Rachael Maddux

Gather ‘round, children, and let wise Grandma Rachael tell you everything she knows (not much)

Sometimes I get emails from young people—young people younger than me! babies emailing babies!—who have questions about how I started writing and how they can start writing and what the hell they should be doing with themselves and their writing. I like replying to these emails. I like it because I was basically in that same position not that long ago (like, seriously, not that long ago at all) and I wish I thought to do what they have done—email someone who seems to have stuff figured out asking how they figured that stuff out—which seems so weirdly impossible, which is actually not impossible at all. It’s very possible. Mostly I wish I had done this because it took me a while to realize that people who seem to have stuff figured out often do not have stuff figured out. Anyway, here is most of an email I sent tonight to a soon-to-be-graduating person who wants to write.

———

To answer your question about how I began (though it all pretty much feels like “beginning” at this point!): I first started writing for publication in college. I went to a really small private liberal arts school and we had a tiny student newspaper that wasn’t especially well-funded or well-run (or well-read) but I loved it and was EIC for a few years and wrote for it every single week. That work helped me get an internship my senior year of college at Paste, a music and culture magazine. I did that for two semesters, then I got hired as an administrative assistant, which eventually turned into an editorial position. I got lucky. I was there for four years, until August 2010, when the print magazine shut down and the staff was laid off. After that I wrote freelance for a while, then eventually wound up taking an editorial position with Georgia Tech’s alumni magazine, which isn’t something I ever expected to be doing, but it’s been a really fun challenge and a huge and insanely smart and passionate community. That’s my “day job” now, and I still do a lot of freelance work too.

I basically figured out what kind of writing I like best by… writing. Just writing and writing and writing. Literally the only way you can get better as a writer, the only way you can figure out what you like to write and what rings your bell and what does not, is to write and write a LOT. Don’t think of it as something you have to make some choice about—you don’t. It all helps, even the dinky assignments that seem like a total waste of time.

If you can’t get assignments from anyone else—and pitching, etc. is like a whole other kettle of fish; you might have further questions about this, I’m not sure—make assignments up for yourself. Start a blog. Don’t expect to get work from that blog and definitely don’t expect to get famous or even get, like, more than three visitors, but write like it matters. Try different stuff out. Have your friends read it. If you don’t know other writers, meet some. Share your work. It will help you all right now, and once your careers start moving along, you can throw work at each other or at least buy each other drinks and commiserate when you have terrible days. Also, don’t call yourself an “aspiring” writer on your resume or your LinkedIn or your Twitter bio or whatever—if you’re writing, you are a writer. There’s never going to be some point in your life where you’re like “Ah, yes! I am no longer aspiring! I am now officially A Legit Writer!” No one’s going to hand you some badge and swear you in. Even writers who SEEM totally legit—a lot of them do not FEEL legit. And if you’re doing it right you’re always going to be “aspiring” to something just beyond where you are now. That’s another thing—welcome to never feeling like your work is done! You might have moments of pride and accomplishment and professional/spiritual/etc satisfaction, but they will soon be replaced by some other intense gnawing ache that you have to go chase away with… more writing. It never ends. But it’s fun!

What you’re interested in, subject-wise and style-wise, will change over time, as you grow as a writer and as you grow as a person. You might find a niche eventually but at first it’s good to stretch yourself in all different directions to see what feels right—to an extent. It’s also just generally good to go with your gut, writing what feels like needs to come out of you. Fear has really helped me a lot in figuring out where I want to go next. Whatever makes my stomach kind of drop and flutter when I think about it, I’ve found that’s generally what I need to be tackling next. I can generally tell what I need to write because I get kind of scared about it. The first record review I ever wrote, and this was my freshman year of college, was like this totally bizarre experience where I felt like I was speaking a different language. It was exciting but it was totally scary, in a way I can still remember but that seems totally foreign to me now. It’s kind of like mountain climbing! Which I’ve never actually done. And which I know carries a high risk of injury and/or death. So it’s actually better than mountain climbing.

———

I perhaps should have also sent her Roxane Gay’s How To Be A Contemporary Writer which just posted earlier this evening, or Mike Barthel’s post from a week or so back about a similar thing. (Related: Does anyone out there keep a running tally of this kind of post? The Days of Yore is the closest I can think of. How great would it be to be able to hit up some website, search for a writer whose work you dig and pull up a battery of advice from them? So great. I would use that now, all the time.)