You want to be published. In fact, you want to be published so badly that you actually begin to write instead of just talking about it. You buy fancy pens and Moleskin journals. You revisit old diaries to confirm that you have a flair for words. The sophisticated way you weaved the word parallelogram into your fourth-grade story about a cat stuck in a tree is surely an indication of your talent. You call your mother and she agrees wholeheartedly. She tells you she loved that story so much she framed it and hung it in her closet.
You start using all the hashtags: AmWriting, WritersofInstagram, 1k1h, AmEditing, AmStuck, WritersLife. You will not however let yourself use the hashtag Literary as your genre—that, you’ve learned, is for someone else to decide. But you will let your mother use it when she tweets fabulous lines from your work in progress to her friends.
When your friends ask you what you’re up to, you declare it:
“Writing makes me a writer. So I’m a writer. I write.”
Your friends find this romantic. They imagine that you must sit around in your pajamas staring out the window for inspiration, smoking long cigarettes and drinking bourbon with oversized ice cubes. You sharpen your pencils with a pocketknife. You are so urbane.
You spare them the details and do not say that you cannot see out of your window because it’s filled with grime and inspiration is not a thing you can catch, and certainly not by staring at it. You are sure that their health insurance plans, 401ks, and bi-weekly paychecks would get in their way of understanding how much you are suffering for your craft.
You do however open a gofundme account in case they believe in you enough to support your work. You tell them they can take a tax deduction for supporting the arts even though you aren’t sure if this is true and suspect that it is not.
When your friends decide against donating, you realize you can no longer afford your therapist and you find yourself in a library. The shelves are filled with books. Books written by other people. Every single person on these shelves has completed a manuscript and found an agent.
You are stuck in chapter one, so the library no longer feels like a safe space. It overwhelms you. Although it does remind you of your favorite childhood story “If you give a pig a pancake.” You loved it because it wasn’t written with adult logic and it was whimsical. Maybe you are a writer full of whimsy. You create new hashtags—WhimsicalWritersofInstagram WritersLifefofWhimsy AmRevisingWhisically MyMotherCallsMeWhimsy.
This proves you are creative and that writing is largely intuitive. So you start sending out your work. You aim high. The New Yorker has not yet published a piece written entirely in hashtags. You think #WhyNotMe.
The rejections come in fast and hard. You resist the urge to tell the editors how much your mother liked it. You also decline your mother’s offer to write to them herself.
You go back to the blank page and start again because it’s all you know to do.