On writing for writing’s sake
The most common cocktail party question in the DC area is “what do you do for a living?” I’ve never had a problem with this question because:
1) It beats the heck out of “What brought you to DC?” which assumes everyone is a transplant and irritates the heck out of me as someone born in DC and raised in the suburbs.
2) In this area what you do for work and how you talk about it does say quite a bit about who you are. For example: if you say “on the Hill” or “on K Street,” I know you’ll be insufferable and to avoid further conversation at all costs. On the flip side, if you tell me you “defend reproductive rights,” or “teach math to eight graders,” I’ll buy you a drink and thank you for your service.
3) I am a happy and proud librarian and given the opportunity, will not shut up about it.
However, my husband, who’s from Seattle, hates this question and thinks it reflects a culture of constant networking and resume building. He also, I think it’s fair to share, moved here for me and took the first decent job he could get so he would be gainfully employed by our wedding. (13 years ago) And throughout his career, he’s been able to separate his personal identity from his work which, I think, is both healthy and admirable. He wants to connect beyond career and asks “What’s your story?” “What are you interested in?” “What are your hobbies?”
All good questions. And yet I know that if I was asked any of them, I would never bring up being a published author. I would talk about knitting, which I do occasionally or maybe dancing, which I enjoy, but the dance class I took was sometime las winter. I would happily talk about reading books or watching competitive cooking shows. But the fact is, my hobby is writing. It is the thing that brings me joy outside of my job. It is the thing I like to think about when I gaze into middle distance between bites of my lunch. But I was more likely to talk about writing in my spare time BEFORE I got published than I do now.
The problem is most people, my pre-published self included, think the end goal of writing is publishing. If I mention that I’ve published questions about my writing go from “what are you working on?” to when is your next book coming out? This is meant to be encouraging, but getting published has been the worst thing to happen to my writing because I can’t stop thinking about how what I write might be received.
I love writing. I love trying to convert scenes in my head and conversations between the imaginary people who live there into words on a digital page. I love putting nerdy/ alternative/unglamorous Black women at the center of love stories. I love filling their worlds with the diversity I see in my own life: queer folks, friends and neighbors of varying races, classes, and nationalities. If my writing was a house, it would be this house.
Publishing is trying to convince the world to buy my rainbow house. And the process can feel like gentrification. Like taking the world I’ve made up and preparing it for market: putting in marble countertops, and hardwood floors and resisting the urge to paint the whole thing griege to suit the tastes of the current market.
Some of my fellow writers can build their own rainbow houses and ready them for sale, no problem. Others truly enjoy building tasteful elegant homes that suit current tastes. Me? I struggle to lift a hammer if I start thinking about repainting the trim. That is to say, I’ve been rewriting the first chapter of my holiday novella for the last four months because I can’t separate what I want to write, to how my book cover might look in stores. I’m gentrifying my own rainbow house. And that’s why I’ve got to get out of the business of real estate.
Step 1: embracing my writing as a hobby. (This blogpost and this blog are both part of step one) Should this novella get published, hooray! Should it live in my drawer forever, also hooray! I just want to get to “the end.” I just want to be a librarian who writes. Anything else is gravy.
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