The thing I love about this newsletter is that it feels like a meme that would show somebody with makeup juxtaposed with a shot of them not wearing anything on their face. A “Me with makeup vs. Me without it” sort of thing. Except in this case, it’s my writing. My face always looks the same. Mostly beard and glasses.
But there is something I find freeing here at The Melt. I’m just writing without an editor giving me their notes and then another editor giving that editor and me their notes and then somebody telling me I have waaaay too many commas in the piece. I love being edited, I’ve learned basically everything from great editors. That has been the best education I’ve received as a writer. But there is still something fun about being able to do what I’m doing right now.
I was thinking about this last night after I got to sit and think about how yesterday I accomplished something I’ve been thinking about for years. It was publishing my first piece for The New Yorker. If you haven’t read it, please do. It’s about Café Luxembourg, the Upper West Side, dining out in New York City and there’s a great Gael Greene quote from 1983 they let me use that I adore.
At the risk of sounding like an amateur, this was a huge deal for me for a million reasons. Professionally, it meant that I got to work with New Yorker editors and fact-checkers, which to a fan of the history and various ins and outs of the American media industry, is like saying the Golden State Warriors let me practice with them or any other tired analogy you can think of involving somebody being able to work with and hopefully improve their own skillset by seeing how the best do it. As I said, editors have taught me everything. I didn’t go to journalism or grad school, and I didn’t have mentors or internships that let me watch how things get done. I’ve been learning all this pretty much on the fly for the last 13 years. And believe me, going back and reading some of my stuff from a decade or so ago, it’s pretty obvious how little I knew then compared to what I know now. And that’s the beautiful part about writing to me that is hard to sometimes recognize in the present moment, that you’re not John Coltrane going “I’m ready to seek a higher level as a human and it will show in my work when I go from My Favorite Things to A Love Supreme in just a few years and it will be noticeable to me and you.” Some fiction writers might be able to get away with that. I think about Philip Roth a lot, probably too much. But if you look at his body of work, he’s got the places where he’s more influenced by James Joyce, then the period where he’s into Kafka and Eastern European writers, etc.
But now I’m rambling about Phil Roth when I mean to get to the bigger point. And that is something my wife said to me a long time ago when I was banging my head against the wall and wondering why things didn’t seem to be working for me as a writer. I wasn’t happy with my crummy job blogging a zillion things a day, living and dying for any sort of news I could craft into some biting little post. Nobody seemed to care and I felt like I’d really picked the wrong path. I’m an anxious person, and a big problem I’ve had to work on is I can’t live in the now, so I’d always be wondering how this one dumb, slow news day would impact the next year, five, years, decade, etc. of my life and career. Nobody is going to hire me because I’m writing crap and even I know it. And maybe that was the case or it’s possible I was being too hard on myself. Either way, my wife said something that I needed to hear from the person I love and trust the most. If anybody else said it to me, I’d be like, sure. But Emily told me that “It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” and it really changed my entire way of thinking about writing.
It has been a marathon, and it continues to be one. But the thing I published yesterday could be viewed as maybe the end of one of the races I’ve been running for exactly 20 years. One that started when I moved to New York City for good in 2003 and wrote in a notebook all of the publications 22-year-old me dreamed of writing for. It was one of the sweet, big dreams a younger person can have. The “Hello, New York! Three bucks. Two bags. One me” mentality. I won’t tell you the entire list, but it was 10 publications, and within a decade, I had accomplished writing a single thing for one of those publications. It was four sentences, it ended up in print and the editor put their name as the byline for whatever reason. He didn’t change anything, it wasn’t like he rewrote the entire thing and just felt he deserved the credit. But still. Ten years, and it felt like the whole “Big Dream” thing was really just that.
That’s around the time Emily gave me the marathon talk. A marathon, not a sprint. Just keep working, love what you do, remember this is hard and nothing should ever just be handed to you. Money will come and go, you might have a job, or you might get laid off. You may write a book (another of my dreams in that 2003 journal) and it might come out a week after Donald Trump is elected and your publicist will tell you “Nobody is going to buy books for a bit.” You might have a cool job, and then you don’t. Most of the time it isn’t your fault. I mean, maybe it’s your fault, but as so many people who have been spinning around the media ecosystem in the last decade can tell you, it’s been pretty rough. The whole “chasing traffic” and “pivot to video, then away from video, then back to video” to one week you need to get good on Twitter, the next you need to build up an audience on Instagram, to “Maybe use a filter so you don’t look so old on TikTok, and finally, “AI will replace you!” If AI doesn’t replace us (and I’m skeptical it will, at least in my lifetime), there will likely be something else to worry about next week.
The reason I bring all of that stuff up is because this has been a particularly crummy time for my fellow writers. Every writer I know, whether they publish books or they work for a media organization or they’re writing for TV (please, please, please read up and support the WGA folks striking. Read my friend Josh Gondelman on why they’re doing what they’re doing) are feeling it. And I know in some ways, hey, we’re writers and we get to write for a living. That’s lovely. Do I wish we all made more money? Hell yes. I’m trying to figure out how to do that all the time. But I think there is something much bigger to this, and that’s what we do and don’t value. I do believe that writers are important. Teachers are important. Nurses are important. Plumbers are important. There are so many important and usually under-appreciated people out there, but speaking as a writer, I do often think about the place folks who do what I do occupy in America and I think about it as part of an ecosystem. You need all sorts of things you might not like or understand to make the ecosystem work, but writers play a big part in it. I usually try not to lean into the dystopian too much, but in the last few years with so much stuff I read in William Gibson books or saw in Blade Runner feeling like reality, I do wonder if we could someday find an America where writers don’t have a place. It might seem farfetched but given the startling number of people I’ve encountered who have told me “I don’t read books” or simply won’t engage with something they see online beyond the headline or the way the big companies like Netflix are trying to turn screenwriting into another part of the gig economy. Something Ilana Glazer recently said really stuck out to me: “As humanity and consciousness move forward, our art must reflect that. And to go backward and have ChatGPT, or whatever the fuck, write stories based on John Wayne or something, I’m like, ‘What are we talking about?’ We have to keep moving forward.” I believe that is true of all writing no matter how it’s presented.
But I’m also hopeful. I suppose it’s because I’m a Jew and it’s baked into my mind that I’m always waiting for Messiah. I believe in hard work and I believe in art. I’m still naive about some things, but only because I allow myself to be. I realized if I didn’t have some bit of naivety, then that’s when I’d finally be out of touch with the young person who got on a bus to New York City 20 years ago because he wanted to be a writer. He didn’t know how he was going to do it, and he had a lot to learn. But he also had a notebook, and in the notebook, he wrote down the names of the publications he dreamed of seeing his name in. He worked a bunch of dead-end jobs, barely scraped by, got mugged once carrying all of his rent money, lived in a literal hole in a wall of some old factory space right by a polluted canal, and possibly almost died several times due to lack of insurance. He started a blog, wrote for about two-dozen websites that didn’t have any money to pay him and aren’t around anymore today. He befriends a bunch of other writers, and learned a lot from them while shaking his head the entire time, wondering how he got to be friends with such talented people. He got his name on a masthead of a magazine that isn’t around anymore, then got his first job as an editor with a salary, insurance, a business card with his name on it, and an opportunity to learn on-the-fly. He wrote his first book, then his second one came out a few months after the global pandemic started. He wrote and he wrote and he kept writing, and he got a little better every single time. He kept reading, understanding that reading all the time is just as important as writing and that the people who said otherwise usually weren’t very good writers. But most importantly, he met somebody who he’d eventually marry, and she’d tell him “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”
There’s more that I could fit in those 20 years, but it’s all capped off nicely because, at the end of this particular story, I went fishing for that list of the publications I wanted to write for that I wrote in the aughts and I finally got to take a pen to The New Yorker. It took 20 years, but I checked off every name on the entire list. I’m proud of this, but it’s hardly the end of the marathon. Instead, it’s a boost, an opportunity to keep running. It’s a reminder that I’m doing this because I enjoy it, that there will be some very big hills ahead in the distance, and there was a time when those hills would have knocked the wind out of me. But I learn to be a little smarter about how I run this marathon every day. I’ve gotten better with each new experience, and I’m going to continue to do so.
Right on! So great to track yr journey from afar (& twitter)
This was so beautiful to read. I teared up at the end.
Emily is a GEM.
Congratulations on The New Yorker!!!