The First Day of the Rest of Your Life (Hopefully)

It's official. After nearly two years of forcing myself into an ill-fitting 9-5:30 lifestyle, today is the first day that I'll be working primarily for myself, primarily on my capital-w Writing, doing the thing I've been desperately trying to get anyone to let me do for almost a decade.

It's pretty terrifying.

Luckily, having a ton on my plate right from the start is helping. As is having amazing coworkers (with some serious personal space issues):

What Did You Call Me? On Labels.

A while back, I wrote a piece called "Reasons Women Aren't Funny." The day after it came out, I was sitting in a coffee shop with a writing friend, and because I'm a compulsive spaz and/or JUST LIKE EVERY WRITER EVER, tracking its progress.

"You should write something else about feminism," she said. "I could maybe help you get it into Slate."

Slate was fantastic, of course. I'd burn as many bras as Slate wanted me to burn if it meant they'd take my stuff. But still, what my friend was saying didn't make much sense to me.

"Yeah, but I'm no expert on feminism. I don't even think of myself that way."

"Seriously, Jilly? Your name is basically synonymous with feminism right now."

Really? Because of one humor piece?

Naked

Anyone who knows me knows that I don't talk about emotions.

I use sarcasm to deflect them, or skim over them by moving the topic to something else (something sillier), or watch Doctor Who until they recede for the time being.

Generally, I'd prefer to pretend like they don't exist at all.

Which is why I'm feeling a little raw about the essay that went up on Elle today. It's possibly the most "out there" I've ever made myself, and it's unavoidably emotional.

So please read it, because lord knows I don't want to do something so against nature for NOTHING.

Then let's all put our skins back on and make self-deprecating jokes again.

xx,
j

Playing Dress-Up

So I'm in the middle of revisions right now (as you likely know, since I've mentioned it about every third minute since they started), which means I'm doing what any reasonable writer would:

I'm finding other things to do.

One of those is constructing my frankly AWESOME Halloween costume, in which I:

Will transform into this: 

Let me tell you all, so far I'm NAILING it. 

But that's not really the point of today's word-vomit. Today's barely-formed idea is that as authors, we're basically just playing pretend, constructing costumes that we hope pass muster, day in and day out. 

The Patina of Culture

Oh, that's SO Jungian.

Of course in CountryName social norms are just completely different.

Well the [Post-Modernists/Medieval ruling classes/Oneida Community Members/Basically any other movement-era-group-schoolofthought] were generally much likelier to [pick your blanket statement] than we are today.

I'm not the only one who bullshits this way, am I?

"So Have You Published Anything?"

You've heard this one before, right?

You tell someone you're a writer, and almost the first words out of his mouth are "oh, so do you have a book published, then?"

And yet...no, it's not in there.

Unless, of course, it's "I have some really interesting things that have happened to me--I should write a book," as though the two are even REMOTELY related to one another (okay, they're a little related, but not much, certainly not as much as, or in the way that, people seem to think).

Where's the Line Between "Work" and "Just Work?"

As you likely know by now (follow the very-cleverly-concealed clues, Sherlocks), in my spare time, I like to write.

I'll admit it: I just wanted to throw some Cumberbatch on this post.

That's not true, in my spare time I write. "Liking" it doesn't really seem like accurate terminology. Maybe  "I feel compelled, as in OCD compelled, like if I don't do this, the inside of my skin will itch, to write" is closer to the mark.

And of course even that only makes me churn out so many words a day. Unless it's a really NICE day and a friend wants to wander. That's important too.

Unlike many of my other addict friends, though, writing is also my day job. Some of it is mildly creative, some of it is deathly boring (that's day jobs, right?), but upwards of 90% of what I do relates pretty directly to the written word.

As I mentioned recently, it's pretty much the only skill I have.

But there's writing and there's writing.

New Talents

I've always claimed that I wound up a writer because I'm frankly no good at anything else.

That was true.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday, at my company's summer outing to an apple orchard, I discovered my true calling in life: apple bobbing, a pursuit at which I DOMINATE.

It's always good to have a backup plan, right?

Shame? Have Any?

When I was younger I was embarrassed pretty much all the time. I was embarrassed of my too-big feet, of my having parents, of the 75,203 things I was afraid of, a list that included speed boats and water parks, and of my own embarrassment, and the way it kept me from being one of those awesome kids who were just cool with everything.

None of you would have liked me. I didn't either. 

Seriously, it was awful in there.

But while most people shed some of the cringing awkwardness of being a teenager as they grow up, I feel like most also retain SOME boundary lines. 

Hide & Seek

There's a theory that I'm sure many people would vociferously disagree with: that all books are, to some extent, about the author.

No, they're not all autobiographical. They may not even contain a single recognizably autobiographical element (though I think we could have a three-cocktails-and-you-feel-deep-and-smart argument about how much voice--by which I mean authorial voice--says about the speaker, and how, simply by writing what one chooses to write, one might in fact be revealing huge swathes of personal information, even if the subject matter happens to be vigilante space-puppies). 

Even then, though, the author is putting him or herself onto the page in important ways--the habits the mother in the story has, say, or the speech patterns of the best friend, or the side-character's vocal disdain for disposable diapers and vaccination. Those characters are all fictional, their tics imagined, but they probably have one or more real-life models, and when those models are drawn from an author's life (and where else could they be drawn from, really? Space-puppy reports to command base?), they of necessity tell us something about the author's background, worldview, or relationships. Sometimes the mother is being modeled after a woman observed in the park, and sometimes she's Mommy Dearest, but she probably got that particular way of pinching her nose to bottle a sneeze from some (more or less) known entity. 

Pretty sure the resemblance to dear old Mom isn't always accidental

So what's an author's responsibility to the people s/he knows? 

Your Best Procrastination Techniques: GO! When You're Ready, That Is...

It didn't even hit 10 AM this morning before this Monday felt like a particularly aggressive, spiteful, headache-inducing, cocktails-required Monday.

What option does a girl have when faced with such a day other than procrastination?

I don't know about you folks, but I'm motivated to do my best procrastinating in two specific circumstances:

CIRCUMSTANCE 1: Nothing is really due, so why worry about getting started?

CIRCUMSTANCE 2: Everything is due yesterday. But I'm telling you about it today. You'll make time, right?

Are You Living in a Comedy or a Tragedy?

There are two kinds of people, people who come up with arbitrary splits that are supposed to tell you something that's not totally inane, and people who think these "two kinds of people" lines are trite, simplistic, and annoying.

BUT.

There are also two kinds of people, I heard recently, and for once I tended to agree: people who think they're living in a tragedy, and people who think they're living in a comedy.

I'm definitely the latter. In the moment, of course, I'm as liable to get frustrated, or melodramatic, or just plain sad about the awful things--death and casual cruelty and the bus being really, REALLY late--but when you look at it from a bird's-eye view, doesn't the whole thing just seem like a loopy Tom Stoppard play?

The way I see it, there's nothing--truly nothing, and yes, I'm including very hot-button issues under this umbrella, like for instance the big-r-as-in-"R__ is never funny"--that you can't make funny. It takes some time, both to gain perspective and because raw flesh isn't tough enough to stand up to the razor-slice of a cutting joke. But if you ask me, the general absurdity of human existence (because cosmically speaking, just about everything we DO is absurd) means that even our pain can be mined for humor.

Fantasies

So part and parcel with taking a first major step towards being a "real" author (let's not waste time arguing this one and all just accept that I'm still mostly faking this) is spending more time than usual watching the fantasy film reels.

You know you have them too. The Walter Mitty moments that you occasionally let yourself play out, where you charm Jon Stewart with your amazing wit (because clearly he wants to talk about your pointless humor book on The Daily Show) and he loves you so much he makes you a regular correspondent, or you sell enough books that you get to quit your day job AND take a real vacation, or you even just see someone reading your book on public transportation and feel overwhelming satisfaction at knowing that person paid to read the words you wrote.

I mean, they don't all have to be EPIC fantasy, right?

I wonder though, how much "it's possible that if everything goes well I might..." is positive, and how much is negative.

How do you Deal with Failure?

I have a confession that is painfully evident to anyone who knows me: I'm a perfectionist. I like things to be a certain way, I get very hung up on the details, and I believe--deeply--that there is usually a "right" way to do things.

Maybe not in life (or in my house cleaning), but certainly in work. Whether you're building artisanal cheese boards or working as an accountant, do it well. Don't be sloppy. Check, then check again.

This even applies to my text messages and gchats. Usually I double check and copy-edit them...

...and when I hit send too fast and miss something, I follow up with a "sic" to whomever I'm corresponding with. Because I hate the idea that they think I'm sloppy THAT MUCH. (No, I'm not kidding about this.)

I think this is my factory setting, but I also think the drive towards perfectionism was reinforced by rewards. Growing up, I was bright, but if I was also anal-retentive, I could be the best. I could get a perfect score on every test and paper, get the right grades, get into the right college, and generally attain all the rubber-stamps of approval I could want because I was, in my dad's words, "disciplined." Obviously this character trait had serious downsides--like several years of "eating" diet coke for lunch--but by the time they started showing up, it was too late. I was stuck on this track, and why, really, would I want to get off of it?

So I must be a masochist.

Pain Plus Time...But How Much?

There's a cliche among humorists: "comedy equals pain plus time."

The idea behind it is fairly simple: you can transform any experience--even a terrible experience--into something totally different, but you need to let it sit awhile, first.

Lately I've been wondering if maybe it applies to all forms of art. I feel like "pain plus time" is probably a reliable formula for tons of great literature, amazing songs, and stunning works of visual art, too.

But how much time do you need?

I think medium matters (for example, it's probably fair to assume a good breakup song could be written sooner, relative to the event, than a good breakup novel), so let's just stick to the one I know: writing.

How much time should you give pain--or fear, or trauma, or any other negative-but-powerful experience--to incubate before you try to give shape to it artistically?

Ideally let's avoid this.


I'm sure a lot of this depends on the person, but I think for most of us, there's a risk in trying to "tap" an experience too soon. My first-ever-novel-no-you-can't-see-it had a climactic scene that drew heavily on a specific, traumatic incident I went through in college.

But I started writing the book my senior year OF college, at which point I was still in the thick of  fallout from said event. I'd finished the first--and second, and third--drafts way before I really understood how I felt about what happened (in fact, I finished them before I'd actually worked through the actual real-life-physical consequences, to say nothing of the emotional ones).

So for me, at least, "two-ish years, during which you've made no effort to sift through the experience" is firmly on the "not long enough" side of the line.

The novel I'm shopping now, on the other hand, deals with something that I knew I wanted to write about the moment it started unfolding (it's based loosely on the events surrounding my father's death).

But I knew I couldn't, yet. Instead I jotted down details--scenes that were too crazy to be made up, moments I wanted to be able to look back on and say "oh dear GOD I'd forgotten how totally effed that was"--and sat on it.

For a little over five years.

I know that said novel will still benefit greatly from the molding of a hands-on agent and/or editor, but I feel much more confident that I've actually distilled what happened--chosen the important parts, picked out the emotional details that are most true and necessary to put on the page, found a few places where the whole mess was, in fact, funny.

It's not just a muddle of regurgitated hurt anymore; I've gotten far enough away from it that I can pick and choose from among my memories, lay them over a different scaffolding, and see that the story might need something that the experience didn't necessarily give me.

Apparently somewhere between two-ish and five-and-change years is my magical "okay, I can work with this, now" line.

Do Your Dreams Ever Have A Plot?

The other night I had a dream that involved two weensie kittens, the smaller of which I saved from certain death through my incredible milk-doling-out-dream-skills.

Dream me didn't have her nails did, though.


I'm not going to bother to try to tell you more about it, because it's a universally-accepted fact that there is nothing on earth more boring than someone else's dreams.

Except maybe young children's baseball games. Those are DEADLY.

That's gonna be another strike.

But sometimes--super rarely, but occasionally--my dreams unfold like an especially awesome children's story (I'm far too immature for them to unfold like an adult story, all layers of meaning and expansive description of setting and lyrical, but often aimless, prose--in fact, this is making me start to think the not-well-plotted dreams are just the literary fiction of my sleeping self...WHOA...).

Leaps of Faith

So here's a question for you creative-types: do you trust your talent?

Do you even trust that you HAVE talent?

I feel like there's a conundrum at the heart of any creative endeavor: on the one hand, we're profoundly fragile people, sculpted out of spun sugar and butterfly wings, ready to fall apart at the first breath of whispered criticism.

A portrait of the artist.

On the other hand, we're arrogant enough to try to create something in the first place, assuming people will want it, even (maybe) want to pay us for the privilege of it.

Sure, there are folks who walk around telling you what an amazing talent they have, and how they just refuse to waste it on less-worthy forms, and how everyone is dying to work with them, and how they would never get out of bed for less than $Large#.

But I'm not those people. I don't even like to be AROUND those people.

"The Artist's Temperament?"

I should probably recall many significantly more important things about the class I took on Vladimir Nabokov, my junior year in college, but the detail that has stuck with me the most wasn't about his expert use of language, or his uncanny ability to get us to sympathize with monsters, or even his amazing adriotness with puns (though that obviously stuck with me too): it was about his family life.

"Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Nabokov," my professor said, quieting the room with an intense gaze (side-note: GOD was he beautiful--my entire love of literature may just be a displaced crush on this professor), "the most unexpected, the way in which he is most unique among writers of his caliber, is this:

"He was happy." 

Let's be honest: I just wanted an excuse to put up a picture of David Tennant 

Conferences?? Conferences.

Is there anything more bittersweet, more simultaneously-maddening-and-invigorating, more hungover, than a writing conference?

Or any conference? I feel like they're all this way, at least as far as the hangovers go.

I only started going to these a year ago, and I'm horrified I didn't start sooner. They're like miniature doses of grown-up summer camp. Every person there--at least at the writing conferences I've picked out so far--is passionate about this stuff, ready to talk about books, and craft, and their projects, and your project, and whether or not literacy is really declining, and whether or not that makes any difference in our opinion of The Hunger Games.

(Answer: who cares, that book was fun.)

Every time I go, the dream of doing this full-time feels brighter, more vital, and more in reach (yes, even after a tough critique) than it did before...

...but my life feels that much worse when I get back. Not least because a bunch of writers without any real responsibility are gonna go out for a BUNCH of cocktails. Monday morning does not look bright after five days of too much bourbon and too little sleep, I tell 'ya.

Conference-land is like a playground, filled with witty conversation, interesting people, and did I mention all the drinks? It makes ordinary life seem so dull by comparison. You mean I really have to still do THIS? Every day? Until indefinitely?

You can't be serious.

If only I had endless money (and vacation days) to spend on endless conferences.

Since I don't...I'd better get writing.

Really Old Kids vs. Adults

By anybody's count, I'm definitively a grown-up now. I have forehead wrinkles that don't go away when my face is at rest. I have multiple bills in my name and a good credit score. At some point in the near future, my doctor will probably start prodding, lightly, about my fertility.

If I ever go to the doctor, which I don't, because I'm not a very GOOD adult.

I've been living on my own for years now, buying groceries besides beer, keeping my cats mostly fed, blah blah blah, but I still feel as though doing those distinctly "adult" things earns me credit in my grown-up account which I'm then justified in blowing on totally non-adult behaviors.

This week I went to the dentist AND scheduled an eye appointment so that, rather than just continuing to wear my disposable contacts until my eyes actually fall out, I can then go on to spend MORE money on contact lenses, the most boring and adult thing to spend money on ever (barring, of course, the insurance I pay for in order to reduce the appointment cost in the first place).

This means that I can go home and watch Adventure Time for hours, right?

I've been doing these "adult" things long enough that they shouldn't register as out-of-character anymore. But it still feels like I'm playing house. Every time I vacuum the living room, or pack a lunch for work because it's JUST SO PRACTICAL AND COST-EFFECTIVE, I feel like I deserve a gold star. Or a cocktail that--now that I'm old enough that real diseases can happen and long-term health is a legit concern--I probably shouldn't have.

Shouldn't paying my credit card bill in full exempt me from having to ever understand what the hell "escrow" is?

Even asking that question earned me a cocktail.

When do other people make the switch to an adult identity? Is everyone just faking it, walking around talking about the rates of return they're getting on their various IRAs while secretly, inside, they feel like they should still be allowed to fake their moms' signatures on a "doctor's note" so they don't have to go to work today? I assume there are people out there who actually FEEL like grown-ups. What's that like? Awful? I'm gonna go ahead and further assume it's awful.

I'm starting to think I will never stop feeling this way--like I'm playing pretend--a stance I'm not exactly upset over, but one I'd love to know whether I'm alone in taking...