This, as always from @hhavrilesky, is so damn smart, and I don’t even have a nemesis. I do have the occasional Writer I Wish I Was moment, & when I do, I force myself to remember that you have to apply for the fellowships, not just mutter. Then, oysters. thecut.com/2019/11/ask-po…
For real, though, the writers I wish I was tend to be twenty to forty years older than me, so I can see the span of their career, and it looks planned. In truth, much of the time it wasn’t. It was just hard work in pursuit of paid power bills, and it added up to fierce art.
If I walk around the outside of my own career, it looks pretty damn cool, and in fact, it is. I write what I want to write. All the time. Most of the time it ends up published, but not always. There are a couple things gestating that’ve been gestating for years and years.
When I was a baby writer, I’d look at the writers who were doing the work I wished I was doing and feel like the world wouldn’t let me do it. Then, one day, I just started writing what I really wanted to write. This was a good move, turns out. Definitely better than muttering.
Also, even if something can’t get published, it can get written. There’s nothing stopping you but your own gnash. And once you’ve written the big crazy thing, you get better at it. The writers I want to be all write the big crazy things. That’s what they’ve got in common.
They tend to write in a bunch of forms, give no fucks about what genre their stuff falls into, throw voice like they’re ventriloquists grabbing from the entire linguistic history of everything. From here, it usually looks like they’re fearless. Probably not. They’re just brave.
It’s mainly because I stared at other writers, drooling after their intrepid careers, that I managed to start just not giving a fuck about whether anyone but me thought I could do a thing. Not nemeses, but badass inspirations.
The moral of this thread, I guess is, read good books. Then throw yourself hard at writing your own, not waiting around for someone to ask you to do it. Write your own batshit lonesome dove set on mars, or, if you’re me, your own Beowulf, this time set in suburbia. Try shit.
Try it loudly, repeatedly, without mercy. The only way great writing hits the page is if you sit your ass down & write. Only way you get an enviable career is by doing the weird work of learning what your brain can make. You can emulate the best, & also do battle with yourself.
Pursue the paid power bills. Write like a whirlwind, don’t read it, drop it in a corner and write some more. Do it like it matters.
And FWIW, it wasn’t til I got super weird as a writer (and as a career-have, picking all the lanes at once) that I got happy. I have fun these days. 🐉
