How to Be a Contemporary Writer

1. Read diversely.

2. Write.

3. See items 1 and 2.

4. Accept that there is no one way to make it as a writer and that the definition of making it is fluid and tiered.

5. Accept that sometimes literary success is political and/or about who you know and that’s not likely to change. Yes, celebrities are going to keep publishing terrible books. Yes, Lisa Rinna’s Starlit is an actual thing. I read the book and… I’m scarred. But. You’re not getting better as a writer, worrying about the system. 

5a. If you’re a woman, writer of color or queer writer, there are probably more barriers. Know that. Be relentless anyway. Strive for excellence. Learn how to kick the shit out of those barriers. Don’t assume every failure is about your identity because such is not the case. 

6. Accept that sometimes cream actually does rise to the top and hard, consistent work will eventually get noticed, maybe not in the way you envisioned, but some way, some how. 

7. Understand the actual odds and learn to love the slush pile. The slush pile is not your enemy. It’s actually one of your best friends.The truth is that a significant percentage of the slush pile, which I prefer to call the submission queue, is absolutely terrible because people are lazy and will submit any old thing. If you can write a good sentence you are already heads and shoulders above most of what is found in submission queues. You’re not competing against 10,000 submissions a year a magazine receives. You’re competing against more like 200.  Those are still intimidating odds but they’re also far more reasonable.

8. Be nice. The community is small and everyone talks. Being nice does not mean eating shit. Being nice does not mean kissing ass. Being nice just means treating others the way you would prefer to be treated. If you’re comfortable being treated like an asshole, then by all means. 

9. Know that more often than not, editors have your best interests at heart. Stand up for your writing but be open to editorial suggestions. A good editor is giving you feedback in service of your writing.

10. Ignore most of the atrocious writing advice that proliferates at such an alarming rate. 

11. Stop listening to conspiracy theories about publishing. 

12. Stop listening to doomsday predictions about publishing. 

13. Don’t talk yourself out of the game by listening to conspiracy theories, doomsday predictions, and bad advice.

14. Make note of the distinction between writing and publishing. They are two very different things.

15. Know that you can get an agent through the mystically fearsome slushpile. It may be hard. It may take more time than you want but it can and does happen. I found my first agent through the slush pile. She’s great. My second agent found me because of essays I wrote. Sometimes people find agents at conferences, or through friends of a friend, or other such connections but you absolutely can go the old fashioned route.

15a. Do your research. Know what agents are interested in. Spell their names correctly. Have a book you give a damn about and make sure it shows. Know how to talk about your book.

15b. If you want to see a sample query letter, just ask a writer who successfully signed with an agent through the slush pile. They will probably share.

15c. This is an interesting take on navigating the business of agents. 

15d. But don’t be so discouraged! 

16. You do not need to live in New York to be a writer, though New York is great (dirty bathrooms aside) and it might be better if you live elsewhere and visit New York for a few days at at time. 

17. Perspective is everything. Someone getting a book deal is not taking yours away. Success is not as finite as it seems–it’s a matter of luck, timing, and hard work. (Or sometimes, yes, who you know).

17a. You are neither as great or terrible a writer as you assume. 

18. Know that sometimes you simply need to work harder and sometimes you’ve done the best you can do and there’s no shame in either.

19. Participate in the literary community in the ways you are comfortable participating. What matters is that you contribute. That could be subscribing to a magazine, attending a reading, volunteering at a literary magazine, and so on. (See #8)

20. Have an online presence or don’t. It’s shocking how much time writers spend stressing over this that could be spent writing. Yes, an online presence helps but only if you actually use it with some regularity. Plenty of writers don’t have a significant online presence and manage to still be writers. If you feel like having an online presence (Twitter, Facebook, Blog, Tumblr, whatever), is a pain in the ass, it’s going to show and it’s not worth having.

21. If you’re going to have a website, don’t have an ugly website. There’s no excuse anymore. If you cannot afford a designer, no problem. Use a content management system like Wordpress or Tumblr and a nice template.

22. You will probably need a job unless you’re fine with financial stress. Yes you can have a job and be a writer. It happens all the time. I used to be fine with financial stress because I was young and my fantasies were exciting. I am not anymore because I am old and I love my apartment and health insurance and buying stupid shit. A job facilitates these things so keep it in mind. There are worse things than a job.

23. Learn to deal with rejection. You don’t have to like it. You can sulk and whine and cry. You can blog about it. Just know that publishing involves rejection far more than acceptance. It’s easier if you can process that early on. 

23 a. Maybe don’t write editors who reject you to call them names. That doesn’t ever end well.

24. Have other hobbies. Don’t be one of those people who only writes and can only talk about writing. My hobbies are embarrassing but I do have them and am grateful to have them.

25. Ignore all of this as you see fit.

Do what Roxane says. 

Let’s be realistic. We are never coming back.

C. D. Wright, January 6, 1949–January 12, 2016

"If you record the world honestly, there's no way people can stop being funny. A lot of fiction writing doesn't get that idea, as if to acknowledge it would trivialize the story or trivialize human nature, when in fact human nature is reduced and falsified if the comic aspects are not included." — Lorrie Moore, born on this day in 1957

[Photo: Linda Nylind]

“But as for me, if all the features that I had assimilated from him had once seemed to me lovable, how, now that they no longer seemed lovable, was I going to tear them out of me? How could I scrape them definitively off of my body, my mind, without finding that I had in the process scraped away myself?”

–Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Nino Sarratore = Noah Solloway 

“I like people too much or not at all”

Sylvia Plath

Scorpio Sun - Libra Moon

Happy bday Sylvia

So Sad Today

Recently I was #blessed to receive an advance copy of So Sad Today, which I read very quickly and enjoyed thoroughly (as much as one can ‘enjoy’ a book about living with a mental illness, anyway) and then gave to Emily. When I dropped it off at her house her kid was a little fussy.  Emily comforted him while we chatted, sort of murmuring nonsense stuff into his little ear and gently bouncing him, at one point repeating “Why so sad? Why so sad?” to him in one tone of voice in between saying something completely different to me in another, and then I said “So sad today!!” and we both looked at the book and at then at Raffi and laughed.  I look forward to running this joke into the ground.

What I liked about So Sad Today is that it takes the experience of severe, chronic depression and treats it, not with a detail-obsessed, third-person remove (here I am thinking about that David Foster Wallace story, “The Depressed Person”) or a first-person from-the-trenches account, either highly medicalized or ending in triumph (I once took The Noonday Demon to the beach. “Your beach read is a book about depression?” – EG), but as a joke.  A dark joke, with intense repercussions, but a joke.  Don’t get me wrong; So Sad Today is, as the title suggests, very sad.  But it is trying to make the reader laugh.

I also treated my severe chronic depression like a joke.  What I mean by this is that I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t do anything about it for a very long time, and when someone tried to talk to me about how I was, really, about my depression, a close friend or medical professional, maybe, I would almost always lie or change the subject, in a way I considered to be a ‘joke.’ But it wasn’t a joke, because my behavior was a. a deflection tactic, prima facie, and b. not funny.  If a friend asks how you are, and you say, “Fantastic!”, or worse, “You know, fantastic!”, relying on their ability to read between the lines and intuit that by “you know”  you mean “You know the nasty hoodie I call my “Darkness Visible” sweatshirt that never leaves my house? Well, I’ve been wearing it for 6 days straight,” you are not being funny.  

With acquaintances and strangers it was much worse. “Ha ha!” I’d think.  “This person doesn’t know that by ‘Fantastic!’ I mean, ‘I feel like I want to die 7 out of every 10 seconds!’  What a hilarious brilliant use of irony! God, I’m funny!” Right, yes, because all of this is so fucking hilarious and my own health will never be important enough for me to do anything about, because I hate myself – how funny.

Are all my jokes about listening to Mogwai and crying really jokes?

Are my jokes about listening to Mogwai and crying  just like 6 years ago really jokes?

I remember around the time I was doing this a lot, laughing at my awful inside jokes with myself about how I was actually “fine,” I also was a few months into a job that I had hoped would be temporary but ended up being pretty permanent.  My responsibilities weren’t enough to fill a complete 8 hour workday, so I spent a lot of time in a beige cubicle clicking around aimlessly on a computer and a lot of time hungover, because clicking around aimlessly on a computer was something I could do quite competently while hungover. Also if I was hungover almost daily I could attribute how bad I felt to the hangover, and not something scarier about my brain chemistry and general disposition. None of this was doing that brain chemistry and disposition any favors as far as feeling purposeful or worthwhile or hopeful about the future, either, but that didn’t seem obvious or even connected.  

Anyway, it was right around lunch, late October or November, grey and disgusting outside, and I was “fine.” An all-office email went out saying there was Turkish food in the conference room left over from a meeting, first come, first served.  The innocuous stampede of people moving towards the free food that always formed like clockwork 2-5 minutes following the receipt of such an email low-key amused me the way it always did – “People love free food!  Ha ha, we’re all such broke animals and life is nothing but a struggle to push someone else, at least one person, beneath you” – and I joined it.  When I reached the buffet there was not much left, and nothing I really personally enjoyed (a small list of things, growing smaller by the day), but I put some random food on my plate.  This way at least I would not have to eat my packed lunch, which was doubtless horrible, like all meals I prepared, or go outside in the rain to waste money I didn’t have on something else that would probably also be bad.  Then the person in front of me in line turned around quickly or stopped suddenly or maybe I wasn’t paying attention and just walked right into them – whatever, the end result was that my plate flew out of my hand, up, high in the air, fully revolving at least once, and landed food-side-down on the carpet.  I can see a way in which this is spectacular and pretty genuinely funny, but in the moment I thought everyone in the room already hated me (because who didn’t?) and I hated myself for being so clumsy and awful, and I burst into tears immediately, right there, in the conference room full of my nice, bookish, nonthreatening coworkers.  I knew I was way overreacting so while the person I had bumped into or whatever apologized I ran out of the room and into the stairwell. I didn’t even pick the plate up from the floor or try to clean anything, which for me and my identity as a Helpful Person is a huge-ish deal.

Once I was safe in the stairwell sitting on the bare concrete landing I cried and cried.  I could not stop.  I thought about how I was crying over pretty literally spilt milk and cried even more about how stupid I was.  I cried about how there was tzatziki or something all over my dress, which was old and stained already and didn’t really fit me or look good anymore because I had lost weight and also chopped off all my hair, and how I didn’t have anything else to wear that I didn’t also hate, at home or in the world, and about how if I tried to shop for something new I would just loathe myself for all the money I had ever spent and didn’t have and then I wouldn’t be able to actually make a decision and buy something, anything, anyway, just like I could not currently  make a decision about the most inconsequential things, such as as to whether to eat my packed lunch or go out for food or go back to the conference room and clean up my mess and get some different Turkish leftovers.  I kept crying and crying, really awful, uncontrollable, silent but wet Claire Danes-style sobs, for a long time.  I would slow down for a while but I couldn’t really stop.  Finally I just left work for the day, even though it was maybe 1:45, because I thought I was probably going to die.

We hyperbolize as a way to express ourselves strongly.  If we prefer a certain shade of nail polish, we’re obsessed with it. When I don’t like someone, I say they’re worthless.  I wanted to die, it was so terrible, we say, about an inconvenient travel experience.  

The thing about depression is that it does not recognize hyperbole. Life is worthless, you are worthless, none of this will ever change and things will always be this way, except the future, which while staying the same will also somehow certainly be worse. You know these to be facts the way you know your birthday and your eye color.

My Darkness Visible hoodie might be a punchline, but it is not a joke.  I spent a long time not really understanding the difference, but now I do.

“‘We convince ourselves we can own the identity of the anxious or depressed person.  Then it sneaks up again.’  It’s like I got this.  Then the mental illness is like, No, I’ve got you.”

I read that and felt like I had been kicked in the stomach.  I might have actually involuntarily said, “oof.”  I cried some, not as much as on the day of the Turkish food buffet, but some.  

I am better now.  In February, I finally started seeing a non-crappy therapist.  In March, I began seeing a non-crappy psychiatrist. Sometime in April I started feeling better.  I remember I was walking to or from Emily’s house, waiting for the light to change on the corner of St. James and Greene.  I felt weird.  I wasn’t dreading something I couldn’t understand or describe, I didn’t instantly hate everything I saw and felt, nothing annoyed me, I didn’t wish I was in bed.  I didn’t feel empty or raw or worthless, or like I needed to be alone in the dark. I hadn’t cried yesterday or the day before. There were things I wanted to do in addition to seeing Emily that day, and I knew I would do them.   Is this a good mood? I wondered.  Is this what being in a good mood feels like?

Now I am in a good mood more often than not.  I still get sad, and I still have days when I feel terrible and my mood sucks. I have days where I am terrified that my wellbeing is a fluke and it’s just a matter of time before I am back to being So Sad Forever.  I also get sad sometimes about everything I lost or never did during the many years I was depressed. I lost friends and opportunities and relationships and a LOT of money, it turns out. When I read that a couple weeks ago – “No, I’ve got you,” – I felt sad for what a stupid lie I had believed for so long, the lie I had to tell myself about how my feelings were a joke, even though they almost killed me. Because I’m a smart person who doesn’t have feelings, or can’t be serious about them, because that’s not cool.  Or something.  I don’t know.  I don’t have to know everything anymore.  I don’t even know why I wrote this, except to say – to promise – that if you feel this way, you don’t have to either.  I know that seems crazy and pointless,  and you don’t have to believe me.  I wouldn’t – didn’t– believe me. But you don’t.

Love what Ruth says here, and I cannot wait for Melissa’s new book 

“One Is a Whole Number” by Daniela Olszewska–Dose Market, 6.14.15

Poem Topic: “Being Happy Being Alone”

Get ready! Our third Hustle reading is happening July 19th with the incredible Angela Flournoy, Leigh Stein + Jenn Baker! 

WORD Brooklyn (126 Franklin St.)

Sunday, July 19 at 2:00PM 

Mark your calendars!