If You Dream of Being a Writer, Maybe Read This First, Okay?

A few words to hang on to when you feel like you’re drowning

You need to get a job, she says.

It’s a tired old conversation but she thinks she’s right. So she’s going to keep bringing it up again and again. For my own good, of course.

I’m doing fine, I say.

No, she says. You’re not doing fine. What you are is irresponsible.

I’m mad and she can tell, but she doesn’t care. Because she’s so sure she’s right I can see it all over her face. Makes me determined to wipe that look off her pretty face.

It’s just — how.

I’m getting a dollar a word, I say.

The look on her face makes me laugh. Because I know. She had no idea how much a writer can earn, what’s even possible. So I tell her I’m fine. I’m finishing a twelve hundred word piece. Let her do the math.

But I know her. She’s not done until she has the last word. So she says sure, but it’s not going to last and you’ll be scrambling again. Like I don’t know that. Tells me I’m a single mother, like I don’t know that either.

She’s watching, waiting for me to say something else she can shoot down.

My thoughts are wild horses. I want to tell her about Bukowski working a job he hated. Tell her about his rooms of the dead, men without eyes and voices. Men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas. Talking about how soul sucking it is to do work you hate because you have to. I’ve done those jobs.

I want to read her T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men. Read her the lines about stuffed men in shadow lands, cactus lands. Men with no voice. Souls that are fading stars. I want to tell her I can’t do that. Tell her I can’t be that fading star. Can’t do it anymore.

I want to remind her she has a house filled with words. Books, newspapers, magazines. Ask who she thinks writes all that, some magical fairy people? Words falling from the sky to land on the printing presses?

Want to whisper that no, it’s people. People like me. People who dream of being a writer so bad they can taste it. But I know. She wouldn’t care. Because that’s how it goes with people who think they know what’s “best” for someone else.

There are no eyes here. In this valley of dying stars.

First time I wrote for pay was in print magazines. Sent my writing out in a manila envelope and waited, fingers crossed.

Hand hovering the phone like a hummingbird, heart racing a hundred beats a minute when I see their number on call display. Pick up, try not to cry when they offer a crazy amount, twice what I was expecting.

Try not to cry. Hold it back. But oh, I want to. I want to yell to the treetops that a real magazine editor likes my words. Likes them enough to pay me for them.

Yes, yes of course I’ll make edits. Happily. So happily. No problem.

Hang up the phone, sink to the floor and finally cry because back then five hundred dollars went a lot farther than it goes today. For one piece of writing? I’ll take it. As many times as they’ll say yes. And thank my lucky stars.

Until it ends.

Because it always ends.

That’s the hardest part. It always ends.

Stephen King has a story about papering the wall with rejection letters but not all places even sent those. Book publishers and literary magazines, sure. But a lot didn’t. A lot just asked for send a self addressed stamped envelope. So if they didn’t want your piece they’d mail it back. I’d go buy stamps by the sheet.

Get too many envelopes sent back, I’d be running classified ads and writing resumes to make ends meet. Send out more envelopes in the mail.

But sometimes? Phone would ring and a voice at the other end would offer some crazy amount of money and I’d be over the moon. Run buy the sneakers my kid needs, splurge on dinner and a movie. Go to bed, sleep like a baby, knowing everything that needs paying is getting paid.

And everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

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We’re sitting in some chain restaurant that’s long since closed their doors when Mama puts her fork down and looks me in the eyes. Tells me I have more internal fortitude than all the rest of her children put together.

And I know. She’s not talking about my writing. She’s talking about all of it. Leaving. Filing for divorce. Being a single mom. Working so hard. It’s like she’s not seeing one singled out part of me, but all of me. For just this one minute.

Puts a lump in my throat. Compliments from Mama are not something I’m used to. She loved me, I know. But we were oil and water. Over all the little things. Too opinionated. Too stubborn. Always too something. So I say thank you, Mama, and I hold on to her words when I’m drowning.

Because you do, some days. Feel like you’re drowning. Drowning in bills, drowning in debt and doubt, drowning in rejection, drowning in fear and sometimes, drowning in other people’s doubts and opinions, too. People who love you mostly. Just want you to be safe, whatever that means.

When you first start, you think you need advice. Looking for someone, anyone, to tell you how to get a foot in the door. How to get started. But no. That’s not what you need. You need a rock. Even if it’s one sentence like the little strip of paper in a fortune cookie. To say hey — you got this.

The internet changed everything for writers. I know it sounds trite, but it’s true. Doesn’t matter what you want to do. Find an agent, build an audience, or find writing opportunities. It’s all out there. No end to what’s out there.

But in some ways, the internet made it harder for writers, too.

For starters, before the internet if you weren’t dead serious about writing, you weren’t doing it. No one thought mailing manila envelopes was an easy side gig. People who weren’t compelled to write looked at people like me, called us crazy. And I guess we were. Crazy to write, anyway.

It’s harder to find good writing gigs now. They’re hidden. You can earn a thousand dollars for one piece of writing but good luck finding those jobs because too many side-hustle people saw dollar signs and bombed them with submissions without bothering to read the submission guide first. Now you need connections to find the jobs that pay well.

One of the worst hurdles is misinformation. Like you’re not already lost in the woods, there’s people out there planting more trees to get lost in.

Just the other day, some random advice giver said the only way to make any money is to write about making money or you’re not going to make any and I replied to say no, you are so wrong but he ignored me because negativity is his game and I wonder how many people read things like that, let it suffocate their dreams.

And the courses. Cripes. I have no problem with teaching or learning, but why is it that so many of those people have never made an income selling essays, fiction or poetry? They make money writing about making money and they’re better at pushing pain buttons than at selling actual writing.

Here’s the thing. It’s hard. So hard. Break your heart hard.

Mama used to get so upset that I wanted to write and paint and draw. She’d tell me go into business or accounting because writers and artists go hungry. And I’d say all those people in the unemployment line are hungry too. Laid off from jobs they hated.

I wish I could tell you steps. But I can’t. Because success looks different for every writer. There’s not just one dream or one way to make it come true.

Like Paul Harding, who wrote a book and got so many rejections he threw it in a drawer. Years later took it to a tiny press and said he just wants to see it in print. They agreed to print it for a profit split. Then it won a Pulitzer.

Know why? Because librarians loved it. Nominated it without telling him.

I could tell you stories like that all day. Because I hunt them down. Read stories about the people like me who chased a dream. And I learned there isn’t just one way. And sometimes, there’s zigzags in the path.

Like Bronnie Ware, who threw in the towel. Gave up trying to write and got a job in a care home. Months later, dawned on her that all the dying people had the same five regrets. So she blogged about them and some publisher called her with an offer. So turns out she became a writer after all. Just not the way she thought.

Know what she said the top regret of the dying is? They wish they’d had the courage to live a life that was true to themselves instead of doing what other people thought they should do, told them to do.

Boy that hits me hard. I think about that a lot. All those years of family telling me I’m irresponsible. Sending me job listings. And here’s me. Tapping away at my keyboard all these years later. It’s all I ever wanted. You know? Live on my terms.

It’s not easy. There’s no map. And success is often short lived. Because then the worry begins. That you’ll never create anything that good again.

Liz Gilbert told that story in a TED talk. Said after Eat, Pray, Love went bestseller she was terrified to write again. Because what if that was it? What if that was her moment, and it never ever got that good again.

I’m no great success story. I’m not a household name like Stephen King or Margaret Atwood. Maybe one day I will be. Or maybe I never will.

Some months I earn more writing what I want. Other months I earn more writing copy for clients. Copywriting. Words to sell stuff. But all these years later, I’m still here. I’m still writing every day. Still rowing my little boat to the moon.

And I just want to tell you. Hang in there. You got this.

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” — Edgar Allan Poe