I love the just stepped on a mine movie trope. You hear the little click and you know before the character does. You’ve seen it too many times and it doesn’t matter. What matters is how this character steps off the mine without blowing up. You know the director’s going to drag this out as long as possible. There’ll be a final cigarette. A hand-off of that love note for the fiance back home. Then it’s time. Something has to be done. Sometimes the bomb tech manages to defuse it. Sometimes there’s a quick-change of weights. Sometimes, more often, the landmine was a dud. Whew. Maybe the writers are wishing the metaphorical landmines are less dangerous.
When I was starting out, living in a Winnebago that leaked and occasionally smoked or caught fire, sending my shit to agents and editors, I joined a few facebook groups for writers. It seemed like a good idea because other struggling writers I met said things like, “You HAVE to be in strugglingwritergroup. There are so many landmines in this business. You need to know what to watch out for.”
So I’d join. I’d scroll through. And every time it was the same. A bunch of writers trying to sell shit to other writers. Follow my course. Pay for my web course. Join my retreat. Give me a thousand dollars and I’ll teach you how to find an agent. Give me five thousand and I’ll teach you how to write a query letter that’ll definitely get you an agent. Give me ten thousand and I’ll edit your manuscript and get you a book deal. You have to pay for an editor. You have to pay for a ghost editor. (There should be no such thing.) Buy my book and I’ll teach you how to pitch and get published in the New York Times or the New Yorker. You’ll never sell a book or get an agent if you’re not in the New York Times or the New Yorker.
That’s it. That’s the entirety of what happens in a writing group. It’s what happens if you follow struggling writers on twitter. Mostly it’s a bunch of writers, of varying skill and success trying to sell shit to writers with a dream of getting published anywhere. But like I said, I was living in a Winnebago that leaked and occasionally caught fire. I wasn’t in a position to get ripped off, any more than I had for the Winnebago. I found an agent by googling lit agents and sending out a few emails saying hey I wrote this book.
I didn’t get the right agent at first. I probably would’ve known that sooner if I hadn’t been in writing groups that assured me I had a big name agent and if I dared talk to any other agents, I’d be blacklisted forever. (There’s no fucking blacklist. It’s a business. Talk to whomever you want. Just don’t be a dick.) I published a piece that no one read, but another agent read it and emailed me. I was on Twitter and Elizabeth McCracken thought my poop jokes were funny, took me out for drinks and told me to switch agents, and that there’s no blacklist, dummy. I didn’t get published in the New York Times until long after I’d made their bestseller list. The New Yorker doesn’t know who the fuck I am. (I do occasionally use an outside editor. He’s Howard Mittelmark and I trust him because he’s a friend who can edit me without breaking me, but also because, unlike half the grifters in facebook groups, he’s actually edited books that can be found in bookstores.)
When I was writing a book, I was, as we all likely know, on Twitter. You get on Twitter as a struggling writer, you end up following a bunch of struggling writers and established writers and it’s hard to see from the outside, who’s who. One day you’re on there and everyone’s oohing and ahhing over someone’s essay and passing sentences back and forth with commentary like “Holy shit,” and “My god.” You read the sentence and don’t understand it. Hard to tell if you’re dumb as shit or it’s just nonsense. Beautiful nonsense, but nonsense. I tend to default to maybe I’m dumb as shit. Maybe I have shitty taste. My favorite books are thrillers and no one’s talking about those. Everyone’s talking about these esoteric essays and I just learned the word esoteric.
Speaking of esoteric essays. Can I even write an essay? Because these motherfuckers keep talking about these other essays with nonsense pretty sentences. They all have the same structure. This motherfucker they’re all fawning over said that essay took a year to write. I wrote mine sitting outside a bar. I wrote that other one on shrooms listing to Sarah McLachlan at a rest stop outside Tucumcari. I wrote the others at 3am in a panic after I’d fucked them up enough times that I found a way in and was scared to sleep until I had them down. Maybe I’m making it look too easy. I should go back and add some words like esoteric so people won’t know I learned to write from reading. Maybe I don’t know how to write at all. They’re all going to make fun of me. Probably already are.
It’s easy as hell to spiral. Lie awake and wonder why I fucking had to make another goddamn enemy. You’re not supposed to have enemies. Not in this business. They tell you that too. It’s a small a world. That one writer who said they’d help. Should’ve fucked them. Yeah they screamed at me for not wanting to fuck after they almost threw up on me. They said I didn’t want them as an enemy. And there I went making them an enemy. Now the people from their writing group they said they’d get me into don’t follow me anymore. They’re on the jury for every award. Do I not get awards because I didn’t fuck them? Or because I suck. Because my sentences aren’t pretty and I never did learn how to write an essay. The people who get awards write pretty sentences. Maybe their essays all sound the same because that’s how to write an essay. But then, twelve million people read my essay I didn’t know how to write. So maybe not.
It helps to have friends who aren’t online, not like we’re online, friends who read a lot and have never logged onto twitter except to check on a hurricane. Name the essayists, the writers everyone’s fawning over and you’ll get a blank stare. They’ll ask if you ever read Where the Crawdads Sing. You’ll laugh because the people who know things on Twitter make fun of that book so fucking hard. But it’s probably still on the bestseller list. Send them the essay everyone’s fawning over and they’ll tell you they didn’t finish it. They tried. Really. But it was boring.
You start noticing a few things after a while. The people fawning over the things and the people writing the things, they’re all the same people. The people selling the things and the people buying the things are still in the same facebook groups selling and buying and promoting each other and swearing this is the one that helped and this is the one that made a difference. Unless they’ve moved here. Where the people fawning over the things and the people writing the things are now the same people. And here’s the thing, your friend who reads all the time has never and will never hear of any of them.
This is where comparing yourself to others gets dangerous. You start thinking any of this you see in your little writer bubble matters at all. It doesn’t. Go ask a friend if they’ve ever heard any of these names. They haven’t. Outside a writing group, off twitter, off substack, no one reads this shit and no one knows who they are. They’re not writing for the people who read things. They’re not writing about anything at all. They’re not saying anything because they don’t have anything to say. They’ve never lived outside academia. They’re not even telling a story. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just pretty words arranged all fucking pretty on a plate like foam and burnt hay. If you wanted a meal, you’ve gotta stop Whataburger on the way home.
It’s so easy to get lost in comparisons. Who has more followers and whose work is getting promoted. Who’s in what looks from where you’re sitting like the cool crowd, the cool kids table, and who’s not allowed to sit there anymore and who’s talking about whom. None of it matters. The kid doing their homework in the library not talking to anyone but the librarian will write the next bestseller. Your friend will know their name.
This is the truth. I’ve said it before because I fucking hate grifters, anyone who preys on someone’s dreams of being a writer. I’m sure it’s made me more than a few enemies. The people selling shit to struggling writers or struggling substacks have never helped anyone but themselves. They want you to believe there’s one way to do this for the same reason street preachers want you to believe there’s one way to heaven. It’s good money.
There are exceptions. You can tell the exceptions because they’ve written things people have read. Courtney Maum is an exception. You want to know everything you need to know about publishing, including how to not get ripped off by grifters preying on your dreams, her book and substack are fucking great. Rebecca Makkai is an exception. I learned more about how to write with ADHD from her recent post than I’ve learned in years of therapy. Chuck Palahniuk is an exception. Motherfucker’s got me sleeping with noise machine.
The grift was always going to move over to substack. Follow notes and you’ll see a lot of the same names you learned to ignore on Twitter. People fawning over sentences that don’t mean anything. People posting how to make it and how I got a million followers and how to write a substack. Pay me fifty dollars and I’ll teach you how to write according to your moon sign.
There’s no secret formula. Some substacks are going to do better than others. Some substacks are going to be fawned over by people who want that substack to promote them in return. If you’ve ever wondered about that part, it’s true. It’s a lot of favors and hoping for favors. It’s the same in the facebook groups and it was the same on twitter and it’s the same here. It was the same when all the writers were living in Paris, gossiping about who didn’t get invited to Gertrude Stein’s.
People promote their friends and they promote people they hope will promote them. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. You’d promote your friends too. But I get how it seems people only promote their friends. You’re not wrong. It does get easier after a while to see what’s real and what’s a favor being paid or sought. I promote friends all the time. They’re usually my friends because I loved their work or they liked mine and we started talking.
It can feel like you’re being shut out. Maybe you are. I am, from more than a few groups. I don’t have an MFA. I don’t live in Brooklyn and I missed brunch. I made some enemies. But I made a few friends too. It helps, rather than thinking of in-crowds and out-crowd, to think of this sort of thing geographically. You move to a place with your writing, it’s hard to talk to people in another place. You’ve got different weather, different stores, different traffic. You move to a new town, move up in your career, sometimes you don’t have as much in common with the people back in Amarillo. You make new friends who understand the jokes about the guy who rollerblades in his tighty-whiteys, friends who can calm you down about the option negotiations. It’s a whole lot easier to talk to and befriend people in your town, real and metaphorical.
Don’t get me wrong, I talk shit with the best of them. It’s how I’m in so many group chats. I’m a nosey bitch and I fucking love gossip. It’s my gayest quality. But I am, thank fuck, somehow immune to jealousy when it comes to writing. Maybe it’s because I took the long way. I never expected to be here at all. Maybe it’s because I know it’s all a crapshoot anyway, Maybe I still don’t understand anything at all. Maybe it’s simply that while I was figuring out how to break into writing, I was on Twitter, watching a thing getting all the attention one day only to be forgotten in a week. Maybe I’m just too old for this shit.
Maybe it’s that I know what it feels like to go viral. How I didn’t sleep for months. How everything was urgent and crucial and covered in landmines. How I thought my heart would come through my chest. They said it was heart palpitations and I said that’s too soft a word for how this feels. I was still working at the bar, standing outside the door checking IDs, and some woman was crying at me. I couldn’t leave. I was at work. People were finding and trying to talk to my family. Someone followed me home. Stood outside my window. I couldn’t complain about any of it because I should be grateful. This is what you wanted. Bitch. They put me on a heart monitor and told me to try sleeping sometimes. The place I’d always gone to run away from everything was the most dangerous place of all. Everyone wanted to be my friend. And everyone wanted to take me down a notch. Sometimes in the same breath. I remember that too well. How quickly I learned the difference between a fan and someone who wanted a favor, and a friend. And how much it hurt when I was wrong.
I’ll take my moderately successful career and my moderately successful substack that means I don’t have to go back to checking IDs and occasionally dodging a fist or being held hostage by a fan who wants a hug, and I’ll hope that more people have forgotten my name than have learned it. Thanks.
I know this: Someone’s substack or book or essay finding success isn’t a bad thing. Every day, there’s a writer panicking because someone wrote a book on the same subject and it’s getting all the attention. They haven’t even finished their proposal. I get these text messages a lot. I’m in a few too many group chats. I can feel them waiting for me to commiserate with a “fuck them.” I don’t. I tell them that’s fucking great. It is. You know how many goddamn World War II books were sold after All the Light We Cannot See won a pulitzer? Have you been to a bookstore in the past five years? You have any idea how many cult memoirs and “memoirs in essays” sold after I made the bestseller list? I do. I get blurb requests for all of them. All of them. There are so many.
Someone else’s successful book doesn’t mean yours is a failure. It means people will go into a bookstore and buy a book, probably more than one, maybe yours. Someone else’s successful substack doesn’t mean yours is a failure. It means your friend who doesn’t even read yours might finally open a substack account. They might send it out to their friends. A few of those people will think damn it’s kind of nice in here. They might start reading longform again and realize it’s healing something in their brain. To sit with something. To give it time to digest. To read a little before bed instead of scrolling social media. They’ll subscribe to a few more. They might even subscribe to yours.
There’s no secret way to be successful at this. Everyone’s using a different set of measures. The best thing I can tell you is ignore it all. Write whatever the fuck you want about whatever the fuck you want however the fuck you want to write it. You wanted to be a writer because you liked reading, I hope. If not, please find another career field. But you did. You do. You read everything you could on whatever your obsession was that week, read everything you could by that writer you were obsessed with before you became obsessed with that other writer’s work, and the next.
At some point, you read something that made you want to write. Stop worrying about landmines and what everyone else is doing and fucking write. Turn on a noise machine. Keep reading the shit you want to read, the shit that makes you feel and the shit that makes you laugh and the shit that makes you want to write. Ignore the trendy thing and the thing everyone says you have to read. Save your money. God knows you won’t make any as a writer. No one can teach you how to write like you. You’ve gotta teach yourself. Write a thing you’d want to read. If you can do that, I promise you, someone else will want to read it too. This, thank fuck, is still a place you get to do just that.
If you motherfuckers make me write another goddamn pep talk…
Wait—I wanted to be a writer to get rich. Is this the wrong place?
You are a goddamn angel.
Not that I believe in angels, but you get my drift.