Romanticizing Writing
On romanticizing the labour of writing, and pretending I'm Carrie Bradshaw
My desk on Monday morning
By 11am on Monday, the French press of coffee is empty, I’ve barely stood up from my desk and I’m overwhelmed. The thing about writing for work is that, when it’s good, it’s too much. And when writing for work is going well, my other writing suffers. There are interviews and calls and competing demands and priorities. There are 6 different notebooks on my desk and almost as many empty cans of sparkling water.
My desk on Tuesday morning
My desk on Tuesday afternoon
I feel a surge of pride sending emails from the bath – no one knows I’m not at my desk. Who knows, maybe everyone is working from the bathtub or their bed, pretending to write copy but actually watching You’ve Got Mail and drinking their third cup of coffee, only moving to their desk when a Zoom meeting demands it.
My desk on Wednesday afternoon
My desk on Thursday morning
Thursday, work mercifully slowed down and I did what I imagine most people fear freelancers and WFHers do: watched Seinfeld, went to Shoppers to swatch makeup, and looked at a lot of non-work related tabs on my laptop.
It’s far too easy for me to romanticize all of this, the freedom, the beautiful notebooks and pens, the mugs of coffee littering my desk and projecting an air of productivity.
We tend to romanticize the shitty stuff, too. Writers, and artists of all kinds, like to make that part of the story look better than it is. Movie stars talk about their days of driving taxis or working in restaurants and it has a sheen on it, because you know that, eventually, they stopped driving taxis and that’s why they’re telling Letterman about how they used to drive taxis. The work, the non-artistic work one does, never acquires that magical gloss of romance if the artist never makes it. If the artist toils forever in a cubicle and writes to little success off the side of his desk, well, that’s just sad. You’re only supposed to slum it in order to make it, one day. Allen Ginsberg or Patti Smith living in a cold water tenement in New York is romantic; the countless, nameless musicians and poets who lived alongside them are just sad, dirty failures.
In my mind, when I’m in bed typing on my Macbook, I imagine I’m Carrie Bradshaw, penning yet another column. I can’t help but live in this fantasy of what writing will be or what it should be, even as I’m actively living it. I get disengaged from the very thing I fought to be able to do. Why is that? Why do I resist living in the moment, even in the good moments? Am I afraid that reality can never live up to the fantasy peddled by tv and movies? Do I want to write, or do I want to eat Chinese takeout in bed and go shopping midday? Can I want both?
How I imagine I look when I put on an oversized blazer just to write in a notebook in a coffee shop
Writing, the actual act of writing, does bring me joy. It gives my life meaning. It’s one of the few things I know I’m good at. And even then, I hate that I’m not better at it. Forget being successful or wealthy – I want to be a better writer. And that’s gotta be the hardest part to romanticize. In movies or tv series about writers, one never sees the process, or the grunt work, of improving. Whether it’s Hannah Horvath writing her e-book on Girls or Carl Bernstein at his typewriter in All the President’s Men, writing seems to be a thing one is preternaturally good at, or just doesn’t have. If you are gifted and persistent, you will succeed.
Yeah, yeah, movies aren’t real. I don’t think one is born a writer – one makes themself into a writer. If the writer is really working at it, the work gets better. When I return to pieces I wrote even a year ago, I see improvement. Digging through my old high school notebooks, I can see the seed of talent, the reason people told me I was a writer. But it wasn’t there yet. I didn’t know exactly what the labour of writing entailed, not yet. I was caught up in the romance of moleskine notebooks and felt-tip pens. But that’s not what writing is.
This is what it is: moving a paragraph around six different times, just to put it back in its original place. Cutting out every sentence you think is beautiful so you can hit your word count. Writing on your day off to meet a deadline. Walking around with a gut anxiety after submitting a draft. Emailing editors over and over. Dealing with constant rejection, and also tracking that rejection in a spreadsheet. Worrying that you aren’t writing enough. Scheduling interviews, googling synonyms, reading articles, trying to interpret data when you got a C- in high school math. Working in a restaurant and quietly hoping that one day, this will be your charming origin story, the gruelling climb before the big break.
In my more honest moments, I don’t want a big break. I don’t want to be a full time writer. I want to be a better writer.
In other honest moments, I resent people who are more successful than me. I resent their accolades and their book tours and their agents. Because I want to be better, but I also want to be known. I want to be read. I want the validation of a book deal, the approval of the various CanLit cliques and indie bookshops and all the girls whose books I don’t even like. I want to be in. Is that gauche to admit?
So yes, it’s more noble to care just about being better, to not want to sell out, to be happy just creating, and sometimes I am. I want to have integrity and be truthful and write what I want to write. But I won’t pretend I don’t envy the successful people. And it’s a lot easier for me to wax poetic about integrity and success when no one is banging down my door, hoping I have a manuscript waiting. I’m not an up-and-comer, I’m not on any lists of writers to watch. I’m most at home performing in basement bars and writing in hipster coffee shops in my small city, toiling away. That part, I’m okay with romanticizing a little.