A note to my patient and beloved subscribers: I’ve got a lot of half-done pieces waiting to be finished. It may take a few more weeks till I can get to all of them. I have to figure out how to pay rent starting in March, and Certain Opportunities Have Presented Themselves, to be coyly Dickensian about it. All of this happened quickly, and I have to act just as quickly. I’m nearly exhausted out of my mind but I hope to have a bushel of news before the end of the year. In the meantime, please bear with me. Thank you, always, for your support. Here is something I wrote about being a writer. Or, you know, A Writer.
I grew up reading magazines. I mean: actual print entities, things that came in the mail and that you held in your hand and whose pages you turned (I write about that here). I loved magazines and still do. When the pandemic hit, I set about subscribing to as many as I could afford (the wonders of the internet include cheap first-time subscriptions, if you know where to look), knowing I’d need relief from the world. Digital subscriptions tend to be the cheapest, but I knew I’d be on the computer for hours, either with endless zoom meetings or with writing and reading research—my eyes would be fried. Which is how I now have several piles of publications to read, neatly organised in various spots around the apartment.
There has been this apocryphal story floating around for a while: that if you place all the issues of National Geographic collected by readers over the years on one end of North America, the whole landmass would dip in that direction and into the ocean. As someone who grew up looking at the growing piles of that magazine in her home, I can believe that. Of course, that was back then, before we were clouded and troubled by the Geographic’s orientalism and racism, something it has since acknowledged and apologised for. As I sit here in my apartment and look at where all the piles are, I wonder if I should be strategically moving them around every now and then.
But I digress: my point is that magazines, in their physical forms, are magical in ways that they are not when they’re online. And yet, as it turns out, subscribing to a print edition, that relic of the late ’90s, doesn’t mean you’re reading the actual magazine, because publications like the New Yorker and Vanity Fair are continuously popping out new stories and op-eds and who the hell knows what else online. This is unfortunately the sad reality for anything resembling a publication these days, including my beloved Current Affairs: produce something new every day or week or die. Readers have become so used to being able to find a new gem (or, judging by the puffy contents of the online New York Times, a random assortment of turds gilded by a paper’s heritage reputation) that they express indignation or disappointment or some combination of both if there isn’t something new nearly every hour. Newspapers are now more like magazines and change all the livelong day, terrified to commit to any view of what the day’s news might be. Sure, yes, that horrible earthquake this morning was news but our readers have now moved on to Scottie Pippen telling us that Michael Jordan was mean so THAT is what appears on top now, sorry. The L. A. Times offers a pdf of its daily paper, for which I respect the hell out of it, but the New York Times does not, shifting and changing by the minute depending on algorithmic configurations based on some hazy idea of who “you” are. What this means is that “news” is not what really matters, but what readers are looking at the most. The Times is now a dizzying portal to a lot of words that don’t really cohere into anything that contributes greatly to what I need to know about the world. But there are op-eds! And it turns out glamour images on Instagram are unrealistic! The Kardashians did something! Maureen Dowd has something to say about Colin Powell that reads like it was written by a bot, and Jennifer Boylan asks if we can separate the art from the artist, as if this is somehow a unique point that has not been written about a hundred times in the past year and, frankly, in much more interesting ways. As a former op-ed writer myself, I firmly believe there should be term limits on op-ed columnists—Dowd and the vast majority of the op-ed team over at the Times have exceeded their ability to write anything new or fresh.
The Times does still produce the kind of news reporting that only well-funded media outlets can, but nearly all of it is tinged by its devotion to neoliberalism (the rare exceptions are just that, exceptions, meant to rope in new readers). Its cooking sections and recipes may be the best thing about it. The Times isn’t a newspaper but a magazine—a constantly undulating, shifting one whose offerings change by the minute, accompanied by puzzles and games. Are you bored by this bit of news? Fear not: here’s another one, completely useless for anything but filling your head with junk that will keep you hooked in.
As I contemplate the magazine-ness of newspapers like the Times, it occurs to me that every writer now also has to operate like a magazine. There are the few who have lucked into regular gigs at, ah, magazines or newspapers and who are able to make a living that way, but always with the sense that things might just end tomorrow. It doesn’t take much: an editor leaves or a publication changes hands and, boom, you’re out of a job or at least wondering when you might lose your regular column. There’s an old guard— the Dowds and the Paul Krugmans and the rest—who probably don’t even need the money any more and who can survive by churning out the exact same column over and over again as they will till the end of time. But nearly every other writer, even if with a regular gig, is hustling. If you have the comfort of, say, a beat or a column somewhere, you can at least breathe for a while but soon, before you know it, you’re out on the proverbial streets, knocking on doors with your résumé in hand. And all the while, you have to keep up your side gigs: a column here, a consultation series there, a paid talk here and anything else you can think of.
I often have this gnawing sense that I should be “monetising” everything I do more effectively but that would leave me with literally nothing to do just because I like doing it. I was once in a café showing friends the scarves I had made—I had recently taken up knitting—and a very kind and gracious man stopped by to admire them and gave me his card, offering to sell anything in his store, on commission. Yes, for a while I contemplated that but never followed through: knitting was something I loved doing (and still do) in a purposeless way, and I needed something like that in my life. We have hobbies for a reason, or did, before the Pinterisation and Instagramming of Everything. The same is true of baking, something I’ve taken up earnestly of late. A lot of what I make is not too pretty but it’s delicious, and I know I’ll get better and could possibly become semi-professional, perhaps selling my goods to neighbours. But that would take away one of the few pleasures I have: making some indulgent dessert, keeping a slice and distributing the rest among friends. I get to read cookbooks for fun—for fun, and what is that even, these days? I tend to be good at anything I take up (I don’t suffer from false modesty), but I’m always possessive of my efforts.
But these days you’re not a writer if you’re not, in effect, a magazine. Do you just write? How boring, how very…early 1990s. Surely you render advice for a fee? Do you have a game you can teach us, any skills you can pass on? Can you stand on your head for five minutes and TikTok that, just so we can experience you on another platform? Are you on Substack? Twitter? Facebook? Discord? Can you facilitate a discussion about something, anything at all? Did you take a vacation? Oh, well, then: where are your photos on Instagram?
I have seen the best minds of my generation lost in the endless hustle.
None of this is an indictment of writers: it’s a sympathetic account of what it means to be one these days. I don’t know what the answer to this is. Hell, I barely know what the question is or if it’s possible to even explain what needs to change and how and why. Better pay, paid regularly, is obviously part of the solution, but it’s not all that needs to change. We’ve reached a point where “content” is what’s demanded, constantly, and the pandemic has created an addiction of sorts: More please, all the time.
Anyway. I’m not drawing in the millions on Substack, and I have no interest in being on there, for reasons I’ll explain in a future piece: the short version is that it kills you as a writer (and if you are one of the paid Substackers, solidarity to you—take the money and run, and find an excellent finance manager so that you hold on to some of it for a while after your contract ends). I’ve had supporters who’ve stuck around for nearly two decades now, and I’m happy with where I am in my work. The biggest question for a writer is: Are you a better writer now than you were five years ago? Or are you saying the same thing over and over again because that’s your “brand” and you have no idea how to express a new idea?
I know there are some who smirk at the fact that I’ve archived most of what I’ve written, including some decades-old pieces, on my website but I do that because, well, it’s my archive. And I do it because I want writers just starting out to see and understand that your work changes and shifts, hopefully for the better, over time—and that it should. The great myth about writing these days, in an age when you’re either the sparkling new prodigy or the writer of the same op-ed every fortnight at the Times or the Guardian, is that you simply and magically emerge, ta-dah! But if you’re actually writing the right way, the magic is that you learn how to write—all the time. It’s fine if there are certain kinds of assignments that come easier than others, but if writing is boringly easy for you every single time you begin a new piece, please be assured that you are already dead as a writer. Back away from your laptop and take up something challenging, something you’ve never done before—knitting, perhaps, or baking—and come back only if writing is what pulls you towards it. If it doesn’t and if it’s not a perfectly dangerous and exhilarating adventure for you most of the time, it’s time to leave writing behind.
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See also, “The Publishing Industry Is Like Fyre Fest.”
And see, everything else I’ve written on writing and publishing, here.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Image: Lesser Ury, Frau am Schreibtisch (Woman at writing desk), 1898.