I’m a big fan of writ­ing sen­tences where I leave out.

I have a degree in Cre­ative Writ­ing. (Tech­ni­cal­ly that’s Eng­lish with empha­sis in CW, so I did my share of lit­er­ary analy­sis.) I grad­u­at­ed Sum­ma Cum Laude from SFSU in Spring 2012. Though it’s their MFA pro­gram well regard­ed, I sat in many of the same class­es, came to all the same pan­els, and a lot of my friends were grad­u­ate stu­dents who wished that they could be in the more struc­tured under­grad work­shops.

I know some peo­ple take Cre­ative Writ­ing for an easy degree, but I looked for the pro­fes­sors who demand­ed excel­lence and had a rep­u­ta­tion for devour­ing under­grads to fuel their dark mag­icks. When I found them, I took every­thing they taught. I didn’t get a 3.94 because I was coast­ing. I also didn’t eke out my degree as fast as pos­si­ble and then wave good­bye with a hearty “Smell ya lat­er.” In fact, I was 21 cre­ative writ­ing units over what I need­ed to grad­u­ate and my dean was basi­cal­ly shoo­ing me out the door with nar­rowed eyes since I was on a Pell Grant. (“Sure, Detec­tive Fic­tion can fill in for your ‘genre’ require­ment [even though we meant poet­ry or dra­ma]. Go fuck­ing grad­u­ate already!”) The point is, I was there to learn, and learn I did.

I’ve been a man­ag­ing edi­tor of a lit­er­ary mag­a­zine. It was­n’t the hap­pi­est time of my life, I had the direc­tor bait and switch me to cov­er a posi­tion I did­n’t want with the promise of some­thing she NEVER intend­ed to con­sid­er me for, and I’m pret­ty sure my Edi­tor in Chief was active­ly try­ing to make me cry, but I learned a lot, espe­cial­ly about the busi­ness of pub­lish­ing.

I’ve also taught ESL and Devel­op­men­tal Eng­lish for years (and only recent­ly gave it up when writ­ing start­ed pay­ing the bills). It might seem like that would­n’t over­lap much with writ­ing, but being wor­ried sick about gram­mar is SUCH a pow­er­ful force in the lives of would-be writ­ers. So many unpub­lished writ­ers think of gram­mar as their white whale when real­ly it’s just some­thing they most­ly already know, and will get bet­ter at with prac­tice and not some class or book.

I actu­al­ly am pub­lished. Tech­ni­cal­ly. It’s not any­thing you could pick up at a Barnes and Noble, and most of it (that isn’t blog­ging) hap­pened before the ubiq­ui­ty of hav­ing an e‑version of near­ly every­thing, but it’s out there. It exists in a few dif­fer­ent dark and hid­den cor­ners. Some­times it’s easy to for­get that the Rubi­con of almighty “pub­li­ca­tion” can be tech­ni­cal­ly passed with a whim­per in a way that feels like it doesn’t “count.”

I’ve been blog­ging since 2012. I make mon­ey. It cov­ers the bills, though I need a side gig to keep and main­tain a car and eat brand name peanut but­ter. I’ve tried to break down the mys­tique, but a lot of peo­ple still don’t want to hear that they need to work hard every day for sev­er­al years.

I tried to be Stephen King when I was 12, writ­ing sto­ries of self-willed big rigs chas­ing lit­tle kids all over pas­toral New Eng­land towns only to vis­cer­al­ly describe them being run over with as much Kingian atten­tion to the crunch­ing sound and col­or of brains as my lim­it­ed skills could muster. It was crap of course, but if you’ve met the aver­age Cre­ative Writ­ing pro­gram stu­dent at SFSU, you would know that it is actu­al­ly prob­a­bly a real­ly good thing I worked my “I’m going to be the next Stephen King” phase out of my sys­tem before I hit a col­lege-lev­el “Short Sto­ry” work­shop.

Despite a num­ber of signs that I could be a pret­ty good writer when I worked at it (like win­ning the UCLA Comm board awards against a bunch of junior and senior UC jour­nal­ism students…..without actu­al­ly hav­ing gone to UCLA….or at that point, even col­lege yet), I still bought into too many cul­tur­al myths of how to find hap­pi­ness. I took the (bad) advice that writ­ing wouldn’t pay the bills and strug­gled through one unhap­py “fall­back, safe­ty-net” job after anoth­er. I mar­ried for all the wrong rea­sons (and divorced some years lat­er for at least a cou­ple of the right ones).

I played the game by society’s hap­pi­ness play­book, and it made me mis­er­able.

So in my thir­ties, I burned that play­book. I let the Jone­ses pull WAY out ahead and ded­i­cat­ed myself to the things that bring me a whole frik­ton more mean­ing in life than big screen TVs and slick-ass cars.

Now I’m writ­ing the writ­ing advice!

So I may not know every last detail of the pub­lish­ing indus­try or where you should per­son­al­ly go with your Gothichopepunk Vam­pire Love Tri­an­gle sto­ry, and I cer­tain­ly don’t seem to be able to write the OKCu­pid pro­file that brings all the milk­shakes to the yard, but here’s what I do know:

I know how to be an unsuc­cess­ful writer.

I know how to not make it.

I know how to write day after day and not make a damned dime. Or to make a pit­tance.

I know how to keep going for near­ly thir­ty years, and nev­er even con­sid­er throw­ing in the tow­el.

I know how to write because not writ­ing feels wrong, and that the parts of writ­ing that are cathar­tic and mean­ing­ful and won­der­ful come in the act of writ­ing itself, not in the acqui­si­tion of an agent or the painful nego­ti­a­tion of a book deal.

I know how to be artis­tic and cre­ative for its own sake and to nev­er let the world tell me that I “need” a white pick­et fence and a sen­si­ble car even as the sweet siren song insists upon it over and over again.

I know how to set up my life to feed my art addic­tion, with­out dejec­tion over the unful­filled fan­tasies of writ­ing the Great Amer­i­can Nov­el and fat roy­al­ty checks and trav­el­ling the talk show cir­cuit.

I know what it means to write when there is no incen­tive to do so except the sheer love of trans­form­ing twen­ty-six let­ters and four­teen pieces of punc­tu­a­tion into mean­ing.

I know how to crawl slow­ly from mak­ing no mon­ey to pay­ing the bills with writ­ing. I know how frus­trat­ing and breath­tak­ing that can feel.

I know how to lose it all get­ting can­cer and hav­ing to step away from writ­ing pro­fes­sion­al­ly. And then how to look at build­ing it all back.

I’m going to keep right on writ­ing. I’m going to do it with forty thou­sand fol­low­ers or four or four mil­lion and with ten page views or ten zil­lion. I’ll do it if I make no mon­ey or enough to quit all my side gigs and be a sus­tain­ing mem­ber of NPR. I can do MORE of it with your help, but I’ll nev­er stop.

So come along if you want. Join us. The one thing I can say is that it’s nev­er been bor­ing.

Ques­tions? Com­ments? Want a future arti­cle to go into more detail? Mail me through our con­tact form. Just be sure to pick the right top­ic from the drop down menu, and check the archives—particularly the F.A.Q.—to see if your ques­tion has been asked before.

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