2016: The Year I Wrote Like a Motherfucker (Who Had No Idea What Was Coming)
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Last year I Wrote Like a Motherfucker. This year? I wrote as much, if not more, while somehow having more and less clearcut goals at the same time.
I went into 2016 with way less pent-up frustration but also fewer resolutions. They were: 1) Keep doing what I’m doing, 2) Get accepted by The New Yorker Shouts & Murmurs, and 3) Complete a book proposal by the end of the year. Damn big goals to be sure, but fewer bite-sized ones. And frankly I think the bite-sized ones are better at keeping me consistently on track.
This is how I did:
Keep doing what I was doing: Check and check. I woke up stupid early, squeezed in writing when a work project got killed, took time (and distance) away from life to do nothing but write and became a better writer and editor—a to-do item that will obviously never be “done.” I wrote very little over the summer but then wrote enough in September and October to make up for it. Mostly what I noticed is that now two years in, I have fully established writing as a habit. It’s both work and pleasure, and most importantly, something I need to do or I’ll get grouchy and mad at life—or at least grouchier and madder than I already am.
Get accepted by The New Yorker Shouts & Murmurs: NOT SO MUCH. In 2015 I barreled towards one of the loftiest goals I could possibly imagine for my writing—get accepted by McSweeney’s. That first acceptance was thrilling, pivotal, and newly surprising to me for months, the way a baby keeps discovering her own hands. McSweeney’s feels like my home now, a place where I don’t always get all the jokes but a place where I feel like I belong. I love that place.
The New Yorker by contrast feels wildly out of reach even when I read a piece I know I could write. Maybe because there’s a part of me that will always be the girl who excelled in typing class in high school and that meant only one thing to my typing teacher (a woman!)—that one day I would make an excellent secretary (!!!). It’s not Imposter Syndrome exactly (god I’m sick of hearing about fucking Imposter Syndrome) but more that it can be tough to outgrow the assumptions that shaped you. You’re a person who begged your best friend to write your college essay for you, you’re a fast typist so you can only aspire to be a secretary, and all that obviously means that no, honey, you who grew up in rural Massachusetts do NOT get to be on The New Yorker, no you do not.
Also, housekeeping item: the wait time for a response is three months. Three months! Those aren’t good odds. So yes I submitted every chance I got … every 3 months … and the rest is non-history. Whomp whomp.
Complete a book proposal by the end of the year: I said I never wanted to write a book. I said it over and over again. I said it for years. Every time I thought about it, all I could think was “sounds hard” followed by “no thanks.” But after My Year of Writing on the Internet™ I felt simultaneously emboldened and frustrated. Emboldened and encouraged by my successes but frustrated at the work that goes into a piece only to have it tank, make a teeny tiny dent or—even if it goes viral!—spin out of everyone’s slow blink of interest within days. I felt like I needed to start taking real steps towards something that felt more permanent. I ended up having three loose concepts. I would give myself 12 months to focus on one, learn how to write a book proposal, and go from start to finish. I didn’t even know what came next. Get an agent? Shop the proposal around myself? Who the hell knows?
That all changed just days into the new year. On Jan 4th I submitted a piece to McSweeney’s called “Please Don’t Get Murdered at School Today.” I tried to synthesize my years of complicated nausea at sending my kids to school (to! school! ffs!) after Sandy Hook with my white hot anger at our politicians for being perma-pressed cowards. I spent more time on this piece than probably any other piece I’ve ever submitted and I felt like my edit was perhaps the only one I would ever describe as “surgical.” On January 7th Chris Monks accepted it, much to my profound, almost weeping, relief. I had no idea what to do with it otherwise because it wasn’t funny-funny, an essay, or an op-ed, it was just this … thing, this thing that was as dark as my humor gets. Chris’s editing suggestions helped make the piece shorter and stronger. It ran on January 27th and was thankfully greeted with a huge “ooof” reaction, which was exactly how I felt about it too. I couldn’t have asked for more.
EXCEPT: Later that afternoon I received a longish e-mail titled “Your writing.” I skimmed it while making dinner for my kids. It was from an agent. I was shaking. Old school, movie-level, OMIGOD shaking. After a feverish exchange of initial “Is this guy legit?” texts with my great friend and—20 years earlier—my maid of honor (don’t dick over your maid of honor, ladies. You never know how much you’ll need them in the future for much more important shit than ironing your ridiculous veil) who works in publishing and days spent on the most deep dive Googling that I have possibly ever done on another human being, I signed with my incredible, super liberal, fun-to-text-with agent, Ryan Harbage, on February 10th. I mean, holy shit!
I spent the next four months laser focusing on getting the proposal done. The summer blasted by in a wow-not-getting-anything-done-at-all-except-drinking-beer-on-an-inflatable-flotilla-I-guess, received feedback from my agent in September, and we finished it all up in October. Then the election happened. Then the world caved in. Then it was the holidays and well nothing gets done then. The proposal is out there in the world, looking for a lover. I feel hopeful, uncharacteristically so.
My Favorite Children
When I look over my writing from the past year, some of my favorite (well, certainly my most emotional) pieces are locked up in my book proposal. So it’s definitely skewed my public output for this past year. I had two viral pieces on Medium this year (“We regret to inform you that the remainder of 2016 has been cancelled” and “Hey America, do accidents happen anymore? Especially when a kid is involved?”), but those aren’t my favorites. In general I really enjoyed writing political and current events commentary this year (like “Make no mistake—we are all Jeb! Jeb? Jeb :( and “I’ll always feel the Bern but it’s time to stand with her”)—and I feel Medium is especially well-suited to that. But commentary is delicious and satisfying, then fleeting. Like junk food.
Given all that, here are my favorite children from 2016:
I will always, always be proud of this piece. And I would give anything for it not to exist.
I had such a great time writing this piece, it felt like a super fun puzzle and I actually hate puzzles so that’s a bad analogy. This one was for RAZED.
I’ve tried previously to encapsulate my utter want-to-lay-down-on-the-ground-and-scream/cry-because-I’m-so-fucking-overwhelmed feelings that I have at the end of every school year. One came off as mom blog-y and others were items on a list or embedded in other pieces. THIS ONE was so god damn satisfying and fun to write. And of course I got hate mail / tweets so that’s how I know it was a success. For McSweeney’s.
HA HA HA HA I thought we’d all look back on this one and laugh AHHH HA HA HA WAAAAAAAH AAAAAHHHHH AAAAGGGGGGGGGH. For McSweeney’s.
The above piece should just be called “Before” and this one is “After.” For Medium.
I’m not posting the below piece because I think it’s the tightest, funniest, or most successful piece from the past year (it’s not, because no time) but it was a great experiment in collaborating on a piece with someone I really admire, and he’s a big reason I started this whole writing-in-public thing to begin with.
I worked with Scot Armstrong roughly a million years ago and he was the first person to really encourage me to think outside my regular job. We had an incredible meeting at Chateau Marmont (a place I was always too poor-uncool-big haired to go to when I actually lived in LA) a couple of years ago where I was at my most Liz Lemon, definitely definitely the only lady drinking beer and eating not just bread but a cheeseburger and fries too and somehow managed to wipe extra cheese off of the side of my burger, then place the napkin on my lap thereby smearing expensive Chateau Marmont cheeseburger cheese across my flimsy black dress and thank god I had a clutch because I had to walk to the bathroom and out of there with it propped awkwardly in front of my shameful cheese lap ANYWAY.
He e-mailed me a one-line idea on November 19th. I wrote back that I thought maybe that idea had been done or it would be done, so maybe we should skip it. Then on the 21st I had a different idea, we both gave it a ‘go’ and had exactly one day to write it together. Did I mention he was on a plane with his family to go visit more family for Thanksgiving? I would write something, pass it to him, and in between adjusting to the time difference and his hard core family time he’d send me notes and other links back and I’d incorporate it all and submit it. McSweeney’s passed on it (with, as always, sharp and legit reasons) and we reworked it to find it another home that might be a better fit. It was accepted by Funny or Die and ran on November 23rd. The afternoon before Thanksgiving. Fuck. That was fun! I want to do more collaborative pieces with Scot, because it was like learning a new way to write and work while building on both of our strengths.
What I Learned This Year
If you have any measure of success, your personal cheering section is going to dwindle. The surprise and joy that people who know you feel when you get your first acceptance will crater by 75–101% by the time you get your 10th acceptance. If you’re solely motivated by likes and comments and fist bumps, you’re going to feel bummed about how that support wears thin. Or maybe it doesn’t wear thin, it’s just that it all becomes less of a big deal. Either way, I’ve never seen deader eyes than when I told another writer friend that I had an agent—and that he had found me. Deadest eyes outside of an actual dead person. And furthermore, I SO GET IT. The knife emoji doesn’t pop up as Frequently Used on my phone for nothing. This all to say: If you need external pushes and consequences to stay motivated, think about why that is. Because your work should feel inevitable, even when no one’s watching or cheering. Especially then.
Having said that, if you don’t have the support of your partner, it’s gonna be a tough row to hoe. If you are partnered and especially if you have kids and are not living off of the fumes of your monopoly-era trust fund, writing isn’t something you have all the time in the world to do. It’s something you will always be cramming into your schedule, like a tampon inserted sideways. Although my husband is 110% not a writer and 75% of my writing isn’t really his cup of tea, he has always, always, always supported my writing. That means he barely shrugs when I’m going out of town for a weekend to write or when my attention will simply be elsewhere (like now, during our holiday break, as I finish this piece that maybe 10 people total will read.) If you’re always feeling guilty for doing something that brings you great pleasure and fulfillment, isn’t illegal, isn’t hurting anyone, and has the potential to reshape your personal and professional future, you need to figure out why. Is it you? Or your partner? Do you feel like you don’t deserve to do something that makes you feel good? Is someone else making you feel that way? Life is fucking short, figure that part out. Yesterday.
If you spend a year saying YES, guess what, you’ll spend the next year saying NO. As a lady who has never needed coaching in how to say NOPE to anything / everything, 2015 was a huge lesson in the fulfillment, learning, and opportunities that can come from saying “yes,” even when money wasn’t on the table, even when I was sacrificing a ton of time that I didn’t have. BUT it also added up to shattering my focus in exponentially more directions than was healthy or ultimately productive.
Halfway through this year it was clear I needed to prioritize. Although I was excited to be asked to join the parenting app NEED/DONE as a partner (then Editor-in-Chief instead because no time) and had invested a bunch of time working on it, I had to step back. Although I love the idea and partners and its potential (it was on Note to Self in July!) something had to give. It wasn’t where my passion was, I just couldn’t do any more investment work, and I couldn’t wedge anything into my life as un-streamlined as a startup.
And while I continued to edit RAZED, out of necessity RAZED’s other co-founder Eric Olsen and I just couldn’t scramble as hard this year. Last year if we didn’t have something we liked enough to run, we’d write something ourselves and rush it through illustration and onto the site. This year we took multiple breaks, honored vacations, and didn’t worry about not having pieces. We rejected plenty. And we’d wait until something shined (or horrified, as the case may be). It helped.
Pause to appreciate your good fortune. I am a relentless nitpicker, a seeker-out-of-potential-problems, a complainer. I am always looking for situations that should be improved, processes that should work better, things that should be done faster. Add on to that, I have no experience with publishing. I know so little about it as to be embarrassing. Advertising? Branding? I GET that shit, I know how it works, I know where to feel suitably impressed, I understand the process and how hard it is to get anything of quality or emotion done. So I feel like I don’t really appreciate the position I’m currently in.
I get crabby and disheartened that publishing works so slowly that I liken it to watching paint dry, then liquify again, then pour itself back into the can a half droplet at a time, then walk itself backwards to the paint store, then climb onto a shelf, then load itself into a box truck, then go back to the paint factory, then separate into its original ingredients. I just. My God. Freelance copywriter wants to know, “How can things not get done in a couple fucking days? Or three weeks tops? I DON’T UNDERSTAND IT.” But what I need to understand is that a year ago I wanted to figure out how to write a book proposal full stop and now I’m waiting for my book to actually be sold so WTF GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR NETHER REGIONS YOU UNGRATEFUL DEMANDING HORRIBLE PERSON.
My 2017 NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS
Keep submitting to The New Yorker. It’s still on my list. I still believe I have a shot. I’m going to keep trying. Because why the hell not?
Expand my submissions list. I’ve started dipping into submitting to other sites but since I’m a person who develops a comfort zone and beats that comfort zone to death, I’ve stayed mostly focused on McSweeney’s. I have pieces in process to other pubs and really just need to rip the Band-Aid off, because they’re harder pieces to write which = super easy to blow off. I’m coming for you, those pieces.
Celebrate my first book being sold. Please, please, please Jesus I swear I’ll start believing in you.
Finish writing that book ^. Please, please, please.
3rd Annual Writers Weekend. Two years ago I went to Maine for a weekend to write. And I cranked. It became painfully clear how much distraction is packed into my everyday life. This year I went again and invited three other writers (and most importantly, friends). It was easily one of my favorite weekends of the year. It wasn’t a “writers’ group” per se, we didn’t read each other’s work, we didn’t ask each other for writing advice, we simply wrote separately and then shared meals and coffee runs. As a writer who has spent years being the only writer in a design studio, a freelance copywriter working from home, and someone who’d rather be set on fire than join a typical writers’ group, this little intimate thing I started is just the right fit and makes me supremely happy. (Find the other writers here! Eric Olsen, Darren Higgins, Nicci Micco.)
Start writing another book. I said I never wanted to write a book. Ever. Those words came out of my actual mouth less than two years ago. Now I want to start on a second one. Life is weird.
Get my distraction situation under-fucking-control. Because I work from home, rarely attend meetings, and have essentially been building my own brand, I tell myself that making infinity loops on Twitter-Instagram-FB-Medium-LinkedIn like a dog trying to constantly lick its own butt is OKAY BECAUSE BRAND BUILDING. But fuckin’ A you guys, it’s a massive focus-smasher. And whenever I feel challenged or frustrated by my writing, I immediately cruise over to social media to do something fast like write a comment, like a post, retweet a something or other because that means I did something. Except NO IT DOESN’T. It means I wasn’t focused and I wasn’t writing. I really need to cut the shit.
Feel as grateful as someone rescued from a well every time someone says they like my writing. I deflect. I say “thank you” and immediately change the subject. Online I’m more effusive but that’s because I’m online. Not sure if you’ve noticed, but things are different there. Here. Hi! But every person who spends any portion of their precious life reading the words I’ve slammed together while wrapped in an old lady blanket on my recliner is owed a genuine thank you and my gratitude. I need to practice putting my Wonder Woman Bracelets of Submission down, even for a hot sec. I’ll start right now—thank you so much for reading this piece.
Happy 2017, everyone. To quote John and Yoko, “Let’s hope it’s a good one, without any fear.”
If you enjoyed this piece (or any of the pieces I’ve linked to), please click the heart-shaped recommend thingy below and/or share the ones you liked!
Where you can find me: I’m a Writer and Creative Director, a contributor to McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Co-Founder and Editor of RAZED. Follow me on Twitter, won’t you?
