Why Write Anything Anyway?

Twenty years ago, I changed my life.

I had been working in the lower rungs of the New York media world since the late 1990s, mostly as a copy editor, with occasional shots at writing for whoever would pay attention to my not-particularly-sharp pitches. It was not a bad life: I had a full-time gig at New York magazine, back when there were perks like a Town Car home after a late close, and once in a while I saw my byline attached to a couple hundred front-of-the-book words.

But I wasn’t writing, not the way I’d wanted to ever since college. The work I produced filled a slot in the New York City media machine, and while it sometimes struck a chord, it didn’t really matter. The words, the stories—they weren’t really, fully me.

By the middle of 2004, I’d formulated a plan: I had been working on a noirish detective novel set in 1950s Cambodia, and I knew that to finish it, I’d have to spend time in Phnom Penh for research. And that would require money. By writing everything I possibly could for New York—which paid $1.50 a word on top of my salary, if you can believe that—I managed to save around $5,000 to $7,000, enough to keep me going for about five months in Southeast Asia. So, in mid-November 2004, I quit my job and off I went!

To say things went well, if not according to plan, is a bit of an understatement. In fact, if you’re reading this, it’s likely because of that—because of everything that happened over those five months, and what that all led to. In short, I got hooked up with the New York Times, I wrote hundreds of travel pieces for them, many as the Frugal Traveler, and I became the writer I’d always wanted to be.

Beginning in 2005, I wrote and wrote and wrote. I wrote about travel and about food, I wrote about running and about submarines, I wrote about the Gowanus Canal and the Bloody Mary and my kids and hot springs and quitting your job. I even wrote poetry.

And then, around 2017, the end came into view. The travel writing, especially, was drying up: The big newspapers and magazines that once had budgets to send me abroad (never extravagantly, I should note) now offered only partial expenses at best, and reduced pay rates. They just didn’t have the money, or the word counts, and anyway travel content was being served up better on Instagram, where a bikini body and a drone shot over cerulean waters or a twee Alpine village seemed to fulfill the needs of the travel-hungry masses far more cheaply, and successfully, than the elaborate chains of sentences and paragraphs, of characters and anecdotes, of weird comedy and surprising pathos that I’d made my career assembling. Stories were superfluous, and as the fees paid for them shrank, the insult grew.

Has this ever happened to you: You spend your life acquiring a skill, honing it, refining it, learning when to adapt it to the marketplace and when to resist the market’s craven pressure, seeing your work succeed and find a real audience, knowing that the skill itself—not necessarily your skill but the skill—is one that people expect to encounter, appreciate, and desire… and then the market evaporates. The skill loses its value, both to the intermediaries who paid you for it and to the human beings who seemed, and who still claim, to love it. The thing you’ve devoted your life to is worthless¹.

This is what is called heartbreak. For the past few years, the mere thought of writing—for little to no money, or even, you know, “for fun”—has twisted my guts. How could I imagine sitting at the damn computer for hours when I knew what awaited the words I’d produce? Why revisit the trauma of raw, ongoing, inevitable failure—you know, for fun? Was there any chance that another story, the thousandth or two-thousandth or whatever, would change anything? No, I was not going to do that. I was, for the most part, going to deny the world my words².

And that hurt just as much. Words have been my best friends all my life. I’ve never felt all that comfortable in this world, not in my schools or the towns I’ve lived in, not in my country or even in my own body, but I’ve always known my way around words. They’re there for me, they cost nothing, they can do anything. I can type them out, delete them, shuffle them, play with them, and little by little coax them into coherence. When they’re good, I can share them and make other people happy—make other people understand. The words themselves have never let me down. To not write, when all I ever really wanted to do was write, only added to the heartbreak.

So maybe that’s why I’m here, writing again, because it’s simply what I want to do, and I can’t not do it. Maybe I’ve let go of the need to make a living wage off this skill (I do have a job-job) and can now write unconcerned about money, free of market pressures! (I’m so punk.) Maybe it’s that 20th anniversary looming and I feel compelled to change my life all over again. Maybe I believe that writing—thoughtful writing—is somehow still vitally important today, when distractions not only abound but so clutter our senses that thoughtful reading is unimaginable. That kind of writing, and that kind of reading, feels like a rebellion against all the dark forces trying to bonk our brains, restrict our thoughts, and deaden our souls. I don’t know that Trying! will alter any of that, or even rise to the bar I’m setting, but I’d rather fight back with my words, even if I’m lashing out blindly, than do nothing at all. Gee, I guess writing is pretty punk, after all.

Or maybe I’m just bored—so fucking bored with so much in this damaged world that I need this silly newsletter to amuse myself.

But if I’m going to amuse myself, I might as well amuse you, too. Trying! will not be so goddamn serious every installment. (Do you have any idea how many fart jokes I cut from this edition? Answer: 32.) I’m going to write about anything and everything I can think of—the books I read and movies I watch, the weird things my kids do and say, the stray ideas that rattle around my skull at night, the shit I see out on the streets of New York. Early next week I’m going down to Richmond, Virginia, to help drive voters to the polls, so you’ll get a bit of travelogue there. You’ll also find me pondering many different aspects of anger, because I’m really trying to figure it out.

But I could also use your help! Feel free to email me with suggestions for topics to take on, and I promise I will give them a shot. Seriously, I really love doing that kind of prompt-based writing; I did it once—for fun!—in a series I called Ballet Up to the Bar. I might not write what you expect, of course, but then why would you ever want me to write something expected? Yeesh. My job as a writer is to bring something new into the world, and I hope I’ll surprise us all.

Notes

1: We should totally talk about capitalism here, right? The equation of skilled labor and dollar bills pervades my thinking, which feels restrictive: Why couldn’t I see writing as something I could do for fun? Because I’d been a professional writer for so long—my first paid story was in 1996—that I could not separate the work from the paycheck? As artful as writing can be, I did, and do, see it as a professional skill, maybe a little like plumbing. Or, really, shoveling snow: The conceptual framework that came to mind most often was from the Haruki Murakami novel “Dance, Dance, Dance,” whose protagonist is a successful but unambitious writer of magazine travel pieces and celebrity interviews. He often thinks of his work as merely a component of late capitalism, as necessary to the system as, say, snow shovelers and snow plows are to earlier versions. “Shoveling cultural snow”—that’s what he and I do. And that’s all well and good until: climate change.

2: In the movie The Last Jedi, when Rey realizes Luke Skywalker has cut himself off from the Force—man, that hit me hard.