The Geeks Guide to the Writing Life

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY

The Write Crowd, Lori A. May

Can Creative Writing Really Be Taught?, Stephanie Vanderslice and Rebecca Manery

This book is dedicated to writing geeks but it would not exist without editors, specifically the editorial team at Bloomsbury, including David Avital, Lucy Brown, Lisa Carden, and Mark Richardson, whose vision and insight have proved instrumental at every step along the way, from conception to production to publication.

For their support and encouragement, I wish to thank my familyit is often said that everyone needs a champion in their youth and I am fortunate to have had several, including my parents, Maureen Pettei and William Muller, and my mother-in-law, Patricia Vanderslice. In addition, I remain indebted to the friends and mentors and writing geeks who have shared my journey, especially: Margot and Ralph Treitel, Hannah Treitel Cosdon, Blanche Boyd, Richard Bausch, Alan Cheuse, Mary Ann Wilson, Kevin McCann, Chris Motto, William Lychack, and Anna Leahy, as well as my writing group members, Donna Wake and Jeff Whittingham. It is also important to mention that this book would not exist without the generous nature of my childhood friend, Jay Kirsch, who helped me get started on the Huffington Post. Finally, I wish to thank my students, who enrich my life in so many ways it is impossible to imagine it without them.

Most of all I am grateful to my husband, the real John Vanderslice and our own little realm of writing-geek love. It has made all the difference.

I have always been the opposite of cool. In literary society, a place generally inhabited by people blinking out from behind Buddy Holly glasses (with or without lenses) and kicking around in their wing tips or Doc Martens, this makes me something of an outsider. A geek. Not the kind of geek who can quote lengthy passages from Star Wars, although I have given birth to people with this talent. No, I mean that, literally or metaphorically, Ive never sat at the cool kids table in the cafeteriawhether in high school or in the literary worldin my life. I wouldnt even know what to do or say there if I had. Im ok with this reality. In fact, Im kind of proud of it. In fact, I think most people share this reality with me. Face it, the cool kids table just isnt that big.

Just as there are cool and uncool people in high school, freaks and geeks, brains and jocks, name your stereotype, there are also cool writers and uncool writers. Some of this might have to do with talent (Ann Patchett, for example, is cool in my opinion, because she is such a luminous writer), some with drive (Elizabeth Gilbert, famous as she might be right now, faithfully waited tables for over a decade while she wrote), some with talent and drive. Come to think of it, both Gilbert and Patchett are not only talented but also waited tables. And Patchett should get extra points for doing so at TGI Fridays, where she had to wear suspenders and be cheerful all the time. Some of it might have to do with trends (Do you have tattoos? Yes? One coolness point for you!), attitude, good fortune, and the ability to hold ones liquor. Some of it also has to do with early success, loosely defined as achieving a high profile in the literary world before the age of forty, and publishing a lot of books while pulling down a lot of grants and awards and residencies along the way. This is all well and good. Im a great champion of literary culture, even if it means I must endure yet another feature story about the friendly competition between two bespectacled, bearded authors for voice of his generation bragging rights (pronoun deliberate; they dont call them pissing contests for nothing).

But what if you are not in this category and you still feel driven to write, youve always felt driven to write, to create, yes even to publish, to share your work with someone else?

This book is for you. Im calling it a prose writers memoir because as a terminally unhip writer, an outsider who has nonetheless managed to lead a pretty fulfilling writing life, I think what Ive learned so far and the stories of how I learned it can be useful for the rest of us, for those who did not go to Iowa or Yaddo or grab an NEA grant or a Guggenheim along the way.

Do I sound bitter? I dont mean to, because Im not bitter, actually. The fact is, I never applied to Iowa or Yaddo or tried to get an NEA grant (having gotten my MFA back in the day, when Poets and Writers magazine was still printed on black and white newsprint and professional development was something business people, not artists, did, I didnt even know those last two were things you were supposed to aim for, like steps on a ladder). George Mason University, where I got my degree, was always my first choice and I got in to all three programs where I applied. Anyway, even if I had achieved some of those distinctions, I still probably wouldnt be cool. What with all this genome mapping, its only a matter of time before they discover that theres actually a gene for coolness. Dont waste the gene splicer. I can tell you right now: I dont have it.

But heres the thingyou dont really have to be cool to be a writer. Even the terminally unhip like me can do it. Lean in here and Ill tell you the secret, something youll read over and over again in this book: Leading a writing life is more about doing the writing than anything else. Doing the writing when no one else really cares what youre doing, becauselean back in, I wasnt finishedthey dont. Its also about figuring out a way to make space for that writing in your life and then, maybe finding some success with it, however you define that. Because even though most writers would still write even if they were the last person on earth, publishing a few things, maybe even a book, here and there, proof that we are still connecting with others through our words, is sometimes the extra little push we need to keep us going.

In fact, the more I think about my definition of writing geek and weigh whats hip and what is not, the more I think that geeks like us might be especially suited for the writing life because of our enthusiasm for it. Stay with me here. The word geek is a synonym for the word nerd. Stratospherically gifted young adult author John Green defines being a nerd like this:

. nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-cant-control-yourself love it when people call people nerds, mostly what theyre saying is, you like stuff. Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, you are too enthusiastic

In this context, being a writing geek is something to be proud of. In a world of sound bites and people who roll their eyes at blocks of text longer than a paragraph, were the people who have lists of favorite words, people who gasp audibly or stare off in the distance at a particularly breathtaking line. Maybe we mortify friends and family with our lack of irony and ability to control our enthusiasm, but thats ok. As literature ebbs and flows in the twenty-first century and threatens to morph into something else entirely, Id certainly rather be on the side of celebrating it rather than regarding the miracle of language with cynicism and disdain.

But that does not mean that people like us dont get a little discouraged sometimes, that we dont wonder how were going to keep all that jumping-up-and-down-in-the-chair intensity burning, to find the time to get it from our heads to the page, when the world doesnt really want us to. When were tired from our day job and our friend from college just published a book or bought a McMansion at 24 on her pharmacists salary (be honest, you dont really want a McMansion anyway, you just want to be able to afford one) and you just dont know how to scrape up the energy and the motivation to keep writing when the rewards seem few or are, lets face it, nonexistent.