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.

I mean, technically speaking, it was meant for me, but I’m going to share, because I’m plagued with thoughts of career doom. And it seems to be a theme that I write about a decent amount.

A man of refined literary tastes

Talk to more people.

Me: I’m exhausted. I’m over it. I will not find a job.
My Dad: Just keep talking to people. Opportunities will spring up.
Me: I have talked to 35 people already. Nothing has sprung.
My Dad: Blair, do you know how many people I talked to after grad school? Sixty. Five. Keep talking.

It is exhausting, but he’s right. And by “talk to people,” he doesn’t just mean informational interviews (but do those! if you feel like it) but also just…talking. To people. Knowing people helps you do things, even if they aren’t going to give you a job necessarily.

Write thank you notes

“Call them up, ask for advice, and then write them a note to say thanks.”

I do this, always, and I don’t care if it makes me look like a dork. And then when I went to visit an advisor/mentor of mine, she had my dorky note tacked to her corkboard. See?

Hustle, hustle, hustle

“[Local band] get good gigs because they are constantly out there promoting.”

Another reason to get business cards! And to tell people insistently that you are a writer (knock that “aspiring” nonsense off, right now. You string words together, you’re a writer). Also: give your cards to your dad and he will give them to his friends and your net practically works itself.

He gave me life, and I gave him a cake with sperm drawn on it (apologies to B. Collins)

You do not have to know what you are doing.

Me: You were a janitor?
My Dad: Yeah, the summer after junior year. But I was also doing…communications, or something. Mainly I remember emptying trashcans and watching TV.

Crappy jobs happen, see? And you can still end up running a graduate school at an Ivy League University!

Liberal arts, forever and always

“No one cares what you majored in. Can you read and write well? Good. You’re set.”

Lest you wonder where my Medieval Studies degree came from, I am going to put the blame entirely on my dad. Not only did he encourage me to follow my heart, he also bankrolled the entire thing so that I can graduate debt-free. What a jerk!

Ars longa, vita brevis

“If I were you, I’d just take the summer off, take a few Vanagon trips, write, do whatever. Just tell them ‘see you in September.'”

Because, actually, I am but 22 years of age, which is young enough to be stupid and old enough to recognize that since being stupid seems inevitable, I should just cave, embrace it, and take a road trip to Kansas City*.

The resemblance between us is clear

Don’t take yourself, or anything, too seriously

My Dad: [fart sound effect from iPhone]
My Mom: Da-vid. Please.

This one speaks for itself.

*To eat barbecue, duh. Why is that even a question?

I got business cards.

Aren’t they cute? They’re little half-size MOO cards and came all bundled up in the dearest little box. I’m pretty excited about them.

I know, I know, it’s like business cards? What business do you think you’re even in, punk?

Well. I’m working on that part. The writing world is in crisis, remember? Electronic media will be the death of us all! But in the mean time, I want to show off my website. I want people to read my writing. And I sure as hell want them to be able to spell my last name.

A few months ago, when it was winter break and I was despairing about my ability to get any kind of job upon graduation, I took the advice of my Chief Career Advisor/Dad and got in touch with people in the communications field–PR types, journalists, people in university news offices. I talked to about 25 people in person and over the phone, took notes, asked questions, tried to ascertain how to break into this field. “Networking is just another word for making friends,” he told me. Easy for an ENTJ* to say! Still, with maybe one exception, they were all incredibly nice and eager to be helpful and set me on the right career path.

But that path wasn’t really my dream life. My dream was pretty much a scene straight from Barbara Kingsolver’s memoir Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, wherein I get up early to trellis tomatoes and till sweet potatoes before settling in with some home-baked toast and working on my novel for seven hours. Networking had nothing to do with this career. Farmers and writers do not, conventionally, get business cards.

Somehow, though, a few days after the creation of this site and the decision that I’m Really Going To Start Being A Writer Right Now Dammit, it was me who dragged my writing friends out to Uncharted Books for a writer’s cocktail hour. It only made half-sense. Yes, there would be cocktails, but it would also probably go longer than an hour and there would also be other writers there which, ugh. I have never thought that I could get along with other writers, because I’d either be jealous of them or they’d look down on me. When you want to write light, comic, or heaven forbid, genre fiction (yes, that means romance. dealwithit.gif), you are at best a laughable novelty and at worst a shit-for-brains hack. Kate is spot-on when she talks about dreading meeting with other writers. I’d spent most of high school utterly unwilling to talk about writing with my friends, because they all knew how to be writers. They were up on whatever contemporary poetry reviews we were supposed to have read and had serious opinions about Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith, while I was rereading PG Wodehouse novels and trying to write a romance taking place in medieval Ireland.

But something was different now. I dressed in the outfit I know think of as “Blair Thornburgh, Girl Writer,” complete with jaunty silk scarf and sparkly eyeliner for extra courage. Armed with a glass of bourbon, I proceeded to chat the hell out of these people. And? It was surprisingly easy to talk to people. It’s just talking! Nobody wants to hurt you! And certainly not if you’re interested in what they have to say, which was almost always the case. I met craft-makers and improv actors and bakery owners and programmers and, yes, other writers. I could bounce around the room, talk about my work, and listen about theirs. I introduced myself for the first time as a writer, not as “a student” or, worse, an “aspiring writer.” No modifier, no shame, no worries. Lots of fun.

In the mean time, I found the courage to email some writers that I admire. And not only did they not respond with “get the hell out of my email inbox I HAVE WORK TO DO,” but they gave me good, solid, concrete advice on how to move forward in my career. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t done this yet. Informational interviews weren’t limited to just office careers I was lukewarm about, but also count in the realm of writers. Which makes perfect sense, now that I think about it. Humans are strange little social creatures, and plugging into our fellows keeps us going.

“You’re a networking machine!” my friend Cecilia told me in the car on the way back from the party. Maybe? I think I was just making friends. So maybe this is more the story of One Girl Comes To Term With Her Social Anxiety, but I hope there’s something in it for you, too. Like it doesn’t hurt to approach other people. Or email complete strangers fan letters. Or print up some business cards.

I mean, the worst they can do is throw it out.

*I, of course, am an INFP

Making things for a living is such a weird job. Mostly I’m thinking of writing, but I guess it really applies to anything creative. It’s not like you can get certified like a physical therapist does and then just go on your merry way realigning hips for the rest of your life. You have to start from scratch, collaging together shitty work however you can. You have to start by sucking and, inevitably, disappointing yourself (see: Ira Glass).

Some of us stop there, which stands to reason. Others get further, sending our work to editors or gallery owners or whatever gatekeeper position is appropriate to our art, and things get worse. External rejections to heap on the internal. Journalism’s dying, books might be dying, no one can “monetize” anything and we’re all going to have to become SEO robots and sell a kidney to afford enough vitamins for soup.

Then we stop. We made things, things we don’t think suck, but no one will disseminate and no one will pay. Stopping makes plenty of sense. Running into a brick wall over and over again will only take you so far, right?

But! Here is the inspirational-turnaround part. Creators are in a pretty good place right now. We have the internet! We can get things out there in less time than it takes to write a cursive sentence (if anyone still even knows how to do that). We can start putting things up–essays, sketch shows, fan fiction, handknit infinity scarves–as soon as we make them, hot off the press if presses were still a thing. We can learn about our craft as our audience slowly builds. And yeah, money can be made. We have little, incremental, peculiar ways to sell our wares: Kickstarter, Etsy, the Kindle Store. Gatekeepers are over. People can get to our stuff–all we have to do is make it good enough that they want to.

So we (and I’m using the royal we that denotes any college student with a parent-issued laptop) have infinite resources out here. And it can work. And for the people for whom it has worked (Kate Beaton! Emily Books! The Awl! Ze Frank! Amanda Hocking!), I can tug out one common thread: work hard. Work damn hard. Because no one will care about things you haven’t made, and there sure as hell is no invisible hand that will swoop you into success. You’ve got to build your success up, brick by shitty, half-baked, getting-better, actually-decent brick. You’ve got to see through enough projects to lose count, and then you’ve got to start some more. Don’t dwell, don’t hesitate. Keep making. There’s always money in the banana stand room on the virtual bookshelf for more.

Finally, get over labels. Or at least mush them together. You don’t have to be A Poet or A Novelist or A Person Who Makes Stop Motion Videos With Legos. You can do it all, if you want! It’s your life. You’ll still have to work hard, maybe harder, but you’ll learn a lot more, too.