Over the past year I have been kicking around an idea for the McSweeney's annual column contest.
Over the past weeks I have been hammering out the details. Putting the words to the page. Editing. Writing. Editing again. Rewriting. Drinking. Crying. Rewriting.
Over the weekend I sat back in my wildly uncomfortable kitchen chair, scrubbed my face, and clicked send. In spite of all the emotional hand-wringing and stylistic issues I had mapping out the coulmn, it was some of the most fun I've ever had writing. More than that, it signified the most work I had ever put into a non-academic piece. It was an entire year's worth of thinking, sketching out installments of the column, rethinking the premise, chucking the whole thing and starting from scratch. It was a month solid of writing and stuttering to a halt. Rewriting and feeling like I was losing my mind. Now, with all that work behind me, I allowed myself to daydream.
I imagined what it would be like when my column was accepted. How I would take the prize money and buy a magnificent bottle of scotch and drink it in the breezy late-summer evenings on the porch. I looked forward to finding an agent who wanted to read my memoir and how in two, three years at the outside, I would be opening yet another bottle of magnificent scotch to toast my successful book release. Critics would adore me. Ira Glass would want to interview me. Mary Oliver would want to have dinner with me.
I know, right? Even in my daydreams I'm a pretentious asshole.
But I felt entitled to these pretentious asshole daydreams. After all of the work I had put into the entry, it was the piece of writing of which I was most proud. It was polished. It was professional. It was about something that actually mattered to me and that I hoped would be amusing to my readers. Eventually, though, the pretentious asshole daydreams wound to a close and I rewarded myself with a stack of X-Men comics and a book on introverts. I spent most of the day in my armchair, getting lost in some of my nerdier pursuits.
When I eventually closed the book on introverts, I remembered a conversation I had the day before with a friend. I told her about my contest entry and she asked if I had read the grand prize winner from the previous year. When I replied that I hadn't, she gave me her best eyebrow-raised, Sherlockian, "Oh-Watson-You-Poor-Dolt-You-Don't-Get-It-Yet" look.
"You should," was all she said.
Now, having finished not only a fraught writing project but the stack of books I had set aside for the day, I wandered over to my computer and pulled up the column. After reading half of it and using up half a box of tissues in the process, I put my face in my hands, utterly embarrassed by what I had so confidently submitted a few hours earlier.
It's one thing to know definitively that your favorite authors are better writers than you. I can handle Neil Gaiman's imagination and Jane Austen's dialogue far outstripping me, because it feels like they should. They've already passed through the crucible of amateur writing. It's quite another feeling to have another amateur, unpublished, young writer WHO DOESN'T EVEN WRITE FULL-TIME be so obviously better than you. I marveled over the fact that she could be so emotional without being maudlin, so evocative without being hackneyed, so darkly hilarious without being macabre. It was disgustingly unjust that someone who has as little experience as I do could be so much better.
I was horrified to realize that in a scant two weeks the editors that picked HER out of the crowd, who noticed HER genius, who offered HER work would be picking my pathetic offering out of the deluge of submissions.
Shit.
If I weren't on a massive dose of antibiotics I would have opened a bottle of bourbon, put on a Patsy Cline record, and climbed out of my depression sometime next Wednesday after lunch. Serendipitously or perhaps cruelly, the universe put a very effective stopper in my self-prescribed cure. At first I spent the evening trying to cultivate a devil-may-care attitude about my writing. Then I tried to distract myself with the approaching Curiosity landing, but even my love for space failed me.
I settled on cleaning.
I write easily 90% of my first drafts by hand, regardless of whether it's a grant, a poem, or an essay. Something about the process of physically writing the words out in longhand is very soothing and helps me to get past writer's block more easily than writing on a computer. However, I have a hard time recycling these first drafts. It's amusing to me to read the marginalia I left for myself. I like to see how the pieces mature from ink first drafts to electronic final drafts. But in my present mood, I was relentlessly trashing everything I could get my hands on. And of course I came across my first draft for McSweeney's.
It's hilarious.
The writing is awful. I mean, sixteen year old Emo Kelly would be embarrassed by it. There's all kinds of marginalia, mostly cussing, about how bad it is. There are blacked out sections and places where my pen poked through the paper in a vehement editing sessions. It managed to wring a genuine snorting laugh from me.
The column I finally submitted may not be as good as last year's winner. It may not be as good as 90% of the other submissions they receive. But it's immeasurably better than that first attempt, which is better than what I was writing last week, which is better than what I was writing five years ago. It's unlikely that This American Life will ever call me for an interview. I will never have an obituary extolling my literary contributions in The New York Times. I will never be represented by the Steven Barclay Agency and outside of winning a contest, I probably won't go to dinner with my writing idols. But this is, irrevocably, the life that I have chosen for myself. Watching my writing evolve slowly over time is going to have to be good enough for me.
And since when have I ever needed an excuse to buy expensive scotch?
Over the past weeks I have been hammering out the details. Putting the words to the page. Editing. Writing. Editing again. Rewriting. Drinking. Crying. Rewriting.
Over the weekend I sat back in my wildly uncomfortable kitchen chair, scrubbed my face, and clicked send. In spite of all the emotional hand-wringing and stylistic issues I had mapping out the coulmn, it was some of the most fun I've ever had writing. More than that, it signified the most work I had ever put into a non-academic piece. It was an entire year's worth of thinking, sketching out installments of the column, rethinking the premise, chucking the whole thing and starting from scratch. It was a month solid of writing and stuttering to a halt. Rewriting and feeling like I was losing my mind. Now, with all that work behind me, I allowed myself to daydream.
I imagined what it would be like when my column was accepted. How I would take the prize money and buy a magnificent bottle of scotch and drink it in the breezy late-summer evenings on the porch. I looked forward to finding an agent who wanted to read my memoir and how in two, three years at the outside, I would be opening yet another bottle of magnificent scotch to toast my successful book release. Critics would adore me. Ira Glass would want to interview me. Mary Oliver would want to have dinner with me.
I know, right? Even in my daydreams I'm a pretentious asshole.
But I felt entitled to these pretentious asshole daydreams. After all of the work I had put into the entry, it was the piece of writing of which I was most proud. It was polished. It was professional. It was about something that actually mattered to me and that I hoped would be amusing to my readers. Eventually, though, the pretentious asshole daydreams wound to a close and I rewarded myself with a stack of X-Men comics and a book on introverts. I spent most of the day in my armchair, getting lost in some of my nerdier pursuits.
When I eventually closed the book on introverts, I remembered a conversation I had the day before with a friend. I told her about my contest entry and she asked if I had read the grand prize winner from the previous year. When I replied that I hadn't, she gave me her best eyebrow-raised, Sherlockian, "Oh-Watson-You-Poor-Dolt-You-Don't-Get-It-Yet" look.
"You should," was all she said.
Now, having finished not only a fraught writing project but the stack of books I had set aside for the day, I wandered over to my computer and pulled up the column. After reading half of it and using up half a box of tissues in the process, I put my face in my hands, utterly embarrassed by what I had so confidently submitted a few hours earlier.
It's one thing to know definitively that your favorite authors are better writers than you. I can handle Neil Gaiman's imagination and Jane Austen's dialogue far outstripping me, because it feels like they should. They've already passed through the crucible of amateur writing. It's quite another feeling to have another amateur, unpublished, young writer WHO DOESN'T EVEN WRITE FULL-TIME be so obviously better than you. I marveled over the fact that she could be so emotional without being maudlin, so evocative without being hackneyed, so darkly hilarious without being macabre. It was disgustingly unjust that someone who has as little experience as I do could be so much better.
I was horrified to realize that in a scant two weeks the editors that picked HER out of the crowd, who noticed HER genius, who offered HER work would be picking my pathetic offering out of the deluge of submissions.
Shit.
If I weren't on a massive dose of antibiotics I would have opened a bottle of bourbon, put on a Patsy Cline record, and climbed out of my depression sometime next Wednesday after lunch. Serendipitously or perhaps cruelly, the universe put a very effective stopper in my self-prescribed cure. At first I spent the evening trying to cultivate a devil-may-care attitude about my writing. Then I tried to distract myself with the approaching Curiosity landing, but even my love for space failed me.
I settled on cleaning.
I write easily 90% of my first drafts by hand, regardless of whether it's a grant, a poem, or an essay. Something about the process of physically writing the words out in longhand is very soothing and helps me to get past writer's block more easily than writing on a computer. However, I have a hard time recycling these first drafts. It's amusing to me to read the marginalia I left for myself. I like to see how the pieces mature from ink first drafts to electronic final drafts. But in my present mood, I was relentlessly trashing everything I could get my hands on. And of course I came across my first draft for McSweeney's.
It's hilarious.
The writing is awful. I mean, sixteen year old Emo Kelly would be embarrassed by it. There's all kinds of marginalia, mostly cussing, about how bad it is. There are blacked out sections and places where my pen poked through the paper in a vehement editing sessions. It managed to wring a genuine snorting laugh from me.
The column I finally submitted may not be as good as last year's winner. It may not be as good as 90% of the other submissions they receive. But it's immeasurably better than that first attempt, which is better than what I was writing last week, which is better than what I was writing five years ago. It's unlikely that This American Life will ever call me for an interview. I will never have an obituary extolling my literary contributions in The New York Times. I will never be represented by the Steven Barclay Agency and outside of winning a contest, I probably won't go to dinner with my writing idols. But this is, irrevocably, the life that I have chosen for myself. Watching my writing evolve slowly over time is going to have to be good enough for me.
And since when have I ever needed an excuse to buy expensive scotch?
Love this. Been there. Actually there right now. Have you ever heard Ira Glass' bit on how you have to just.keep.going through the early years of your craft? It's succinct and brilliant. I am ashamed to admit I watch this vimeo version of it probably once a month when I get disgusted with my own writing. When taken with a large swill of red wine, it really helps: http://motheringspirit.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/on-guilt-growing-up-and-ira-glass/
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