1. There are few larger accomplishments than writing something that makes someone else cry. Making someone else laugh is also extremely splendid.
2. It’s important to pay attention to what’s happening outside of your own dumb head. For instance: there are cows where I live! And bats! And dogs! And black squirrels! And extremely friendly regular squirrels! And deer! And bodies of water! And hills! And trees! And all of those things are pretty nice things. And it’s absolutely crucial that you walk around and observe those things as often as you can, because if all you do is stay in your house and listen to your neighbors having sex, all you will write about is staying in your house and listening to your neighbors having sex. (This is a topic that can only reasonably bear the weight of 3-4 stories.)
3. Speaking of neighbors, sometimes (/okay just one time, so far) a Dodge minivan will pull into your driveway and a sweatshirted person you’ve never met before will emerge from the passenger seat in order to efficiently vomit onto your driveway and you just have to, like, go with it, and hope that an unseasonable winter rain will wash the vomit away.
4. Writing is fucking hard. And the only person who can make you write is your own self.
5. You just have to keep at it. There will be nights when you are alone in your house under a faux-fur blanket, drinking wine and listening to Tiny Animals scurry around your attic and faulting yourself for every terrible sentence you have ever constructed. But the best thing to do about that is to keep writing, because for every 75 terrible sentences you write, you write one that is Pretty Okay.
6. Most things worth doing aren’t easy. At this time two years ago, I was living in a scary graduate commune near a Horse Research Farm in Urbana, Illinois, going into debt for a masters degree I wasn’t sure I wanted, highly depressed and existentially apathetic and inhaling air that perpetually smelled like damp livestock. And then I decided to take a risk, and that risk brought me here, and now my homework is, to paraphrase, “read something wonderful, at least twice but probably more than twice, and then talk about said wonderful thing with a bunch of really smart people for a long-ass time.” So sometimes risks are really exceptional things to take. The day I got accepted here was one of the best days of my life, and I remind myself of that feeling every time I start to get discouraged.
7. Being buried alive beneath piles of paper is a legitimate concern, but staring at a screen for too long is also extremely troubling, so you should buy recycled printer paper so at least you can feel a tiny bit better about all of the refuse you’re generating.
8. If you’re doing something you enjoy doing, it is possibly because you have people who took the time to look out for you, and that is an incredibly fortunate thing. I will never stop being grateful to my parents for building a life that allowed me to do what I love, and for loving me enough to make me believe that I can. My father—operationally a man of logic and numbers but elementally a storyteller, the man who first taught me to love words, simply by saying them in his voice—is so happy somewhere, knowing that I am doing what I love to do. And my mother reminds me of this, and of her own support of my endeavors, every time I talk to her. (Oh, yeah, also, #8a: having a phenomenal mom you can call on the phone is the most wondrous endowment of all.)
9. Everyone writes about his / her own life sometimes. It is totally okay to write what you know, as long as you change enough details so that other people have doubts about whether or not you are throwing shade at them.
10. I am so fucking lucky to be doing what I’m doing. There are other ways to spin it, but this is the most important one. I do what I love, every day, and other people let me do it and help me do it and try to make me better at doing it and check in and make sure that I’m existentially okay while I’m doing it. And if I ever stop being aware of this, you’ve got full license to (gently) punch me in the face. (And I might write a story about the time you punched me in the face, but I’ll take care to change the first letter of your name.)
Claire Lombardo is the author of “I Only Want To Talk About The Nice Things” — our most read story of 2015, and actually of all time (to date). Pretty impressive for a story that we just published a couple of months ago. I, personally take it as a sign of two things: 1) our fiction editor, Beth, really knows what she’s doing and 2) Claire’s going to have one hell of a writing career. Just watch.
