Why do we want to write books?

It's hard. It's solitary. The pay is meh-to-exploitative. But still, I can't bring myself to fully discourage people either.

When I first got started in journalism, as a college student and in my first years as a newspaper reporter, veterans from the field were constantly discouraging me.

In a journalism class I took the professor said, “why don’t you go into marketing?” In one of the first newsrooms I was at, where the veteran staff was particularly miserable, senior editors would tell me “get out of journalism,” which I stupidly sort of ignored (or didn’t, not fully anyway).

One of these editors, in this rust belt city I reported in, was fully convinced he could have made more working on an assembly line at GM instead. I don’t think he was crazy about that.

You hear even famous writers do this sometimes. Harvey Pekar, who is kind of obscure, but a Cleveland native who helped launch the genre of graphic novels in the 1970s avant garde, once discouraged a young person from following the same path in something I read of his. He told them it was hard especially if you weren’t in a major publishing center like New York. Pekar continued to work as a file clerk for the VA his entire career and financed the publishing of a lot of his work out of his own pocket. It wasn’t until very late in his life, I think, he ever got much recognition. (But in 2003 there was a really good movie (IMO) made about his life starring Paul Giamatti.)

I would honestly have the same impulse at this point in my career when it comes to advice for young writers, probably. I was reading a book recently that’s a lot about writing. And it is from this sort of emo perspective. The writer, Sigrid Nunez, talks a lot about living as a writer and a teacher of writing and socializing among writers in New York City.

In the book, The Friend, which won a national book award, she says:

My own first writing teacher used to tell her students that if there was anything else they could do with their lives instead of becoming writers, any other profession, they should do it.

I have to admit, I related to all this. I’m seasoned like that now, and by that I mean cynical about the whole endeavor. The industry has never been worse. Writing was a terrible, terrible way to make money in the first place.

I never like expected to retire from a newsroom I guess. I think I just wanted to see how long I could keep going. It seemed cool to have that kind of role even for a short time.

I have been thinking about all this because I have been working on a second book. I’ve mentioned this before on here, but I almost feel like it's embarrassing to talk about or not real yet, which is making it harder in a way. For about a year now though, I’ve been working with an agent on the proposal and now it’s about 30,000 words (my first book was only about 65,000) and has gone through probably 20 edits. I am so, so sick of reading it. Heh.

My agent is a pro though and I trust her when she says it’s not good enough, or needs this or that or that we’re almost there. It’s hard to work on something for a year quietly this way, without any guarantees about what will come of it. Like anything else in life, the hardest thing is to overcome your own sense of self doubt.

The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has a short story about this tension I really like. It’s called “Super Frog Saves Toyko.” In the book, this character, a frog (lol) visits this normal office worker in Tokyo and tells him he needs his help fighting this supernatural being — a giant worm — to save the city from a devastating earthquake. The main character, he spends the whole book trying to convince the Frog he’s got the wrong guy. He’s just a normal dude. Not the savior of Tokyo.

I don’t mean to spoil the plot, and it’s a lot more eloquent coming from Murakami, but the two do end up teaming up and saving the city, sorta. The point, which I’m sure I’ve seen in other literature, was that the toughest battle was within himself. He needed to overcome his sense of self doubt in order to slay the beast.

I relate to that story, I think anyone can. It’s scary to try to do something creative or new. That is true for me with respect to book writing, or even writing this Substack even though I’ve already written a book, a book which was relatively successful, at least at what it set out to do. With the previous book, I didn’t use an agent and went with a small publisher, and I didn’t really know what to expect or expect it to be a big hit necessarily. It was so hard to know how it would be received. And I remember having some pretty serious anxiety about it at times.

With the last book, I did not have go through this time-consuming purgatory of edits and back and forth with an agent. To be honest, I probably would have quit on this one a long time ago, if I hadn’t found this agent who was willing to take it on, which made me feel more confident I could get a book deal from a major publisher with a respectable advance, etc. Usually you can’t get any of that without an agent. It took me my whole career to get to that point where I could get an agent. I think I really needed her help.

It’s hard to do anything useful alone, even in writing which is very solitary. I had some ideas and getting them organized, well that is the hardest part of writing a book. So maybe — I’m telling myself this to make myself feel better — the hard part is done now.

For me, writing was always like an impulse. I would start a dumb blog like this with no long term plan. I am very impulsive by nature. I would write something. Then next, I would want someone to read it. I would sort of struggle. Maybe I wouldn’t get the editor I wanted’s approval. Maybe I couldn’t get certain people to take me seriously, because I lived in Cleveland, or didn’t have the right credentials, or because of my temperament or tone, which I feel like doesn’t code somehow as respectable or something.

Looking back on all these years of writing, it’s hard to even know how to judge it. There’s an opportunity cost to not being a lawyer or a nurse, both of which were possibilities for me. I didn’t dream of writing for the New York Times necessarily. But I have worked at places now where people have gone on to things like that.I don’t think my career has been a big success. I wrote and wrote for years and years though. A lot of the stuff I wrote was dumb, frankly. But some of it I am proud of.

What does it amount to? With writing, it’s hard to say. At the same time, there are reasons, so many people want to write books, or write essays, even though it’s objectively hard and solitary.

I come across people sometimes however that have read my work and connected with it. If you write, and write and write and write for years, even if it’s not for a super huge audience at once, it all adds up.

The other day I was sitting in a coffee shop and a woman I had never met or seen before stopped me. And she asked if I was MY NAME. And I said yeah. And she said she used to read and like this little blog I was publishing like 15 years ago that I don’t even discuss or talk about any more. She remembered it after all that time.

That kind of thing is pretty freaking cool. It’s happened to me on other occasions. I spoke in Phoenix and Tucson about the subject of my first book. And a man using a cane came out to hear me speak and asked me to sign his book. He had been hit by a car and nearly killed (the book was about these kinds of crashes). He spent 3 months in the ICU. Was lucky to be alive. I feel ridiculous signing books, but damn what an honor to meet him in person.

When I was in Tucson as well I met a woman who had been head of a state department of transportation. I don’t want to identify her, in case she wouldn’t like that. But she was from a state where their safety record is REAL BAD. A sun belt type of state. And state DOTs have a lot of power. She told me she not only read it but bought it for some of her top engineers to read as well. I recently got asked to blurb a book by a normie traffic engineer with lives in Indiana (and it was really good!) He said to me “Your work has shaped how so many of us talk about safety, equity, and infrastructure that actually serves people.”

I spoke in Honolulu last fall which felt like a dream. I was hosted by a Hawaii based nonprofit and before my talk, they gave me two (!!) leis. I do not think I have ever been through anything that felt so humbling. When something like this happens, I feel a real sense of disbelief. Those kind of kind and encouraging comments are what’s keeping me going now through the hard parts of this process.

So I guess what I’m saying is while I have the impulse to discourage people, and I do so from love (😂) I also can’t bring myself to do it fully. You never know what kind of impact your work will have. And people public some pretty dumb books.

I once read something that said humans developed language because of the instinctual need to be understood. And I think that is what drives this crazy impulse to write, despite of everything.

Here is someone who put it more beautifully. Maybe this is what we’re all aspiring toward with writing.