writing about writing
I’m just doing some test content to see if this works the way I want it to. If you’re seeing this it means I’m still working on it! I am trying to get the footnotes to work exactly the way I want them to, which is to appear on the right there and look that way. I wonder if this is going to work. But maybe this time it will.
Here’s more text, and maybe an embedded image?
The title is meant to make you want to read this, but I don’t get into the three ways to succeed as a writer until further down the page, so scroll away if you want to skip the other parts. I don’t blame you. Frankly, I’m just happy you’re here.
If I told you how many newsletters have begun as conversations with my therapist, you might be surprised, but probably not. The topic of this week was hunches, and how we shouldn’t trust them. Well, that’s not the whole story.
It’s more accurate to say: don’t JUST trust your hunches. It’s fine to have them. As conscious human beings, our minds are stratified in a way that favors survival, and one way to survive is to notice patterns. Your brain are constantly scanning its environment for patterns, and humans are extremely good at finding patterns. We’re so good that the instinct can overtake us and we get things like ghost sightings and obsessive compulsive disorder. I bet you didn’t expect that pivot! I broke my pattern. You probably thought I was going to write more about how ghosts aren’t real or how aliens aren’t visiting earth, but I didn’t! I pivoted to mental health, which is a different pattern for me altogether.
Here he goes again, writing about mental illness. And human evolution. I’m hitting all the greatest hits.
Our brains are so tuned to pattern-seeking that it will see them where there aren’t any. That’s where constellations came from. My favorite is Orion, which is a bit like saying your favorite Led Zeppelin song is Stairway to Heaven, but I don’t care. I embrace my basic-ness. Basicosity. Whatever. I’m very basic, and that’s okay, because the things we’re basic about free us to be not-basic (complex?) about other things.
I love Orion because it comes out in autumn, my favorite season, it’s easy to find, and the best star name in the galaxy, Betelgeuse, is part of it. There was a whole movie about how to pronounce that word, but that’s also a movie about ghosts and haunting and features the best song ever recorded:
The wikipedia entry for constellations is a good read, if you like such things, because you can see a pattern develop among human beings the world over. There’s something about our brains, that pattern-seeking tendency, that means the constellation I know as Orion is known by so many other names in different cultures. The Greeks saw a guy holding a club, but the nature of patterns is such that while two people might see the same pattern they can make different conclusions about what they mean.
A different kind of pattern: there is a weird tendency for disparate cultures all over the world to associate Orion with hunting. It does look like a man holding a weapon, which would have been the traditional and baseline interpretation of a man holding a weapon. The Seri people of Mexico call the three stars Hapj, meaning hunter. In ancient India, those stars in Orion are known as the hunting dogs. Why is this?
All of those are Northern Hemisphere cultures, which means they experience seasons the same. Orion appears in November, and continues to be visible until the end of winter, and autumn and winter are times of culling and using the stores we’ve accumulated in more fruitful months.
Cause there’s nothin’ strange about an axe with bloodstains in the barn
There’s always some killin’ you got to do around the farm — Tom Waits, Murder in the Red Barn
I’m just speculating. It might just be the fact that Orion kind of looks like a guy holding a weapon, like I said before.
If the golden rule had a corollary, it would be the above. I believe that we should trust first, and then revise that trust as a person moves in and out of our lives. Every relationship comes with these wobbly orbits — a person can be your best friend for years and then move to a different neighborhood and you don’t hear from them for another few years, and then you move closer to them and suddenly they’re back in your life again, like nothing happened. They bring up something that happened during their time in the wilderness, when they weren’t thinking about you much (nor you them), and you question your own memory. Then you remember, oh, that’s when we weren’t really talking much, and then it becomes part of the sheaf of background info we carry in our mind for that person.
Hunches are good, and we should always heed them. When someone comes running up to us and says “run!” it’s probably a good idea to run, but look over your shoulder once in a while to make sure there’s something worth running from. Trust but confirm.
I can innumerate specific moments in my life when I made a hunch, didn’t question it, and made a mistake. Sometimes that hunch can be tiny, a trusted macro of mini-behaviors that I often link together that has one misstep and the wrong text goes to the wrong person, the absolutely wrong person, and I have to re-learn two more lessons: don’t trust your hunches and don’t talk about other people behind their backs. Neither one is productive, and you might screw up and send that bitchy text to the very person you were bitching about and suddenly one moment of weakness that likely had nothing whatsoever to do with the object of your brief scorn ends a relationship.
This specific scenario has not happened to me, despite my clear familiarity with its bits and bites, but I have done enough similar things that I can define the shape if it to illustrate my point: don’t talk about people behind their backs. If you really don’t like someone, just avoid them, and stop the obsessive thoughts about how much you don’t like them. You know which person I mean. Everybody has one. Other people might agree with you about that person, but there’s enough negativity in the air these days, and you gain nothing by tearing someone down. Besides, the person you don’t like might compliment you out of the blue tomorrow and you might say “oh well they’re not all bad” and their ledger in your brain is revised again.
I spend all day writing, for money. They aren’t always subjects I would choose to write about, but that’s what a job is, and I’m happy to do my very best to write the very best words I can about whatever subject I’m being paid to write about. I don’t just do this to maintain my employment, I do it because I take pride in my work, and the people who pay me to write do so because they expect that what I’m going to write is going to be good. It is not enough to simply be good, I have to be exceptional. I also do better than my best work because I care about the people who pay me, and I want their overall business to be successful.
One of the things that people like me worry about is whether or not writing so much during the week will make me want to write less when it comes to the things I enjoy writing, like this newsletter. As I creep up in word count, the answer is self-evident, but I like stating self-evident things with plain language: I still love writing! I love putting words after another in new, pleasing ways. I mentioned this in the previous newsletter, but it’s something that occupies my mind continuously.
Our modern age makes us examine ourselves in context that are familiar in other areas of our lives, and there is a tendency toward metaphors when we try to understand the more obfuscated portions. This is especially true in the motions of our minds — the microscope cannot examine itself, only other things.
We don’t know exactly how many of our brain’s functions work, but we can look at our behaviors and make some conclusions. How closely linked are thoughts and behaviors? The debate continues and I won’t try to enter it here, because my sister is a behaviorist and I don’t want her to read this and feel embarrassment that one of her siblings so fundamentally misunderstands the very subject she’s spent her adult life studying.
Anyway, my point: the metaphor for creativity is not the gas tank, battery, or other source of a finite resource. Creativity is not a cistern, it is a river.
We might get tired of creating, and our overall energy level might decrease, and after a long day of bending your mind into pretzel shapes, you would rather absorb a tv show than try to bend it even more for the novel you’re working on, but you have to do it anyway. I broke another pattern: I bet you thought I was going to say it’s okay to not do what you love, but it’s not. You gotta do the work. I don’t always do it, and I won’t beat myself up over it, but I will use it to shape the next day, after work, when I don’t want to write. Okay, today, I didn’t work on my novel, but tomorrow I need to.
There are three vital behaviors, and accompanying thoughts, to my philosophy. I am 43 years old, and I have been doing this long enough to know what works for me, and I suspect that it will work for others. I didn’t invent a lot of this, but gathered it from the advice of other creative people, and added my own twists.
The glib version is this: write it. You have to write. If you aren’t writing, you’re not writing. It’s that simple. Everybody has a billion ideas, but the difference between telling a story and thinking of a story is, well, telling it.
Here are those three steps to being a successful novel writer that I promised, above. Note that I don’t define success as anything but having written a novel, which is a laudable goal.
Write every day, even if it’s just a little
Write at the same time every day, even if it’s just a little
Leave off in the middle of a sentence, so you don’t struggle for where to start the next time
I have written a novel to completion, and I have chosen writing novels as my primary method of expressing my creativity, but I have published zero novels and the number of people who have read it is very small. I have tried to get it published, but querying a novel (the verb, if unfamiliar to you, is “to query,” which means “to bleed into an email that will be scanned, not read, by somebody who sees a thousand bloody emails a day and is not impressed by how much you bled into yours”), is a daunting experience that is not nearly as fun as writing. I confess to spending more time doing the fun bits, and writing instead of querying, but it’s not a race, and I’m not chasing a dream of being rich from my writing. My dream is only to write, and that dream comes true every day. If my novels are mandalas made of sand that are swept away the moment I finish them, never to be seen again, then it doesn’t really matter. My writing is about me, and for me, and I want you to read it. But I won’t consider myself a failure for not being J.K. Rowling, or Nicholson Baker. If writing a novel weren’t fun, nobody would do it.
It’s a cracking good time to write a novel. I highly recommend giving it a try. It’s very difficult, too, but rewarding. And when you’re done you have a novel, and you can say you wrote a novel. There’s nothing to stop you from saying you wrote a novel when you haven’t written a novel, but at least if you have written the novel, when someone says “prove it” you don’t have to make excuses for not having a finished novel to show them.
That’s the tricky bit, the last thing I mentioned. Also, you might have noticed I snuck it into the paragraph above: “I want you to read it.” Aye, there’s the rub.
I daydream and come up with plots and ideas all the time, and sometimes I write them down and they become something more, as I build on it by writing more words. I write a lot that nobody will ever read, by design, because writing something down has value in itself, but the choice to write my ideas and form them into coherent stories is brimming with the hope that somebody might want to read it. They don’t even have to read it, but I want them to want to read it. After all, how many brilliant novels sit on shelves and gather dust because the owner “will get to it eventually?” You don’t have to read my novel, but saying you want to read it is part of the deal I’ve made with myself in writing it.
And it’s also the hardest part. And the part I don’t want to think about. And the part that, when my confidence flags, I question the most. Nobody reads this, so what’s the point?
Thousands of people have likely read my work, though I don’t know for sure. I’ve never seen the numbers on the things I’ve published online and in print that have found purchase in the zeitgeist or however I choose to frame it, but it’s not small. Through McSweeney’s and Machine of Death, I have succeeded. My writing has been read, and continues to be read, by many people. They don’t necessarily remember my name, but they probably remember the ideas I tried to communicate. Maybe they resonate with them and bounce around in their heads, just like they bounced around in mine. A good story is like herpes. I’m sure there are other metaphors but that’s the gross one I choose.
I used to say “nobody’s reading this, so what’s the point?” You can find me saying it in previous newsletters. I will likely have the same struggle again, many times. It is easy to see someone’s creative endeavors that nobody ever reads and say “why bother?” There are millions of unread words, millions of unseen photos, unheard songs. All artists are burdened by the weight of obscurity. That is, until they’re burdened by the weight of notoriety, which brings its own problems. There is a nice middle ground, one that I aspire to, which feels attainable: I want a small but loyal group of people who enjoy my work and want to see more of it. Again, this is something I’ve earned, and already have, to a point. There are a few dozen people who seem invested in what I create, and I think of them when I write. I am doing this for me, but I’m also doing it for them.
I’m doing this for you.
But I’m mostly doing it for me.
Having said that, I would love it if you told people how much you like what I have to say, because that is all I can do to make my work more known: encourage people who enjoy it to spread that enjoyment to others. It’s a cruel fact for someone like me that no amount of hard work can make you more widely-read. In my example, above, I said I didn’t expect to be J.K. Rowling or Nicholson Baker.
I didn’t choose those two names at random. J.K. Rowling is an outlier. She is so popular and well known for writing something popular that when she tried to write something that was not in the same genre, she did so under a different name. Everybody found out it was her, anyway, and it is an open question whether or not it would have been published if she weren’t the author of Harry Potter.
But if good writing was rewarded with money and fame, you would know who Nicholson Baker is. He wrote one of my favorite novels, the second of my recommendations, below. He is known well enough to have feuded with Stephen King (King derisively called one of Baker’s books a nail clipping, and Baker’s response was an essay about nail clippers in The New Yorker) , and have books written about understanding his work, but he is not nearly at the level of Rowling. There are thousands of writers who are in this category.
I don’t need everyone to read what I write, I just want somebody to, maybe a few somebodies.
But it doesn’t matter if my circle of loyal readers never expands. I don’t write for them. I write for me. Creation is its own end. The act of having made something is vital to my survival. I can’t not do it.
Other newsletters I read end with recommendations, and occasionally mine does, too. This recommendation is for four newsletters I enjoy reading.
I will cite my pal Dane’s newsletter not only for its content but for her recommendations — she mentioned something in her recommendations and I clicked the link and bought one. Her newsletter is called My City Anthem, and you can read it at this link: https://mailchi.mp/92203ad024a6/my-city-anthem-issue-5910136. Her point of view is interesting, and the things she chooses to write about are not things I would ever think about, which is an endorsement.
Another newsletter is one I’ve mentioned before, my friend Andrea’s, who writes You Know What I Mean https://andrealaurion.com/newsletter1, and whose work consistently delights me.
Speaking of being delighted, Ginny has been delighting the entire city of Pittsburgh with her words and hardly needs the bump from me, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention her newsletter, Breathing Space https://breathingspace.substack.com
My brother Rob demolished my preconceptions about newsletters with his, called The Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown, at http://tinyletter.com/RobertLong4man — Rob is my favorite writer, not just because our work probably contains some similar DNA, but because his work is constantly refreshing, and surprising, and the way he uses language is enviable (I envy it!). You can also buy his book, which you should do to a) support small press b) support my brother and c) read something you will definitely enjoy: https://squareup.com/store/sundress-publications/item/i-am-here-to-make-friends-by-robert-long-foreman?square_lead=item_embed
My brother Rob once compared my writing to Nicholson Baker’s while simultaneously gifting me a book he wrote, and I have never been more honored by any other comparison. The book is The Fermata, which I won’t try to describe to you except to say that it’s highly sexual and the protagonist stretches the bounds of likability, but now that I’m writing this I think I’ve recommended it before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fermata
My pal Matt and I vibrate on the same creative wavelength and while we rarely agree about movies, his kickstarter is for a book and I would very much like to read it, and if you like my work you’ll probably like his: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matthewbuchholz/flee-america-fifty-states-of-alternate-histories?ref=discovery&term=alternate%20histories
My own newsletter, this one you’re reading! Yes! I’m recommending something you’re already reading! That’s marketing, baby. You can share it with other people by sending them this link: https://www.tinyletter.com/jamesforeman
Good evening, my lovelies.
<3
Almost exactly a year ago, my job ended. It was a good job. I discovered a great deal about myself during my years there. I learned about my field and how to be a good contributor to a team that does what I do.
I just finished my first week in a new job. The work is similar to the old job, but new in interesting and exciting ways, which I think is exactly what one wants when one moves from one employment to the next. I find all of my new coworkers capable and supportive, a testament to the people who hired me. That is a vote of confidence for me. If I am surrounded by people who are good at their jobs and are also kind and helpful on top of that, then the people who hired me obviously saw those traits in me. This is a delightful revelation. It makes me want to live up to the high expectations, and also gives me the confidence in my own abilities that I can meet, or even exceed, those expectations. I am experiencing good leadership.
I lamented often during the last year that I was due a good turn, and it has happened. I was hired by good people at a good place to do good work. All this, I admit, is wildly fortunate. While I like to think I earned some measure of credit for what I accomplished, I accept that this good turn was helped along by what I am rather than what I did. I won’t enumerate every single point of privilege. They are obvious and I am deeply thankful for them. I know how lucky I am.
Because being happy about something good is a new experience for me, I approach it as a primitive man would approach a television set. I’m waiting for the inevitable shoe to drop, even though there is no evidence that there are any shoes up there at all. Writing this has been difficult for me. I started it twice and put it away both times. Why?
Partly, I am reluctant to talk too much about work online. This is a habit I adopted early in my life, and I think it’s generally a good idea to keep parts of your life siloed off from each other. This makes me better at everything I do, because I respond well to processes.
I am also reluctant to write about writing, because I have always thought that if one has time to write about writing, then one should be writing something. It’s a bit like buying eggs when you have a chicken at home. It’s my own little version of “if you have time to lean, you have time to clean,” a refrain heard in fast food restaurants.
I have finally accomplished my goal of writing this post, which is not important. The audience of my newsletter is small. This isn’t about you, it’s about me.
After a week of time at a job spent writing a lot, I find that my desire to write is not lessened at all. Without exception, the times I wrote the least are the times in which I have been unemployed. It was observed to me that I simply do better, overall, when I have a job. I think this is true. I have the window open to write this newsletter update and another window open to my second novel, which is tantalizingly close to a first draft.
These days are awful, but there are good things among the bad. I hope this is as true for you as it has been for me.
Yeah, I’m throwing another one of these at you this soon. So what? You got a problem with that? Only 3/4 of you even opened the last one so I don’t even feel bad about it. I wrote most of this the other day, not today, but it is an accurate guide to my headspace when I’m not feeling like doing anything, which happens.
This is what I write when I don’t want to write. I’m writing this and sharing it with you, which will probably result in a bunch of you unsubscribing. There’s nothing offensive or objectionable under this paragraph, but it might not be what you want in your inbox. This isn’t about you, anyway. This is about me.
Anyway, this is what I write when I don’t want to write.
I am writing this completely against my will. I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be in this chair, I don’t want to be typing this, I don’t want to be worried that my butt crack might be visible in this chair in this coffee shop (it probably is), I don’t want to be drinking this DECAF flat white in this Starbucks because I’m old and if I drink caffeine after a nonspecific hour I will spin around in bed all night, I don’t want to be creative, I don’t want to have to write this, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this.
I don’t want to be writing and listening to my music and it’s making me sad. It’s making me angry, too, and I’m hardly ever angry. I have a headache, probably because I fell asleep on the couch avoiding doing anything and now I’m angry that the afternoon nap will probably make me have trouble sleeping tonight, too. I need sleep. I get a lot of sleep, because I don’t set an alarm and I don’t have any reason to get up at any specific hour. I got a lot of sleep when I do have a reason to get up at a specific hour, but not having something to wake up for means I get extra sleep I probably don’t need. Getting enough sleep is important for your health, but getting too much sleep is bad. You have to get the right amount. This is true for everything in life. Too much of anything is bad. Too much oxygen will kill you. Too much water will kill you. Too much sleep will eventually kill you, maybe. As suicide goes, it’s not the most expeditious route.
I bet BJ Novak could get this published.
The reason why I don’t want to write is because I have to. I am forcing myself. I sometimes have to force myself to do things. I don’t simply mean that I have to do things I don’t want to do but that I feel a push and pull occurring in my mind. My need to feel productive, my need to not waste the day, my need to feel valuable, grasp my motivation by the shoulder straps and pull as hard as they can but my motivation, digs its heels down and pushes against the forces pulling at it. It wants to go back to bed. It wants to lie down. Once deployed, my motivation can do really cool stuff, but sometimes getting it to move takes effort. Sometimes that effort comes from external expectations. When I have to motivate myself, well, that’s a whole thing.
I imagine my motivated self wearing overalls because it works hard and overalls are what workers wear. I imagine those needs (to feel productive, to feel valuable, etc.) as weaker. They can’t do much on their own but if I get enough of them involved, they can move my motivation. It is big and blocky, like it’s made out of cement. It scrapes along the ground. Set to rolling, my motivation is a powerful force. The corners fly off and it turns into a ball, and it’s hard to stop. But sometimes it doesn’t want to move.
I blame a book I can’t remember for making me think of my mental processes with such vivid pictures. The book was about Grover, or at least featured Grover, and it depicted various bodily functions as factory-like stations, depending on its function.
No, that’s wrong. I’m combining two different memories. The factory-bodily- functions thing is from a cartoon and the Grover book is this one.
I distracted myself from writing by researching the world of Grover books. There are a lot. The one most people know is The Monster at the End of This Book, which one published novelist wrote about. He wrote more about that Grover book than anyone has ever written about anything I’ve written, but I didn’t write anything as brilliant as The Monster at the End of This Book, so it’s okay. I’m in an okay mood. Not great, not terrible.
I imagine my mood as a light just over my right shoulder, a few feet back. It is clouded and dingey, like an old street lamp. The color of that lamp reflects my mood. It’s different all the time. I turn my mind’s eye to that lamp to see how I feel. When somebody asks me how I am, I check that light. The color has nothing to do with the mood. I look at it and it tells me what my mood is, but not with words. I just know.
This is another weird visualization that I experience, but there are a lot.
Another one is the calendar. I just tweeted about this (another great way to not write). When I was in kindergarten, the calendar was displayed over the chalk board. We spent most of our day sitting in front of that calendar and that chalk board. It is seared into my brain. This calendar begins with September on one side and August on the other. It’s a feature of my mind’s landscape, a monument to the easy permanence of childhood experience. If I think about it too long, my interactions with children are paralyzed, because I don’t want to say something that they will inexplicably remember when they’re 42 years old and not writing.
Did you ever think of what is behind your eyes? I mean, it’s just brains and bone but sometimes I imagine it’s a huge apparatus that stretches into the sky. How do I know that I don’t have one? Of course it disappears in mirrors and photographs. Maybe we all have them, in the sideways universe that sits just beside our own.
This is what I write when I don’t want to write.
The title is stolen from Stephen King, and I am shameless in my theft. I have a pet theory that he stole The Green Mile from an episode of Amazing Stories (a man on death row heals people is not exactly a common trope), so I have zero shame. It is also title of the only book Stephen King wrote that I enjoyed. This is not a controversial opinion among people who write, though I know a few who adore his work. I don’t hold that against them. Opinions change over time.
But some of them don’t. They attach themselves to us and never leave, while some interests flit in and then out of our minds. This seems to happen with more frequency in the young, when everything is more flexible, wits are fast, these things come and go. A year ago a child was obsessed with garbage trucks, but now he can’t be bothered. Is there a time when these interests calcify and define our lives thereafter?
I would say that writing is a phase that I never grew out of, an interest I never gave up, a distraction that captured me completely and became a vocation. I did not wish to become a writer. That life, or whatever vision I had of it, never appealed to me. It still does not, as I write this on an iPad in the same coffee shop I’ve been visiting semi-regularly for the last six years, unemployed and drinking coffee in the afternoon, looking exactly like the person I never wanted to be. Having said that, I like the person I am. I’m happy with the choices I made that led me here. I don’t regret anything. Given the same life to lead again, I would have done everything the same. I made choices that were inevitable for me to having made them. I know me. I was always going to do those things.
Writing is one of those things that everybody thinks they can do, because literacy is a requirement for participation in modern society (though a few seem to somehow get by without it). To me, this is as senseless a summation of one’s abilities as would thinking that learning algebra made one able to solve the Riemann hypothesis.
But life is not that simple, and human endeavor is not that simple, and “making it” is not that simple. One likes to think that good work will be recognized, eventually. But this is not the case. Well-connected work will be recognized while unconnected work can easily be lost in slush piles. The role of privilege and the circumstances of one’s birth play a part here.
Great work goes unrecognized constantly. The greatest living writer could be in this very coffee shop, writing words nobody will ever read. I don’t know how people find out about these podcasts they listen to that I have never heard of, but random chance seems unlikely. The world is not a meritocracy.
We are so often told to reach for our dreams. People accepting awards love to tell anybody watching to pursue their dreams, because they, too, were once watching an award show and some celebrity made some similar declaration. It might be true that nobody who never makes it ever did so by not trying. Effort is an assumed factor. Perhaps less assumed is privilege.
I was at Target the other day, and I saw a children’s book by BJ Novak. I know he had other publications, but this was the one in front of me. I know who BJ Novak is, because I used to watch him on The Office. BJ Novak was a literature major at Harvard, so he has at least a passing familiarity with written words. I don’t know if his writing is good. I will never read a single word BJ Novak has written. He got his start as a stand-up comedian in Los Angeles, and was cast based on the act that producer Greg Daniels saw him perform. Greg Daniels also went to Harvard.
It’s entirely possible that BJ Novak could have produced great literature and would have been widely published had he not appeared on the Office. We will never know.
I got mildly angry at the sight of seeing BJ Novak’s name on a book at Target. It was not the kind of anger that makes its mark, but if you had been there you would have heard me say “blech.” I moved on and went to look at humidifiers. Our apartment is very dry.
Publishing a book is a dream of mine. BJ Novak is a rich, award-winning television writer. Publishing a book might have been his dream, too, and I can imagine a scenario in which he worries whether he is actually worthy of having books published, had he not been on the Office. I have no ill feelings toward BJ Novak. His success takes nothing away from me.
I used the p-word, so I should address it more clearly. I enjoy a certain amount of privilege. My mother has three signers of the Declaration of Independence in her heritage, and an august name respected and admired by many people in Wheeling, West Virginia, where she and I grew up. Some of that admiration comes from who she is related to, but she also made a mark herself. The previous generation of Wheelingites would ask me if I was related to James Hazlett, who was a physician and treated many of them (he was my grandfather). This current generation asks if I’m related to Anne Foreman, my mother. They know her for her art, for her charity, for her kindness, generosity. I do not materially benefit from those famous signers, but my mother’s journey through life has eased the way for us, her children. There is a certain privilege in having a great mom, and that defies class or wealth.
I am blessed with many advantages. But I did not go to Harvard. My father was the first member of his family to go to college, and then to law school. A lean Christmas for our family was fewer presents under the tree, but there were always a few. If I don’t get a job soon, I will not starve or lose a place to live. My worst case scenario was never destitution but temporary reliance on the charity of my family to get me through — a wound to my pride, but just a glancing one.
Jealousy is a disgusting thing. It’s slimy and cancerous and it makes us miserable. There is never a reason for jealousy. I envy BJ Novak having published books, because I want to publish books, but that feeling, that emotional weight, is without purpose or benefit. I banish that feeling when I feel it, sometimes with a “yech” or an “ugh,” or a brief rant, but I get it out of me as soon as I feel it. We have a finite amount of energy. My true love, Shyloh, has worked for a singular goal since before I met her, and recently achieved it. No amount of privilege led her to that achievement — she worked, very hard, and very smartly, for that goal. She is an inspiration to me, and for creative people anywhere. Her art form is hair, but she’s a writer, too. She understands the struggle. She also understands that it takes struggle to make a dream come true.
Because our stores of energy are finite, the sensible thing to do is use them to pursue the dreams we have our own way. I wrote a novel, and I’m proud of it. I still think it’s good. Here’s what I say about it when I send a sample to prospective agents (which is how one publishes books the way I want to publish mine). This was written for me by my brother, Rob, who has a newsletter, too, and a thriving career as a writer. That’s another layer of privilege to acknowledge: a helpful brother who writes better than I do.
Edolphus Pierpont is a luckless smuggler who has been living in one of the Only Worlds, an interlocking complex of simulations of the major eras of human culture and society. To escape a threat on his life, he goes to Vegas, an Only World full of vice and folly where a man called Peachy has taken his stolen family heirloom, as well as his stolen girlfriend. His journey there propels him on a voyage to more Only Worlds than he knew existed. Events escalate until he is faced with a truth long since hidden from him: that he himself may be the creator of these artificial worlds, gone so deeply undercover that he has been made to forget his identity. As Pierpont peels back layers of the truth, he recognizes a cataclysm faced by the Only Worlds, and does everything he can to try to save them. At 90,000 words, THE WALLS OF THE WORLD is a fast, witty science-fiction adventure in a carefully imagined, high-concept universe.
So far, no agents have wanted to represent me and this book, so I have taken to writing other things. Another book is in me, and I work on that. I have also given myself until the middle of January to finish a story I have only recently begun. The story is called The First (And Least) Erotic Story Ever Written, and it is about how heaven handles good people who enjoy a little suffering. There are some scandalized, pearl-clutching celestial beings and some leering ones, too, and I enjoy the premise so much that I can’t wait to make a story out of it.
This is the moral of the story I’ve spun for you today: I write because I love it. I get an enormous burst of joy from having written, even if the process of writing is not always very fun. It is work, and it often feels like it. I don’t write to become famous or to become rich but because I am compelled to tell stories, even if nobody ever reads them.
But it’s even better when they do.