I Wanted to be a Writer. It Didn't Happen Until 35 (Part 2)

The gut punch that made me quit writing for years

For those of you new to this three-part series about the *dramatic music* CHH Origin Story, Part 1 is here.

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When I met Nick, I had put my writing on pause—I still thought I would be a professional writer eventually, I just figured I’d take care of the whole marriage thing first. As I often reminded myself, boys were not attracted to intelligence, let alone “creativity.” And being funny was almost certain to be a negative, not a neutral. During my freshman year sociology lecture, the professor was describing hegemonic masculinity and I raised my hand and made what I thought was a slightly cheeky comment: “Is hegemonic masculinity just code for being a D-O-U-C-H-E?” (I know, you’re cringing. I am too. But hey—it made people laugh! At me, not with me, but they still laughed!) The “douche” mishap was embarrassing, but what was worse was that nobody was able to forget it. For quite a while after, I was known as “douche girl,” and when Nick first introduced me to his friends, a couple of them informed him that he was dating “douche girl.” You could argue that these boys made fun of me because I made a bad joke, not because I was funny. But I didn’t want to take the risk.

But as Nick and I became a couple, I couldn’t help but notice that the parts of me I was terrified to expose—the fact that I wanted to be a writer, and the fact that I was funny (well, at least sometimes)—were things that deepened his interest. In fact, after reading some of my work, he came up with the idea for us to write a TV show together. This idea, in hindsight, was clearly the brainchild of two young people steeped in 2000s Raunch Culture. Let’s examine two of the main characters: Walter, a horny old man who is constantly popping Viagra, and Monty, a gynecologist fired from his practice for having a “creepy mustache,” who resorts to selling cocaine. This was not our best work. Stay tuned, because we are co-writing a piece for this Substack soon which is probably a bit better (or is it? I mean, maybe you all just want to hear about Monty’s mustache!)

Anyway, Nick encouraged me to write, both solo and together. He even offered me back scratches while I wrote, when I was having a hard time getting motivated or inspired. He told me he was attracted to ambition, something I didn’t think applied to me because I associated ambition with the corporate world, and you couldn’t exactly be the CEO of Books. Part of the reason that Nick loved ambition was that he was ambitious himself. He was working on his own tech startup, which at first I thought was something he made up to impress me. His plan was to finish his schooling out in San Francisco while working on his company, which would make us long distance for well over a year. At first, I thought this would be the end of our relationship, especially because my previous relationship (which admittedly wasn’t that serious) hadn’t survived a much shorter distance. After a week-long “breakup” (if you could really call it that) we decided to stay together and brave the distance.

Nick graduated college a bit before me (we wound up being long distance for two agonizing years) and I moved to San Francisco to be with him about one week after my own graduation. During our early twenties, I worked on a few novels (I was convinced that novels were my medium.) Some were better than others, and most went unfinished. For example, I began writing an epic fantasy book, which, 700 pages in, I realized was almost a carbon copy of the first Game of Thrones book.

My actual Google Drive:

For the first time in my life, my love of writing was up against the reality of the economy—specifically, the 2008 recession (I graduated a few years after 2008, so it could have been worse, but it was still bad.) People talk about how the economy is bad in 2024, but in the early 2010s, people were fiercely competitive over jobs that actually didn’t have salaries. My first job out of college was at a tech company that paid $15/hour, which I considered really good. Nick was still working on his startup, so neither of us was making a lot of money. The two of us lived illegally in the spare bedroom of a very nice single male yoga teacher. We had to keep our stuff in suitcases that we could easily shove in the closet when the landlady (who was religious and didn’t rent to unmarried couples) came around.

To avoid any stolen valor here: Nick and I were never really “poor” in the true sense of the word. We had well-off parents. They weren’t giving us money or anything, but in a worst case scenario, they would have let us move back in with them. However, that would have meant living apart and being long distance again, which terrified us. So while we were relatively privileged, with a safety net that other young people didn’t have during this time, we still had to worry about money.

Worrying about money meant that my writing was way less fun. Suddenly, every time I wrote something I wondered how it would “play” with big New York City literary agencies. The idea of emailing agents and editors felt overwhelming. All my life, I thought that the way to become a professional writer was to just write things that were good. But it looked like a great deal of the work—if not the vast majority of the work—was about networking, pounding on doors, and even worse, “appealing to other people.” I was terrible at those things! I could barely even get people to like me without an ulterior motive. The future I envisioned for myself—making a handsome salary solely from writing—suddenly felt as absurd as my childhood dream to become a fairy princess.

I started writing things that I thought would sell or “go viral.” I wrote two pretty terrible young adult novels, convinced this was the booming market I needed to get into. My lack of genuine enthusiasm probably drove the mediocrity of these books, but I’m proud to say I never wrote anything about vampires.