I’ve always been passionate about supporting fellow writers and artists. I recently received a lovely email from a college student who I babysat for when he was an infant. He asked for advice on everything from publishing to internships. Even though I’m convinced I don’t know a goddamn thing about life (and have extensive proof to back this notion up), I shared a few things I’ve picked up along the way that help me make sense out of being a writer. This email was written specifically for him, and belongs to him, but I thought it might be helpful to other writers who are starting out, or to people who work with writers, are parents to writers, are friends with writers, are in love with writers…

There’s a world of difference between someone who writes and someone who identifies unequivocally as a writer. This letter is for the latter.

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Dear D,

Well, this is lovely symmetry. You’re now the age I was when you were born. If I remember correctly, you and I had a few one-way conversations that summer, mostly me reasoning with you to stop crying and fall asleep. If only I’d had the foresight to suggest that someday you’d want my help getting an internship. At least now I can honestly say “He never sleeps.”

This is going to be a long email that won’t make complete sense to you now. I recommend hanging on to it and rereading it in a couple of years. Most of this advice will eventually synthesise. I’m including even the kitchen sink because I wish someone had said these things to me at your age so that the issues were in my peripheral thoughts and not complete surprises when they presented themselves, generally at inopportune moments. Anything here that doesn’t make sense, just push it aside. It may crop up down the road.

Most writers you ask for advice will warn you off becoming a writer. Don’t take it personally but do take it to heart. It’s not rewarding in any traditional sense. It’s lonely and it’s hard work, but it’s incredibly meaningful because of what you’re giving up to pursue it (stability, regular income, a sense of belonging.) We live in a culture that romanticises a writer’s life, so you aren’t allowed to complain about your choice even though you’re sacrificing just as much as the people who take jobs they don’t want in order to support families, or themselves. Your life won’t look like a sacrifice because you’re privileging your thoughts over everything else. It’s the “everything else” that you sacrifice.

Don’t underestimate the emotional toll it takes to carry a mountain around on your shoulders. To mitigate the discomfort, do the uncomfortable things like emailing other writers and artists and connecting with people. Build a network of support with people who grasp what you’re trying to do. Also keep in mind that artists can be some of the most fucked up people in the world, so try to be smart about who you trust and don’t beat yourself up when you get burned. It’s going to happen and it will suck. One of my favourite quotes is from Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served The King of England — “He was a gentle and sensitive soul, and therefore had a short temper, which is why he went straight after everything with an ax…” (it’s a great book that I highly recommend, but only after you read Too Loud a Solitude, which is even better.) Some artists (friends, mentors, colleagues) will come after you with an ax, but chalk it up to their having bruised temperaments from a lifetime of being misunderstood (as all writers have been) and get really good at forgiveness. Forgiveness is probably the third most useful skill in this profession, after curiosity and word usage.

Here’s the good news — you can’t screw this up. You can only fail to meet certain expectations that you’ve created in your mind, like getting published or living the life of a writer. Those are broad concepts. Yet, as you’re reading them here, they probably call up specific images because you’ve been thinking about them a lot. The truth is our future life only promises shades of what we imagine. I can’t think of a single time something happened exactly the way I imagined it, and more often things work out completely differently than I thought they would. The imagination is a writer’s bridge to their finished work, but using it to reach practical decisions can blur the line between goals and expectations which leads to crushing (but avoidable!) disappointment. So, you can’t screw this up because there’s nothing to screw up. The future is a blank. Set yourself a few goals, preferably achievable ones, and then set to work attaining them through curiosity, investigation, skill, and hard work. If you want to write about politics, move to Washington. If you want to write about love, love people…mindfully and willfully, not like it’s expected of you, and not like it’s a given. If you want to write about seeing the world but can’t travel, talk to people who have and write nonfiction. If you want to write about a world that’s better/different/more advanced/more regressed than the one you live in, become knowledgable in what this one offers. These are all logical choices, but when you begin to write it can feel overwhelming to identify what you want to write about because you haven’t really tried anything yet and you may not know where your true interests lie. See, screwing up is what you’re supposed to do. It’s the currency of writing. The screw ups become your material. The thing to get good at, then, is failing. (And yeah, it’s painful to write that, because I often wonder if I’m TOO good at failing, and then I write something that speaks to people and it gives me a good enough reason to go out and fail again. ☺)

For good measure, here’s a piece of my advice you can ignore — don’t be afraid of the smiley face. (DO. BE AFRAID. I use it all the time and it’s complete laziness on my part. Inventor of the Smiley Face, I shake my fist at you! I undercut everything I write with the smiley face. ☺)

re: Being terrified

Being terrified is completely normal. You’re taking a big risk. I was just having this conversation with a friend the other day and we disagreed over the concept of bravery (which I mention only to remind you that everything I say here is subjective and easily disagreed with.) For me, being scared is inherent in bravery. Understanding what’s at stake and being willing to face that loss repeatedly is imperative to living an honest life. Some people rely on religion for this sort of self inventory. Personally, I prefer philosophy and science. No matter your chosen paradigm, fear is going to be a part of everything, always. People have ways of convincing themselves it isn’t but writers don’t have that luxury. We live with an excruciating awareness of life’s poverty of reassurance. (It’s why we write.)

re: Publishing now vs later

I’m not a great person to answer this question. Publishing was never on my radar and I have an ambivalent relationship to all things “publishing.” Actually, that’s an understatement. If I’m completely honest with you, I’m disdainful of a lot of publishing practises, but that’s my idiosyncratic view and it doesn’t serve me well. I’m a purist first, careerist last, and it’s highly likely that’s why my novel isn’t currently sitting on a bookshelf somewhere, so…take heed. I didn’t go to school for writing and I send out one story a year. I prefer to publish in unprotected venues (like Medium, Red Lemonade, G+) just to see what sort of readers it brings me into contact with. I meet the most interesting people through the writing I put out there. I’m familiar with what’s going on in the world, publishing-wise, so if you have specific questions down the road feel free to drop me an email. For now, given that you’re pursuing writing in an academic setting, I’d listen to your professors on this one. Further to that, if you’re in school and around these experienced people it makes sense to get the most out of their expertise by following their advice; it doesn’t strike me as the right time to rebel against it. Without meaning to sound pretentiously zen, be where you are. Embrace where you’ve chosen to learn. Anything else is a waste of energy, and writing already requires more energy than most of us have. I’d focus your time in school entirely on developing your writing practise. Having a practise is SO important. Simply put, think of yourself as a word athlete. You have to train your muscles every day. When you don’t, you grow weak. When you do, you become boundless.

On practical matters — an internship.

Do you want one? If you want one, apply for one. Your resume looks great and I’m sure anyone would love to have you. I don’t think you’ll need any help from me (remember, you’re giving them your time for free) but I’ll happily put in a call for you if you don’t hear back from someone. As for whether to apply, it all comes down to what you think you need most. If you get an internship over the summer, then a year from now you’ll be writing about bureaucracy, unpaid work and publishing a literary magazine, so if those things intrigue you then pursue them. To answer your question, I interned at the UN in college. It was an insane time. I ended up with the largest, nicest office I’ve ever had while I harassed the Senate Budget Appropriations Committee for more money, went to State Department briefings and wrote policy papers on the effects of economic aid in developing economies, all while I was an unpaid 20-year old college student! But that’s a longer story for another time. It’s a great story, actually, and one I should write someday. It makes a great case for getting an internship somewhere completely unrelated to writing, in a field you’d be happy in if writing doesn’t pan out the way you need it to. Just a thought. As an aside, unrelated to anything in your email, I’m always skeptical of people who go to the ends of the earth to find adventure when they aren’t really adventurers. The people who spend three months on an Alaskan fishing boat just to say they did it? I’ve only ever met two people who truly belong on an Alaskan fishing boat, or somewhere comparable, and the rest are sadly misguided individuals. If you don’t want to be an Alaskan fisherman then what the hell are you doing on that boat? (That’s my question; rarely gets a decent answer.) There’s plenty of adventure to be found in the middle of whatever excites you, so my suggestion is to start exploring things that are interesting to you, the stuff you’ve always wondered about, whatever it may be, and don’t let anyone else paint the picture of what “adventure” looks like. They don’t have to live it, you do.

Money, not publishing, is the thorn in the side of every writer. There’s no money in this work whatsoever. Zero. I’ve been in debt for almost my entire career, as have many of my friends, and it’s exhausting and demoralising. That said, I worked at Apple for a few years and took the time to figure out if I’d be happier with a great paycheck at the top company in the world, building a “music geek team” — ostensibly a dream job. The experience was awesome, but once the learning curve levelled off I thought about writing every day. I was just too tired and distracted to sit down and do it. I made the practical decision to stay at the company for several years to save money so I could eventually pay myself to write, and guess what — the screenplay I just turned in has a character built on my experiences in tech. I traded five years of writing for five years of security and experience, and I don’t know what on earth I’d be writing about now if I hadn’t had that experience. Which loops back to the idea that no matter how hard you try, there’s really no screwing this up.

…Except if you don’t develop a writing practise. That’s the only way to screw up being a writer.

The direct segue from money is to the subject of time. Most people will be profoundly confused by any decision you make that privileges anything over money. My suggestion is to form a relationship to money, understand what your threshold for risk is before you start to feel like your writing process suffers because your time is bound up with the wrong place. (Some of the greatest novels in the world are written on this subject. Bel Ami comes to mind.) Make it a priority to learn how much time you need to write and live above that threshold — is it a job at Starbucks, a tiny apartment and writing every day? A job at Apple and writing a novel every four or five years? The main thing to remember is that a financial goal won’t be met by writing, so be on the lookout for ways you can support yourself and accomplish your writing goals, knowing that the way you support yourself will also likely become your material.

The last thing I’ll say is on your work, which I enjoyed reading. As I mentioned above, it’s your life experience that informs the subject matter of your writing, and both pieces you sent me involve young men who are observing their lives and the people in their immediate vicinity (parents, friends, etc.) I expect this is why your professors aren’t pro-publishing — because right now that experience is not substantially unique, no matter how unique your voice or skill set may be. To me, the greatest books, and my favourite writers, bring me into worlds they’ve seen and experienced, and share their observations of life and human behaviour that come from those places. They make meaning out of the human condition, as all writers are obligated to do, but they make the journey exhilarating with backdrops and characters I wouldn’t otherwise know about. My first novel was about a young woman trying to figure out how to live on her own — not unique. I only gave it to a few people, and someone wanted to make a TV series out of it, but I declined and am very glad I did. I would hate to be known for that piece of work now. You strike me as someone with strong observational skill, and when you turn that outward it will open up so many worlds for you to write about. But, for now, I’d sit tight and develop your writing habits so you have a foundation to stand on when you’re out there having the singular experience of pursuing what interests you.

I really hope some of this is helpful to you. It’s a lot of information. No matter how confidently I state it, it is subjective. Use what works, discard what doesn’t. I think the strangest thing about writing is that you’re always writing about something from the past, but in the name of the future. People don’t understand how unsettling that can be, the mental time-travel of it all. Most people live life looking forward — earning money they’ll receive next week, or planning weddings, holidays, babies. Writers spend as much or more time thinking about the baby that was born, the holiday that was had, and the wedding that happened. To do that effectively without letting life pass you by it’s helpful to see the present moment for what it is: what you’ll be writing about tomorrow. So…make now interesting.

Take care, and keep me posted on how things go. You can email me any time.

EC