So You Want to Be a Writer

The Good, the Bad, and the Bizarre

Here’s a prose poem that pokes fun of the fleeting fame of being a writer and also of writers who think that they will the “Next Big Thing.”

Wordmeister

He dusts the shelves where his books used to be.

He had some big ones—rock-hard abs, too—and he could half-nelson a cliché until it screamed “mama.”

He was the Word’s most wanted man.

Could steam into a library and shake up the joint.

A rose broke into spasm when he read a poem about a rose breaking into spasm.

There was a beautiful blonde in the front row, with earrings fashioned from tiny No. 2 pencils.

She had lapis-lazuli eyes, her fingers bleeding from a thorn on a red rose she was womanhandling.

He read a poem about wanting to be a woman in love with other women.

He believed the phrase “flattened by a sacrament” could distract a terrorist.

That the right word could bring the whole world down (or together).

That he could let the stale air out of a century merely by giving it a name.

All of this long before he had his teeth whitened and was given the Blowhard Emeritus Chair at the local college.

Now just these empty bookshelves, a duster dangling limply from his hand, and the image of a red rose quivering like a plucked guitar string in the hands of a beautiful and troubled woman.

It seems that everyone is a “writer” nowadays or has published a book. This would be a good thing if everyone was also a reader. Over the years I have come to know poets who churn out poems faster than the US mints dollars bills, yet most of them, manically obsessed with their own work and believing their ideas will change the world, rarely read much of anyone else’s poetry. Most of us poets have to give our books away to other poets, knowing they will read a few poems and then place the book on a shelf, or bring it to the used bookstore and sell it for just enough to buy a fancy Starbuck’s drink.

The Internet has also been a mixed blessing for writers. The good news is that it is democratic, so anyone can upload anything they write. And, in fact, many self-published poems and stories are better than most of what big publishing houses print. But if the good news is that the Internet is democratic, then the bad new is also that the Internet is democratic, because, along with some good work, the Internet provides a platform for a tremendous amount of garbage, most of which is difficult to read because of the spelling and grammatical mistakes. Also, with so many, many poems, and short stories, and essays coming at one like a lake-effect snowstorm in Buffalo, NY, it’s hard to find the good among the bad.

It would be fair to say that I have earned the right to call myself a writer, yet when I am at social gatherings, I rarely tell people what I do, because I have learned that just about everyone has a novel or picture book they’d like me to read and give to my agent so that they can become famous without getting the 10,000 rejection slips I received before being published. I don’t blame them. To most people, being a writer is glamorous. And it certainly is for about .01% of best-selling writers, who show up at book-signings where groupies shower them with praise and dollars. It doesn’t matter that most of these writers books are written with the sophistication and syntax of a fourth grader. But I’ll get to that later.

For now, though, let’s focus on the problems that the rest of us moderately successful writers have faced over the years, and, quite frankly, still face. Why? Because you are only as good as your last book, and last year’s superstar, if she doesn’t follow it up with another bestseller, may find herself bagging groceries instead of deciding whether to vacation in Cancun or Cannes. We are talking about fame here, though, and being a good writer is very different than being a famous writer. In fact, I would advise that if you want to become “famous,” you’d be better off streaking bare-naked across the 50-yard line in the next Super Bowl than writing a novel, and certainly a book of poems.

I have written and published books of poems, short stories, essays, novels, and I have edited a literary journal for ten years and three poetry anthologies.  My writing has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two Rhode Island Council on the Arts writing fellowships, and my second book of poems was awarded the James Laughlin Award by the Academy of American Poets, an award that honors what the Academy considers to be the best “second” book by an American poet. Two of my middle grade and young adult novels have also won awards or praise.

I don’t mention this to boast. I raise it so you don’t think what I am about say is sour grapes. There is nothing worse than a bitter writer who complains that his book is unpublished while an unread memoir about bedwetting written by a participant in Naked and Afraid is an overnight success.

Also, I’d be the first to admit that I have been lucky with my awards, and I know first-hand that awards rarely translate into money. Any fame you receive for “literary” works is short-lived. The most you can hope for is to sell a few copies at a literary conference or library reading, or hook up with some a troubled person who thinks you are smarter than you are—the latter which I would never do because my wife, though petite, teaches Body Combat and Grit courses, and she’s made it clear, she’d beat the hell out of me.

So here are a few reasons not to be a writer, but don’t worry, this essay ends on a happy note.

Kind of.

Early rejection notices and odd reviews.

The first time I ever sent out poems to a journal, I received a rejection letter saying, “Sorry, we only publish working-class poems.” “But, dudes,” I wrote back, “The poems are about working in the steel plants.”

A couple of years later, when I started writing prose poems, which were more like short, comic character sketches, I received: “Sorry, but these prose poems are obviously cheap imitations of the prose poems of Russell Edson [a well-known poet].” Who? I wondered, so I wrote back, “Dude, I don’t know who Russell Edson is, but now that I know I’ve been influenced him, I promise to buy his book, because one should at least read the people one is influenced by.”

      Even years later after winning that prestigious James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, when I sent out a new manuscript to a big publisher, I received an email from that publisher asking me what MFA program I went to, who I worked with, and what social media I was active on. I wrote back, “I studied with Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag and I am frequently on my CVS app. for a variety prescriptions.” In other words, “What about the book?”

        These types of dumb responses were not limited to the small literary world of poetry. One of my relatively successful YA novels called What Happened was favorably reviewed, though one sourpuss wrote, “Just another rich-white-kid suburban novel.” That would have stung, except that the book was about working-class kids causing trouble on the city streets of Buffalo, NY. And, really, if it were about white suburban kids, is there anything wrong with that? What book did this reviewer read? I thought.

I could go on and on about the rejections and slights I have received, but, trust me, they will never stop. Just reread my first essay “I’m Old, Not Dead,” which relates how, after my long, somewhat prestigious, publication record, I couldn’t find an “adult” agent to represent my best novel because they all referred to my age, one agent saying that her agency would wonder “how many books I have left in [me].”

A Few Final Warnings About Wanting to Be a Writer:

• Don’t ever expect other writers to be happy for your success unless they are also successful or unless they think they can use your accomplishments or fame (your blurb, your agent, or whatever) to bolster their own careers.

• Be ready to have many people you hardly know and who have never read a word you have written want you to read, edit, and to get published their novel or their daughter’s novel. And if you refuse or just don’t have time (which I usually don’t) be ready for those people to hate you or to think that you are a snob or selfish, even though they would never ask the plumber to work for free in his spare time on a new bathroom. I once had a woman ask me to read her 12-year-old daughter’s novel. I liked this woman, and I liked her daughter, so I thought, “Shit, maybe I can find the time.” So I asked her how long it was.  “1200 pages,” she said. “isn’t that impressive.” “Yes,” I said, but I had to decline, and that woman has never spoken to me again. And when I see her in the grocery store, I never leave my cart of vegetables unattended, fearing she may inject my tomatoes with cyanide.

• If you are trying to write good, literary YA fiction, prepare yourself to be sitting on a panel next to a twenty-year-old kid who has written hugely successful novels based on a video game and who speaks over you as if you’re invisible, and when you ask him later how he manages to churn out so many books, he says, “My mom actually does most of the writing. Just the ideas are mine.”

In one of his Substack entries, George Saunders offers a brilliant and eloquent piece on rejection. At one point, he writes,

“I guess what I'm saying is that this writing life is not just about writing and one of the gifts it gives us is a chance to better know who, at our best, we are.  So, I hope your book finds a publisher.  If not, I really feel that always (even with published books) we are working, not on behalf of that book, but on behalf of the next one.  In this sense, we are always, perennially, doing warm-up exercises, for that ultimate book that, we hope, we'll never quite get to.”

Idealistically, I agree with Saunders, but does this advice really help a struggling writer who wants to be read. Having someone as hugely popular as Saunders, try to assuage your pain, is kind of like having Jesus on your deathbed appear to tell you, “Don’t worry. You’ll rise from the dead. Look at me.” And you want to reply, “Yeah, sure, but you’re Jesus. And while your here can you tell me something about Hell and Purgatory?”

In short, there is probably no consolation for us writers, and maybe we don’t deserve this needy nurturing. As I used to tell my students, “If you are going to be a plumber, you’re going to end up with bad knees. Just enjoy the little things and hope for lightning to strike. And make sure you have a real job to support yourself or you marry rich.”

Perhaps the prose poet Russell Edson said it best about writers who complain about their lot while hoping to be successful: “What they forget, Peter,” he said, “is that you can’t go to heaven without dying.”

Let me finish with an uplifting story. As I said, my first young adult novel did fairly well, with some stupid but mostly excellent reviews and “stars.” But the best response I have ever received on a poem, short story or essay came from a young man attending a school for “troubled boys.” His teacher had gotten a grant and had purchased 80 copies of my book for his students, and the kid wrote me to say, very simply, “Finally a book that doesn’t suck.”

What more can a writer possibly want out of life.

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