the book i wrote isn’t the book i thought i would write
what I learned from 30+ years of writing a lot
I’ve wanted to write a book since I could remember.
When I was 8, I decided I’d be the youngest published author ever.
When that didn’t happen, I vowed to be an early 20something prodigy first-time novelist.
When that didn’t happen either, guess what did happen?
Nothing. Because I forgot about it. Life kind of just rolled on.
Looking back, I now know I didn’t particularly want to write books because I had stories burning inside me, dying to be written in book form. Whether it was fame, prestige, or VIP access to the secret wings of bookstores and libraries, my superficial motivations couldn’t overcome the actual drudgery of writing books.
It turned out I liked the idea of writing them more than I actually wanted to write them.
Which, by the way, is never a good reason to write a book—or do anything, really. But ESPECIALLY books. All that work and time and misery for very little payoff.
Literally. Books don’t pay.
Recently I caught up with a grad school professor who told me about his short-lived afterwork gig doing standup in coffee shops in 1960s New York. I asked him why he never pursued it beyond that.
“I just didn’t feel called to it,” he said.
And that sums up everything pretty well. Life, that is.
And books.
*
There’s a lot of things we don’t feel called to do that we have to do.
Pay rent.
Wash dishes.
Take out the trash.
Shave our pits.
The fact that all these things take up so much of our time makes it that much more important to spend the time we actually have on the things we do feel called to do.
For me, that was always writing.
Always, always for myself.
Maybe I was lucky my parents had no expectations about my writing career that I was able to experiment without the burden of fulfilling the stereotypical overachiever ideal our Asian ancestors set for us eons ago.
Noone was there saying, Sure, you’re executive editor of the college paper but it’s not The Harvard Crimson.
Or
Sure, you got a newspaper job but it isn’t The New York Times.
Or
Sure, you’re writing for a big brand but it’s not THE BIGGEST MOST FAMOUS BRAND OF ALL THE TIME.
If the ancestors did say those things, I have no recollection of it because I’m stubborn AF and probably just ignored them anyway.
In any case, I just got to exist. I got to decide for myself what a writer could be and what forms the stories that did burn inside of me could take. I got to define what success was.
This meant I could explore different types of writing: essays, journalism, copywriting, comics, sketch comedy, and weird side projects. As a staff writer at a newspaper, I used to turn rather serious news stories into comedic pieces—and got in trouble for it. Not with the ancestors but with the elected officials of the things I was covering (whoops). These days I slip my voice into my client work. It mostly dies, but when it makes it out into the world boy am I chuffed.
So, when the time came to finally listen to that voice inside of me that wouldn’t let me forget the story that had to be told, I just let it take whatever form it wanted to take.
Which, had I stuck to my old dreams, wouldn’t have happened at all.
Remember, this is what child me thought my book would be:
Instead, here’s what it ended up as:
Here’s what child me thought I would look like writing it:
Here’s what I actually looked like:
Truly the best pic I’ve ever taken, btw. Point is, modern devices powered by electricity were involved.
LIFE. Amiright?
*
I wish I had a defining anecdote I could include here about the moment I decided to let go of my childhood dreams of writing The Book.
But I don’t have one.
Sometimes that’s how it happens, I guess. After 30+ years of writing, I learned that big revelations don’t always come with a dramatic climax or lightbulb moment. Sometimes the longing for some specific ideal quietly disappears into a general forgetting before, if you keep writing long enough, it resurfaces years later as something else, acting like it had been there all along.
And in a way, it had.