Write More, Publish Less

In 2015, I wrote not that much. Actually, I wrote a ton. It just doesn’t look like it.

I don’t even want to look at 2014 because I think I published too much stuff that year—just everything that occurred to me? The years 2011–3 were similar—just this dumb rush to get the words out.

In 2015, I slowed down. Why?

Early on, it was because I found myself doing these strange science-y pieces—both memoir and reporting—for the good folks at Pacific Standard. One (technically from 2014, December 30) explained why I bought a turntable. Next I remembered the greatest rock show I’d ever seen — and the fact it turns out I’ve always remembered it wrong. The final of three I wrote for PS last winter concerns the astonishing experience of watching a special screening of the movie Boyhood; when the lights came up, all the actors and the director walk onto the stage for a Q&A. How moving it was to spend two hours with these characters and then see them come to life! I wrote about how I wanted to hug them and weep with them but instead, what was really powerful happened in the parking garage later, walking back to the car. Re-reading these pieces now, I’m remembering, if briefly, what it was like to care about science.

Then I got all excited about Yelp, assembling the material to write about the odd people who comment, for instance, on Harvard or The New Yorker. I think I even wrote a fancy book editor, suggesting I write a book about Yelp? (Just checked, I did indeed write a Twitter message to this guy; related note: I’m an idiot.) In any case, I did publish at least one piece of Yelp-related content, for The Awl: Lines from the New Yorker’s 3.5-Star Yelp Listing.

The Awl: It’s still awesome. How about that Content Wars stuff? Amazing. And it’s also one of the first places that took me at all seriously, back in 2010, when I first started trying to become a “real” writer. Thanks! In my mind I wrote half a dozen pieces for them and they were so important to me and I learned everything and so much more. The truth, I see now, is that I wrote only three that year, one about cannibal birds, the other about students evacuated from Egypt, and a third about the day OBL was killed. I also have a lot more to learn.

Anyhow, thanks Kyle. I am enjoying this look-back thing. It’s good to factcheck ourselves, and to think about why we’ve done what we did or failed do what we did not. And why not do it now, at the end of the year?

This morning, in fact, I noticed I followed my 1001st person on Twitter; wanting, for no good reason, to have that number remain in the three digits, I decided to unfollow a bunch of accounts I no longer cared about or which didn’t even correspond to extant entities anymore, such as Oyster.

So I scrolled through what was probably three years of obsessions, hopes, agendas, and ideas—moving to L.A., getting really into the idea of California Sunday Magazine, then Los Angeles, and later LA Weekly (only one of which I’ve actually written for).

It occurs to me: I’ve been with the same woman pretty much my whole adult life. (I am 36.) But I’ve never had the same kind of stability or fidelity to ideas. Looking at all the editors I’ve worked for and the notions I’ve gotten excited about—do a gmail search for the word “pitch” and shudder—is to see a side of myself that is dissimilar to another instinct I have: to be married forever and wear the same boots and listen to the same music and have the same friends, until I die.

After my little Yelp thing, I decided I needed to get my shit together and get serious about a second book.

While stewing (and teaching) I managed to squeeze out a little piece for Roxane Gay and The Butter. It’s about riding a bus. And the people we see and the way we ourselves can change during any journey. It’s also about Rabih Alameddine, who is great at both novel-writing and Twitter.

Journeys: Turns out I’m a travel writer? Around the time I was diving into the second book, I found out I’d been selected as “NOTABLE” for the second year in a row by Best American Travel Writing, which is to say that I wrote an essay—in this case an excerpt of my first book—that was chosen by the series editor but didn’t make the final cut, as chosen by the guest editor. In other words, I’m listed in BATW2015 but am not one of the 10 or 12 authors whose pieces were reprinted in full.

What is travel writing? I’m still trying to figure that out. For short pieces, the challenge, it seems, is to compress and distill a single journey, which is probably inherently long and weird and maybe not all that interesting, and decide in a small space what matters and what kind of narrative can be created from an arc that is more or less this: I set out, this happened, and now I can say this.

The journey I want to make into a book, by the way, is fairly straight-forward: When I was 27, I was an editor at Rolling Stone. I was miserable. So one day I walked out the door and I walked all day and then I slept on the beach and then I woke up and walked again. I did this for months and months, along America’s roadside, until I made it to New Orleans, and it was there I discovered I’d more or less stumbled back into a whole new way of life—or so it seemed!

How to attack the problem of telling this story in book-form? There’s so much room and so much material. For inspiration, I’ve studied Geoff Dyer and Robert MacFarlane and Lidia Yuknavitch and Rebecca Solnit. I’ve been trying to figure out my own version of a solution—the ending, a beginning, the stuff in the middle—for years and years and then this summer I stopped pitching entirely so I could assemble some pages.

A couple book-related pieces have squirted out. Such as this one, for The New York Times Magazine, which is about the shoes I wore. People seem to like knowing what I put on my feet. Another piece publishes this Sunday, in the Los Angeles Times Op-Ed section, and attempts to argue for the under-appreciated beauty of a filthy, urine-soaked roadside.

Books! Writing! Argh. So much to say. I’m trying to write this book and partially because a lot of my creative headspace is being taken up by this book — and partially because I am trying to publish fewer, better pieces—it feels like I wrote a lot less this year. But I probably actually wrote more than ever.

For all this talk about travel writing and journeys and walking I nearly forgot about another piece I wrote “Against Travel,” which I ended up doing with The Normal School. It’s a weird, difficult essay—of a kind I’m glad I can still write but which I know is not for every kind of editor, or reader. Here’s to giving yourself room to do the odd stuff that isn’t obviously as urgent as the other stuff.

Why do we write at all? Two things worth sharing, both related, neither things I knew about myself before this year: I’ve become more and more comfortable being a human on earth and part of this is probably embracing the twin realities that 1. I’m a teacher of writing and 2. A healthy part of being a writer for me is also writing about writing.

When all I did was write personal essays about the crazy shit I was feeling in the Middle East (and then the transition back to America) I think I started to go a little insane. It might have resulted in some decent work, but I was too lonely and nuts. There’s something monstrous about all that introspection! Teaching and literary criticism, however, both bring me outside of myself and remind me I’m part of a community.

There’s nothing like a room full of students, the energy of people who care and want to learn. Likewise, there is a power in taking the time to read and write about someone else’s book, and something sacred about the seriousness with which we all take that task.

So it is with some emotions and regret that I turned down, in the last two years, a couple tenure-track jobs in academia. (Because: marriage; another thing that happened in 2015 is that my wife became a new host for All Things Considered. ((!!!)))

Having spurned that Assistant Professor Life, I instead renewed my non-tenure contract at UCLA and seem also to be on faculty more or less permanently but in a limited non-tenure role at the new Mount Saint Mary’s MFA in Creative Writing. And it looks like I’ll continue to review books for The Los Angeles Times. (I’ll still hawk books pieces to other places, too; I wrote an essay about my two favorite Joan Didion books, for LitHub, for instance. D’oh: I keep forgetting to try to write for Hazlitt!)

Goals for 2016: Sell that book. Write for The New Yorker? But will my essays ever have the right manners? I definitely hope to work with Eric Sullivan at Esquire; his rep is golden. Maybe I’ll even have a cool idea for Elle? The people I like who write there do so surprisingly gritty and well, for a magazine I don’t believe I’ve ever actually held in my hands. (Oh, duh, they’re all women? Except Paul Ford! Didn’t he write some awesome Elle stuff? So many things to read, all the time!) I’d like to get in on that hot new New Republic action. I wrote for them when the wonderful Greg Veis was doing his thing but who doesn’t love team Ted Ross and Bijan and the gang? Also: New York Times Book Review? I’m over here, ready and willing. I’d like to write for London Review of Books, too.

Maybe I should write a piece about this weird thing that’s happening to me: I’ve started doing difficult, sort of age-inappropriate physical activities. It started with paddle-boarding. Which I love so much. The other day I caught my first wave. It was “gnarly.” Then I found a skate-board in the trash and started grinding like I haven’t since I was 15. Shaka. Now, having given up running years ago because of a bad knee and sore heel, I’ve discovered barefoot running and have been going on longer and longer barefoot runs. What does it all meaaaaaaan?

Thanks! We’re all in this together. Gonna go run in the cold now.

Bonus: Books that got sold or whose pub dates approach and that I look forward to reading: Doree’s novel. John Lingan’s Patsy Cline book. Porochista’s Sick. Suzy Hansen’s memoir about Istanbul. Nick Bredie’s novel about Istanbul. Diana Marcum’s island book. Diana won a freaking Pulitzer! So did my friend Zach. Life is beautiful. And life is awful. More Words. Fewer Problems.