Waiting to Write
I always wanted to write fiction. As a little kid I did it all in my head. While other kids played with toys, I would pace around my parents’ living room, conducting an imaginary epic in the film reel of my mind. In 6th grade I was scolded for writing an exceedingly violent story about a heroic knight who died in the final battle. It startled my teacher, which was confusing to me, because I had read an abridged version of Beowulf, and knew that such martial violence was a natural element in a story. In high school I seemed to be the only one who enjoyed group discussions in English class, and I liked reading the classics. I thought a brilliant writing career was inevitable in the future.
I graduated from college in 2009, an English major, and totally depressed. I was up to my eyeballs in student debt. I was steeped in the horrific beauty of twentieth century American literature. I was worried I would default on my student loans and destroy my cosigning parents’ credit. We were in the midst of a financial crisis I didn’t fully understand (I was an English major, after all,) and, although Barack Obama was finally president, I didn’t believe any serious change was coming. I was also acutely aware — from reading plenty of intersectional critical theory — of the white privilege that had led me hither. I understood that privilege, but rather than face it, I let the injustice of it be an excuse to turn away from academia, from business, from further developing myself as a thinker or a leader. The world was just wrong and so I wouldn’t take part in it anymore.
Reluctantly, I left the pastoral beauty and Gothic architecture of the campus behind.
I still wanted to write, but I knew I had to earn a living. I did not want to be that be that friend who crashes on your couch and eats all your food because he is a struggling writer who can’t afford his keep. I didn’t want to be some caricature of the artist out of William Gaddis, shirking all responsibility while pushing toward some crystallized artistic vision no one could understand but me. I told myself a good story about a guy who would work hard as a waiter, and write terrific literature in his free time. I moved to Maine to work in the seasonal service industry.
I fell in love with Maine, as a place, as a state, as an idea. And it paid off. I made thousands of dollars as a server, paying down my debt and learning to support myself as an independent adult. But the lifestyle led me further astray from any meaningful action or literary achievement. My friends and I treated ourselves to lavish meals in the restaurants we worked for. We worked all day, hiked beautiful coastal peaks at sunset, drank all night, and somehow got to work the next morning looking fresh and presentable. And it wasn’t just about the party. I was connected to an exciting new world of culinary beauty and I found a sense of professionalism in table service that I still believe is underappreciated and under-practiced in American restaurant culture. I took myself seriously as a server and I made sure to leave myself time for serious reading in the mornings. All the while I still believed, and told people, that I was a writer.
I knew that, sooner or later, I would prove to be like Richard Wright, who worked long days in the post office, then wrote Native Son by night. Or maybe I would be like Hemingway, working all sorts of odd jobs and having unhealthy adventures, but “working well” in the mornings. And sometimes I did. I have pages and pages of unpublished, half-baked stories and would-be novels written at random intervals when I found a moment to breathe and then to write.
But none of it seemed to add up to anything. A published product eluded me.
The restaurants I worked for rewarded my hard work by promoting me into positions of higher responsibility. By 2019 I was running a mid-sized hotel with an attached high-volume restaurant. I was working eighty-hour weeks and writing very little besides email. Although I was ostensibly “successful,” that finished novel seemed further away than ever.
That I didn’t become a break-out writer in my twenties is no one’s fault but mine, and I am proud of my professional accomplishments in the service industry. But the part of me that still wants to create excellent fiction regrets having traded away so much potential productivity. I want to lay out a couple of lessons I learned over the years so that younger readers might make better use of their time.
The first one is simple. Writing is work. Don’t tell yourself that you can write a novel in the few spare minutes you have between cooking dinner and washing the dishes. I’m not saying that you can’t write well on top of a full time job — you absolutely can — but you need to recognize that the time you do dedicate to the craft will not be an hour of free play or a frolic with the muses. If your writing is going to be good, the hours you dedicate to it need to be work hours. If your day job is eight hours long, and you are hoping to get three hours of writing time in during the evening, then you need to be thinking about your workday as eleven hours long. Then you need to make sure that you are still leaving time to sleep and cook nutritious meals to fuel that long workday. You also need to leave time to clean your living space and do all the other things necessary to maintain a clear mind that is ready to work. So, eight hours for sleep, say, three hours for eating and chores, plus the eleven-hour workday: that’s twenty-two hours, leaving only two for relaxation or fun with friends. And that ‘fun with friends’ bit is also important. Even though your friends love you and think it’s cool that you are a writer, it can be really hard for them to understand why you need to sneak off to the attic and write by yourself for several hours. I’m not saying that you can’t have friends if you are a writer, just that you have to set some boundaries to protect your work time. It helps to schedule routine hours for your writing, so that others will know when you are unavailable.
The second lesson is about money. You deserve to make money even if you are a writer. When I left school, I had this vague but powerful notion that if a story could attain commercial success it must not be very literary. To be sure — I knew there were great contemporary authors who wrote literature and got big book contracts, but they had struggled for years in oblivion until one day they went nova and hit the bestseller lists. I felt that the only way I would be able to respect myself as a writer was if I lived that same old story. I thought that journalism was slowly decaying into click-bait hackwork, and self-publishing was for failures who couldn’t get a book contract. For years I submitted to the learned reviews, hoping to get published at ten cents a word with a two-thousand-word limit. The only real money I ever made came from restaurants.
If you are laboring under these same misconceptions, please stop now. It is an illusion that great artists need to starve. Some of them have, surely, but not because they had to. Financial literacy is not incompatible with literary literacy. Money is not the root of all evil; systemic racism and a body of financial law built to protect the wealth of the few, are the roots of evil, at least in America. If we are ever going to do something about that, we need to train ourselves to understand the system and secure our financial futures, so that we can help others secure theirs. Even the most apolitical writer needs financial stability to be able to foster works of beauty.
Working as a server was a great counterpoint to my college education because it gave me the opportunity to learn a bit about how businesses work, and to understand that all business is not inherently dirty. I wish that I had come earlier to the conclusion that writing is a form of business, in addition to being a high art. Writing is, in fact, among the oldest forms of commercial activity. The idea that it should be purely artistic was born out of the Romantic period in Europe, which was mostly the domain of wealthy white men. They didn’t need to make money of their writing.
If you want to be a well-fed writer, think of yourself as a small business that produces high quality manuscripts, hopefully at a profit. Your personal income, call it a salary, is one of the business’s costs. In the early stages, you might need other revenue streams to support manufacturing your main product, and there a hundred million of them out there. Make a business plan and a budget and the challenges of earning a living seem less daunting.
At the very least, do not be afraid — or too proud — to spend some time reading up on economic principles and personal finance. It is not a betrayal of your inner artist; it can only empower you.
The third lesson is about getting your work out there. The great publishing houses of New York and London are businesses like any other. The books they publish are, to them, products just like any other you might find on the shelf of some superstore. Their choice to publish one book over another does not imbue the one with literary merit, it simply means they deemed the one to be the safer, more profitable bet. Now, there is nothing wrong with getting a big book deal if you have that opportunity — I know part of me still hopes to. But that should not negate the other, more democratic forms of publishing that are out there. We live in a golden age of self-publishing, whether it is posted for free on the internet, or printed as a book that you can sell and reap the profits for yourself. The catch here is marketing. The nice thing about the big publishing houses is they do all of that for you. But with so many forms of free media out there today, there is nothing stopping you from spreading the word about your work and keeping more of its profits for yourself.
If you have something to say, that is worth someone else’s time to read, then you should let them know about it, and you should not be too proud to name the price.
These lessons may seem obvious to the established writer. But I know that when I was a twenty year old aspiring fiction author, applying for serving jobs in restaurants, I could have used an older person, who also identified as a writer, as a worker, someone outside the university system, to hammer me with these simple truths. It might have saved me some time and a lot of wasted energy and money.
The events following the murder of George Floyd have given me, like so many others, a moment of pause and self-reflection. At Kenyon College, I was fortunate enough to study under some great professors of black literature like Ted Mason and Jene Schoenfeld. I believed this exposure gave me a leg-up on all the other white folks out there who just didn’t understand. But now, when I think back on that student I was, I realize that even at the time, his dream was not of a better world shaped by social justice. His dream was to become a literary star and find commercial success in the publishing industry, which is itself a product of that old American racial hierarchy. He was afraid to write too hastily, to say something that might be controversial, that might ding his chances at total popularity. He was unwilling to see just how much the world still needed to change.
As a young white writer, I have been trying to figure out what to say right now. I want to support those who stand up for equality and radical change. But I am also conscious that this is a moment for white men to just shut up and listen for once. That second option seems correct, but where does that leave me as someone who only ever wanted to write?
The answer is simple. It leaves me right where I always was. There is plenty of room for my voice. I just have to accept that my voice doesn’t need to be the loudest, most perfect, or most authoritative voice in the room.
I thought by avoiding the university system, or the traditional press, or the publishing world, I was somehow excusing myself from complicity in the wrongs of our social structure. But the reality is that restaurants are not immune from that either. Nothing is. At the end of the day, claiming historical injustice toward other people as a reason not to take part in the great discussion, was just a way to cover up my fears that what I write might not be good enough, or smart enough, or woke enough. And that position not only robs myself and others of my voice, which might just do some good, but it also elides the true victims of that injustice and somehow makes it all about me.
I promise not to do that anymore.
I can use my voice to uplift others and to be honest about what my life and culture has been. I have quit my job in the restaurant to devote myself full time to writing. I can write stories about change, I can write journalism that casts light on unseen places, I can write activist essays that add to the multitude of voices crying out for a better world. And for the first time in my life I feel confident that I can support myself while doing it. I have my experience as a waiter to thank for that.
I may not write it right at first, but I’m not waiting anymore to try.
