Writing Lessons

Floating at five in the Florida Keys

Last month I signed up for a memoir writing class led by one of my OG writing idols, Cintra Wilson. With three out of five classes down, I've been thinking a lot about what I'm learning about myself.

The timing was probably not ideal, but when life hands you this kind of opportunity, you don't just jump, you ask how high. Someone once said you should never meet your idols, but I don't know any drummers who wouldn't leap at the chance to learn from Danny Carey or some other comparison that means something to you.

So for the last three weeks I've been splitting my mental energy between my 6-month contract job, which is coming to an end, culminating in a global launch and the wrapping up of loose ends. There’s also that end of the school year feeling where the crew you’ve been rolling with is disbanding, and you feel like the person you’ve been for six months is dying, just a little.

Meanwhile, of course, the job search engine has revved up to full steam, with all the attendant misery that spending hours on LinkedIn and Indeed entails, crafting cover letters and trying to repackage myself in a slightly different way, between 10 and 20 times a day.

Finding a job these days is an exercise in digital contortion, twisting yourself into different shapes to become exactly what the algorithm wants you to be, which changes from minute to minute. Every job posting is written by AI, so they all sound the same, and the algorithm encourages you to lie (“tailer your resume to this job with LinkedIn Premium!”), so every job receives thousands of applicants and only AI can sort through them all, judging if you’ve matched the magic number of keywords.

It’s exhausting and demoralizing, but I can’t get off the hamster wheel until I land another contract. Add to the mix, it's the height of summer in Vancouver, which means I'm compelled to be outside as much as possible in my time off.

I want to be everywhere and do everything. I hate having downtime and I don't know how to relax. I would love to take a few weeks off between contracts to recharge and feel like a person again between job titles, but I'm also absolutely petrified of doing that.

So what have I learned so far in memoir class?

1. Although I love to write about myself, I don't really like to write about my feelings.

I don’t even like to say the word “feelings.” It sounds gross and whiney. Feelings… ugh. Chalk it up to any number of excuses, I'm a Virgo, I had a reasonably happy childhood. I've never been in therapy. My life has been interesting, but never miserable. If I had addictions or committed crimes that went unpunished, I would keep that shit to myself. If I had any truly dark secrets hiding in my soul, you can rest assured I would never broadcast them on the Internet.

2. There's a reason the word honesty is often preceded by brutal.

So many great writers are either insufferable assholes or batshit crazy. Hunter S. Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka... I find myself not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings. Maybe I'm too nice to be a great writer. Am I here to make friends or am I here to win? I don't even know what winning means.

Most successful writers in history have dedicated every ounce of their mental energy to writing, to the detriment of their families, their livelihoods, their mental health. It's like how great comedians almost always had super fucked up childhoods. No one wants to hear about how awesome your parents were or how popular you were in school, all about your summer home and annual ski trips, unless you can make it funny. Maybe I should take a class on humor writing and really give myself something to cry about.

3. It's made me think as much about why I write as how I write.

I started writing around the same time I started drawing, when I was five. I used to staple together several pages printer paper and draw these elaborate comic books with multiple characters and soap opera-like story arcs and make my mother and grandmother read them as though they were the latest highly anticipated issue of some Marvel franchise.

I started blogging in 2003, only taking a couple of years off between then and now. For over a year now, I've been publishing every single Saturday. And every Saturday morning I wake up, almost never knowing what I'm going to write about. I just need to have an assignment, a deadline, and of course, an audience.

Every week, I wonder why I continue to do this to myself, but I always figure out something to publish. I guess I’m just enough of an asshole to think people actually care what I write about, so that’s something. I know some of you really like the goddess articles, and others love it when I delve into my past and talk about dead friends and '90s nostalgia. I appreciate you all! But…

4. I'm definitely not writing for the feedback.

I know this because for the first 20 years I had a blog, there were no reliable metrics. Aside from my mother, I had absolutely no idea who was reading, if anyone was. I didn't send an email or post to social media. I just hit publish on my old school blog (which took quite a few more manual steps back then) and sent it out into the ether. 

5. Come for the brutal honesty, stay for the existential crisis.

So last week, I tried writing something out of character and it did not work. It went over badly and I’m not great at taking constructive criticism, which I learned in art school but conveniently forgot over these many years of being out of school. At work, I live in fear of fucking up and being called out for it. My childhood, which I previously described as happy, was that way in part because I never, ever wanted to make my mother sad.

So I’m rewriting last week’s assignment and hopefully making it funny. We’ll see how it goes.

Last night after work, when I should have been working on the second draft for this Tuesday's class, or drafting this morning's blog, all I could do was post up in front of Netflix and watch a season and a half of The Good Place. Yes, I feel guilty when I relax, but it was actually a kind of perfect antidote, an existential ensemble workplace comedy with themes about friendship and morality, a little like Groundhog Day meets Good Omens, starring Veronica Mars. 

Invest in Yourself 
When I was debating signing up for this memoir class, my podcasting partner, Alison Price, urged me to do it. Invest in yourself, she said. I have two more weeks ago, and if I don't come out a better memoir writer, at least I will have learned that there are other kinds of writing I do better. It's like extreme sports for your brain.

Cintra Wilson has written about how there is no longer any money in being a writer, which I wrote about at length at the time. This is a weird time to be alive as a creative person, trying to carve out a meaningful career right around the birth of the internet a mere 30 years ago, and now we're at the doorstep of the AI singularity.

So is writing just another expensive hobby, like burlesque or snowboarding, but with less costumes? All I know, is that it's an inextricable part of my personality. I'm going to keep doing it because I can't imagine not doing it, and hopefully get better at it over the course of a lifetime.

I seem to like to end these posts with a little tidbit of advice, so get out there and invest in yourself, whatever your expensive hobby is, and find a way to share it the world in whatever way you can.

Until next week, thanks for reading.

Art & Astrology

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