How to Become a Writer

A striver's story.*

From Karl Pärsimägi’s “Girl at Window” via Wikimedia Commons.

Your middle school never formally announces its gifted and talented program. The word leaks out in overheard conversations, usually involving logistics. On Tuesday they’re meeting in room 105, not 107. The final projects are due on the 13^th.

You suppose the gifted students were instructed to keep quiet about the program because they didn’t want everyone else—the ungifted, the untalented—to feel bad. The pity implied by their stealthiness only makes it worse.

Not that you’re surprised you weren’t chosen. You are an unremarkable seventh grader, a B+ student who is frequently the last kid picked in gym class. You have never successfully thrown a Frisbee or served a volleyball—skills that have no bearing in adult life but are vital to one’s social standing as a child. You long to show some kind of aptitude to make up for these clear deficiencies. You take violin lessons, but the thing baffles you. You’re as likely to elicit a pleasing sound from it as you are to hit a home run. You love art class, but you soon see that some kids can draw faces and hands that look like faces and hands, and you aren’t one of them.

Your life is ordinary in good ways, too. You have nice friends, a nice family. After school, your mother listens intently to your daily dramas. Each evening, your dad shouts out Jeopardy! answers with your brother and you. His job selling advertising time for a television station in Syracuse, New York, enables you to take certain material comforts for granted—summer vacations, back-to-school clothes, presents under the Christmas tree.

Mostly, you’re just busy doing the work of being a seventh-grader—having crushes on boys, going to the mall with friends, and doing your homework while sitting upright in bed. You work hard for those B+s.

Sometimes, though, you push away your textbooks and college-ruled spiral notepads. You lay on the bed, stare at the ceiling, and dream of a life far away from Syracuse, a life where your talents—whatever they are—become clear and you bask in the glow of the world’s approval.

**

You choose Fordham University because 1) you get in and 2) it’s in New York City. But although you can take the subway to Greenwich Village from the Bronx campus, you quickly realize that a Catholic college is not the place for a vaguely artsy girl to begin her cosmopolitan life. Your classmates are friendly graduates of parochial schools in New Jersey and Long Island. They like Ronald Reagan and worry that their parents will find out they’re having sex. They’re as solidly average as you are; the difference is, they don’t seem to mind.

But if you lack a soulmate peer group, you gain something equally good: the attention of your professors. They like that you’re a dreamy girl who gets misty-eyed over eighteen-century poetry.

Your nonfiction writing teacher is a magazine journalist in his thirties who has a book coming out with a cool new paperback imprint called Vintage Contemporaries. He’s tough on you in class, publicly calling out your spelling mistakes. But he also praises you in a way you’ve never been praised before. He gushes in class over your prose’s grace, wit and insight. He might as well be shooting heroin into your veins.

From that point on, you’re single-focused. You’re not quite sure you could really become a writer—because who gets to do that?—but this newly discovered talent is clearly the path to the life you want. A life of the mind, a life of art, a life of the gifted and the talented.

On weeknights, you stay in the university study center until 1 a.m., writing and rewriting the same sentences, fine-tuning to elicit maximum compliments. On Thanksgiving break, you ignore your family to work on your final paper. Your parents are annoyed. How can they not see that this is so much more important?

**

One afternoon during the spring semester of your senior year, your nonfiction teacher asks about your plans after graduation. You say you want to be a writer.

“I think I could do it,” you say.

“Oh, you could definitely do it,” he says.

His words are so quick and casual that you know he means them. He’s not being a coach or a professional encourager of young people; this is what he really thinks.

In that moment, all other life possibilities shut down. In your twenties, while your classmates are going to law school or buying starter homes, you spend your weekends cloistered in the dark bedroom of your grubby share apartment, polishing the sentences of your short stories and magazine pitches.

The rejections are abundant; that’s fine. Your teacher’s words carry you through years of form letters saying “this doesn’t fit our needs at the current time” and “good luck placing this piece elsewhere.”

Eight years after graduation, you have enough magazine work to quit your job. A co-worker says he’s happy for you. “It’s so great to see after watching you bang your head against a wall for so long,” he says.

This stings, but it’s true. You’re great at banging your head against a wall.

**

In the decades that follow, your greatest strength will be your adaptability. You’re good at shape-shifting—mimicking a magazine’s voice, channeling a ghostwriting client. You take instructions well and deliver copy on time. For this reason, you nearly always have work. You’re disappointed that your career never reaches the heights of many of your friends’, but it also doesn’t bottom out. Some editor is always giving your info to some other editor, and this enables you to not notice just how bad things are getting for writers. Until you do—until the music stops for you, too.

But that’s another story.

You stay in touch with your nonfiction teacher, who is now a big-name writer and teaches at a college you could never, ever have gotten into. “I alternately credit or blame you for my career,” you joke.

His encouragement propelled you into a life of financial precarity, yes, but also one of smart, funny friends and plenty of time to think. A life that demands that you ask smart questions and observe closely, and a life where you don’t feel dread on Sunday nights.

But sometimes, when you’re walking your dog on an early Saturday morning, you look up at the sky and wonder what would have happened if you hadn’t been so fixated on winning a teacher’s approval, or proving the administrators of a middle-school gifted-and-talented program wrong? What if, instead of trying to claw your way into an oversaturated field, you had asked yourself where your efforts were most needed? Would everything be different if you could have spiked a volleyball?

Sometimes, when you think about that seventh-grader, you want to shake her a bit. Just be ordinary. It’s OK. You could have a nice life if you ignore all the graduation-speech hogwash about aiming for the stars. The life you’re taking for granted—an ordinary middle-class life of beach vacations and money for home repairs—that’s pretty hard to pull off!

**

You read this essay over, and you think it’s good but not quite there yet. You’re telling readers about your beautiful sentences, but are you showing them?

A younger version of you would spend the weekend crafting metaphors and thinking of more pungent verbs. Instead, you go hiking with your husband and your dog, and then get a snack at a farm brewpub where the owners make their own wheat beer and cherry cider. That night, you go to your friends’ bonfire and talk and laugh until you’re too exhausted to sit up. The next day, you paint a coffee table you bought for $3 at a garage sale, and then you sit on the porch and talk on the phone to a friend in another city.

Now you’re back in the workweek. Your ghostwriting client needs you, and you need the money she pays you—which far exceeds anything you can make writing under your own name.

So you tell your story honestly to the best of your ability in the amount of time you have. You give yourself a B+.

* With apologies to Lorrie Moore.