Is that title too dire? I don’t know, let’s indulge our inner dramatic sixteen-year-old.

The upside to being a creative nobody who doesn’t register on the cultural radar is that people don’t know you exist enough to invest energy in really hating you. The downside is that you are going to get a lot of tangential criticism and semi-polite rejections. Like a backhanded Twitter compliment on something you made, or an article turned down for being “too pop-culture-geeky,” or someone telling you “the novel is dead” at a party after hearing your life’s ambition.

(Sidenote: can you believe that there are college students out there who actually, in complete sincerity, albeit while likely intoxicated, say things like “the novel is dead”? Sometimes I loathe people.)

And then you look at things that other people make, things that are well-written, intelligent, transcendent, funny, beautiful, even, maybe, the work of genius. You listen to Bach or read a John Green novel or even watch “Friends with Benefits” and instead of fueling your inspiration and getting your ass back in the chair to make things they make you despair. Stacking up, ever, seems positively Sisyphean.

So what is a person to do? Hang in there or keep on truckin’ or Believe as so many posters would have us do is not so simple. It’s hard to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when everyone thinks you should be wearing heels.* Motivation is difficult to conjure when you realize the only consequence of your not making things is that they won’t exist. No one will miss something they never would have seen anyway. Because despite your best efforts to get yourself out there and shine, the fact is that the universe is inherently indifferent. And people suck sometimes.

This is bleak. And I’m sorry. But please don’t go into an existential downspin (I did this once and cannot recommend it; suffice it to say that 11th grade is a dangerous time to read Sartre). Taking criticism is, obviously, part of the job. And I, for one, have no problem killing my darlings as long as it’s my finger on the trigger. A firing squad against all my wonky little writings breaks my heart. If making things is what makes you live, then you have got to keep moving forward, shark-like, or you will die.

The other night, walking home after an interpretive dance college production of Beowulf performed in the very-cold outdoors and complete with melon-smashing and fire-spinning, my Old English classmate said to me, “Well…I guess it’s always better to make art than to not make art.” Which was a very polite thing to say in face of what we had just witnessed, but I also really liked it. I’m trying it out as a Thing To Take To Heart and I think you should too. Because isn’t it always better to attempt something on the chance that it could be good, people might enjoy, and critics potentially will fawn? To resist brain crack and power through the not-so-great and just keep giving your ideas form?

So don’t like the infinity of the universe swallow you up, don’t sweat the small stuff, don’t stop believin’, don’t choke. Make art in a world where no one cares. Because you’ve got to do a lot of shouting into the void if you ever want to hear an echo.

*Late-breaking bad metaphor alert

When I phrase it like that, it seems like something that should come standard in the toolkit for Being A Person (along with How To Breathe and How Not To Spill Water On Yourself While Drinking*). But it’s hard! People are scary, unknown entities. But the fact of the matter is than unless you’re resigning yourself to an unfashionably ascetic lifestyle, you are going to have to talk to people. This is the dread networking that no one wants to think about and everyone has to do.

But it is not that bad! A few strategies and you’re set. Let me, a newly-minted extrovert, give you all the hot tips. Listen up!

• Find a place. Every night, in every city, people are hanging out somewhere. Go on Reddit. Go on Twitter. Read email list hosts. Grab your city’s alt-weekly. Pick something appealing, pull on your bootstraps and go. Take a friend if you’re nervous.
• Actually talk. That means stop checking your phone, nursing your drink, hanging back in the corner. Be bold, take the plunge. Stuck for an opener? Try “Hi.” And tack on a question: “Who are you?” “What do you do?” “Why won’t that waiter give me more than one mini-quiche?” etc.
• Use a name tag. Well, if appropriate for the situation. Read people’s names off their chests and call them by it. Indicate your own. Try not to stare at boobs.
• Prepare some log lines. You can probably anticipate the kind of questions you’ll get asked (see above), so get your pithy responses ready ahead of time so you don’t have to flail verbally. And be aspirational! I say something like “I’m a writer and journalist who hosts my own podcast” because, well, I am and do. Bring up your student status later (if applicable) and watch people be impressed at your initiative. Get elevator pitches in shape for your novel/screenplay/fusion restaurant concept and then impress.
• Plant seeds. This is Actual Advice I think I got from “How To Win Friends and Influence People for Teen Girls” (which does exist, ahem). When you first arrive somewhere, do the proverbial making-of-the-rounds, visit each cluster of people, and give them a little remark to come back to later, like “Bourbon, straight up? Excellent choice” or “I love your TARDIS necklace!” or “Where did you guys get all those mini-quiches?!” Then, if you come back to talk to them later, you can riff on what you first said. It’s a conversational callback! People like those.
• Dutch courage. I never said I was a role model! But seriously, there is a reason that cocktail parties are the locus of so many socializing events. A sufficient amount of judiciously-applied booze makes talking easier. Don’t fight science (and don’t go overboard, for God’s sake. Eat a snack beforehand!)
• Ask more questions. People like talking about themselves and what they like doing (a-duh). So ask, nod, listen, ask more. Jump in if you’ve got something really cool to say, but the secret to good conversation is that you don’t do all the work.
• Promote. If you’ve got a project (like a blog! like a podcast!) and you’re talking to the kind of people who might dig it, by all means TELL THEM. If they don’t want to read/listen, they can ignore you, but if you never tell them in the first place, they will not know about it. I like to say things like “I’ve just started a podcast and I’d love to hear what you think about it,” because 1. flattery of their opinion! and 2. if they do end up listening, they’ll do it with an engaged and critical ear, which is a win-win.
• Corollary to the above: business cards. I don’t care if you think it’s dumb. It’s the easiest way to get your information to someone. Get fancy pretty ones if you like or just buy the freebies from Vistaprint. Name, email, twitter, website, and a joke for good measure. Boom. And then give them to people. Exhort them to stay in touch.
• Believe in yourself, ’cause that’s the place to start. And I say hey! But seriously. You’ve gotta muster some self-confidence one way or another because if you, as the person who spends the most time around you, do not think you are interesting and have something to say, you’re going to have a hell of a time convincing anyone else.

*Which, okay, not all of us have mastered
**I know you’re out there! I can hear you breathing on Google Analytics!!

I want to write about money. Which is hard! Whether money is actually our last taboo or not, it’s definitely a touchy subject; more than just personal, but actually tacky. What else can you even say that about? Intimate body piercings?

But here’s the thing. I just watched Girls, and read this article, and then went to try to pay my credit card bill and discovered I’m spitting distance from overdrawing my checking account, and then I felt a bit down. My generation sucks at this, and I don’t want to get dragged down with it. I don’t want my parents to support me (even though I know they would) and I don’t want to drown in credit debt and I don’t want to be broke because I’m too proud or lazy to work hard, but budgeting is tricky. Not that I don’t make budgets, of course. $50/week for food, $40/week for fun things, and the remainder of my paycheck gets shunted to the Big Interest Savings Account whence it shall never return, earning me tiny increments of 40 cents a month. But I suck at keeping them. I go over without blinking, slapping things on my credit card or just withdrawing more cash, telling myself it’s from next week’s budget and I’ll balance it by the end of the month and ignoring all the frantic alerts from Mint.com. I fake-fret about this, but in the back of my mind I know there’s a nebulous somewhere with plenty of money to keep me from dying of starvation.

Here is where I start to feel uncomfortable. The reason this is hard because I grew up privileged, continue to be privileged, and spend my time with other privileged people. The attitude colors my thinking, regardless of parental underwriting: money will always just be there, somewhere, and I don’t have to worry.

But maybe worrying is good. Maybe staving off hunger pangs on 20 bucks a week would teach me what the hell money is actually worth. Build character. Tighten pursestrings. Erase carelessness.

The moral of this half-baked parable is an tripartite exhortation: buy the best stuff you do need to use and not waste, don’t buy stuff you don’t need, and recognize how goddamned entitled you are, if you are. I’m not against spending money: I drop a rather sizeable food budget every week on things like local milk and just spent $120 on a digital recorder to make a podcast. But I use up every last scrap of vegetable if I can and made sure that that recorder was the exact best one I could get, refurbished, from a second-hand dealer. I care about those things being good and I’ll put my money where my mouth is.

So: don’t be a middle-class snack kid; buy yourself a goddamned meal. And with every dollar that slips through your hot little hands, think hard about who gave it to you, who’s going to get it, and why both those things might matter.

Recently, I have gotten three different, good chunks of writerly advice, and I’m going to attempt stringing them together on a common thread.

A while ago, I emailed Kate of Eat the Damn Cake for some wisdom from a real-life, freelance-writing, blogger-type. She was wonderfully friendly, and gave me excellent guidance, including this, paraphrasedly: “Your blog needs to be about something, and, at first at least, that thing cannot be you, because people will not want to read about you.”

Good advice–so good, in fact, that I couldn’t make myself follow it. I like writing about myself! I can’t help it. I’m 22 and the tiniest bit narcissistic and I love to riff on the absurdities I experience firsthand in my day-to-day life (because there are so many?). But though I say that this is a blog about living while writing and vice versa, and it is, I guess, that can really mean anything in practice.

Now, please read this article on Boing Boing. The advice is all so, so good: timely, relevant, practical. Especially this:

You’re only as interesting as the things you do, find or say. Even if you’re a fantastically gifted writer, if you make your work solely about you, you won’t just bore your readers: you’ll eventually get bored of yourself and give up.

It’s true! You, me, the creative types and writers especially, need to do. Make. Not just describe or transcribe or subscribe, not only render and wrangle but literally create some things that we can write about. Do you forget, like I do, that the word creative doesn’t just mean eccentric or caffeine-addicted or good at painting but describes something transitive, the action that comes from create?

Well. The last surprise of the week was when I got an email letting me know I was one of 30 kids nominated to speak at commencement. I was floored. And thrilled. And terrified. And definitely in need of advice. I could write about so many things! Be funny? Tell a story? Talk about the future? I found some guidance, no-nonsense and useful, from a speaker last year, and it’s totally shifted the paradigm in how I look at writing.

“Do not start by saying my speech is about,” she told me. “Your speech can be about anything. What do you want your speech to do?”

Pow. Writing that does things. I had never thought of it that way. But so much of my writing, of anyone’s writing, is supposed to do: my newspaper reviews tell you if concerts sucked or not, my BA paper convinces you that the medieval author of the Roman d’Enéas was trying to educate his audience in courtly love, my culture articles show you why the things we like to read or see or listen to matter, even the shitty ones. This is the ultimate goal of nonfiction writing, isn’t it? Acting on the reader.

Ergo, this blog needs a job (kind of like its author! ha ha ha). So: I want this writing to inspire you to make things. I want to make you care about the details and dig into the nitty-gritty and grind it yourself, pickle your own, get the hell outta Dodge. And then write about it. Send postcards. Get all those wonderful verbs into the first-person past tense and then keep on keepin’ on. I’ll lead by example, fingers crossed, and I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

And the subject of my putative speech? I don’t know yet. Little ideas are knocking around my brain like rocks in a tumbler. But I hope it makes you think. I hope it makes you grateful. I hope I spit out a gem.