A Foolish Thing for Writers to Do
Is to pursue careers that involve writing.
“It finally penetrated my thick skull that, in fact, work should be something that you love doing—that you put everything you have and more into it. And that only that kind of work was really worthy of the name. When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.”
—Margaret Laurence, as quoted in Conversations with Canadian Novelists (1973)
I started graduate school in the fall of 2013 with a pretty antiquated idea of what I wanted to do with my life professionally. Growing up, I’d heard too many stories from my grandfather, read too many books by Hemingway, and spent too many hours daydreaming about a supposedly better past I didn’t know all that much about.
Two years before enrolling in UT’s journalism school, I graduated from Willy P with a bachelor’s degree in Latin American studies. Between leaving home and being a student again, I paid my bills collecting money for Jim Clayton, a Good ‘Ol Boy who’d struck it big selling mobile homes to poor people with bad credit. It was a far cry from the work I’d imagined I’d be doing after college. Still, my earnings—around $28,000 the first year— kept the lights on, paid for Chinese buffet when I got tired of leftovers, and covered the gas and maintenance on my 1998 GMC Jimmy, which I drove up I-81 to Johnson City and down to Madisonville on nights and weekends playing open mics and small gigs for free beer, tips, and, on one occasion, prayers from older women who were glad to see a young man singing songs about Jesus.
My songwriting wasn’t very good (my singing was worse). And the audiences I drew to my shows were nothing compared to the numbers Bleacher Report told me I pulled in whenever I published an article about pro soccer. I started doing that in 2009—two years before finishing college and four years before starting grad school. My first article was about the U.S. men’s loss to Brazil in the final of that year’s Confederations Cup1. Back then, B/R’s owners let anyone write for the site, and the more traffic you pulled in, the more they encouraged you to keep submitting, eventually offering a couple of pennies for each post.
Even though my early articles weren’t much better than my music, I gained confidence after one—an impassioned defense of Messi in September 2009 (because, of course)—was republished by FoxSports.com. While growing my portfolio at B/R, I took an unpaid gig as an editor for another blog (Soccer Without Limits) and then started two of my own. Before long, I grew bored watching games on TV or illegally on ATDHE.net and RojaDirecta. I wanted to be a real journalist walking stadium corridors and interviewing the players I obsessed over. So after reading online that a kid who’d graduated from UT the year before managed to land a full-time job at ESPN, I applied to the master’s program in communication and information.
A week in, my advisor asked what my ambitions were, and I told her I wanted to write the kinds of stories that got at the underbelly of sports. Rather than post-game recaps and preview articles, I wanted to explore why certain players feel the urge to bite their opponents whenever they step onto a soccer field. I wanted to write with the same depth and detail as Gay Talese in his 1964 Esquire feature on Floyd Patterson ahead of his rematch with Sonny Liston. (That story, in which the ex-heavyweight champ gives the journalist up-close access to his sequestered fight camp, is called “the most honest sports story ever written.”)
It took only two semesters of school and a summer internship at ESPN to realize the job I wanted no longer existed. But I was in too deep (i.e., I’d taken out student loans), so I had to stay the course.
Like many former journalists, I’ve spent the past decade working a mishmash of public relations, marketing, and professional communications jobs. What’s kept me employed is that I’m competent enough at posting on social media, managing a website, answering emails quickly, and spinning a yarn so that whoever’s paying me to promote their products or programs comes out looking great. It’s not bad work. I’ve made good friends and had great bosses. But it’s presented me with a challenge I haven’t yet figured out how to overcome.
Working a career that’s so close to what I most love doing—writing—and that requires so many of the same skills—studying, editing, promoting—zaps my brain of the creative space or energy it needs to do my work. It makes total sense. After notifications have rung in my ears and words swirled in my head for 8 hours of staring at a screen, I need to disconnect and tie a fly, take a walk, or wrestle a kid. My last column on hanging out with knife maker Brad Walker took more than two months to write because going back through the transcript of our interview and figuring out a narrative felt so daunting.
On my last birthday this past February, when Future Me showed up at the front door explaining what I had to do to make a life of writing work, I wish I’d asked him to travel further back in the timeline to tell a Younger Me to quit school and become a carpenter. Or to change majors and become a librarian or a zookeeper—some job that would pay well enough to fund fishing tackle, a summer vacation, and keep my debts paid without interfering with what I really want to do before clocking in or out.
But it’s too late for that now that I’ve got three kids and a 6% interest rate on my mortgage. I can’t reinvent myself at 35, especially with how few meaningful skills I possess. So I’ll do my best to grind it out, make time when I can, and hope that I can figure out how to compartmentalize a little bit better than I have over the past decade.
One good thing this week
I usually reserve a section of my Attic Club entries for music, film, book, and article recs. But we could all use something good this week.
Earlier this month, Sturgill Simpson put out a new album, Passage Du Desir (“Passage of Desire”), under the stage name Johnny Blue Skies. Seeing as he’s one of the oddballs of American roots music, I expected it to be weird2. It’s also damn good, with a fine mix of rock-n-roll, blues, and country tunes.
For this GQ feature, Sturgill spoke about feeling creatively stifled and sad, needing to travel the world and relocate to Paris ahead of recording, and other stuff you’ll understand if you’re inclined, as I am, to feeling stuck.
Listen to the whole album on YouTube. This bluesy love song is my favorite track of the day.
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The article is long gone from the internet, but here are the highlights. I’ll never forget it. That tournament was when Mickey and I decided to put our full backing behind the U.S. men, realizing how badly the country needed lunatics who knew and loved the sport to support the Stars and Stripes. We had watched the game before together, a 1-nil victory over a Spain team that hadn’t been beaten in like 34 games. And when the U.S. went up 2-nil in the first half of the final, we were on such a high that the inevitable comedown felt like the cement floor beneath a skyscraper. Brazil scored thrice in the second half and that terrible feeling was, in a way, what eventually led to the hundreds of soccer articles I’ve written over the past 15 years.