Tumbling Down a Staircase: A Scene from My Writing Life

I’m reviewing my manuscript in Farley’s café, right across the street from Bloom’s Saloon— which I recommend if you’re ever looking for an adult beverage in my quiet corner of The City. It’s just after seven o’clock in the morning, opening time at the café, with the sunlight streaming through the street-facing windows. Alone at a small table, I’m gearing up to tackle the latest round of edits on the opening pages of my work-in-progress, a book about my writing life, when a German Shepherd bounds into the room and skitters to a stop on the hardwood floorboards. “He’s just a puppy,” the owner says while wrapping her arms around the dog’s neck. I insert my earplugs, not to shut out the frisky pooch or "London Calling" blasting from the overhead speakers, but more to insulate my mind in the blanket of solitude needed to make sense of my chicken-scratch marginalia. Just as I'm about to dig into my manuscript, the woman at the table next to mine leans over.

“Excuse me,” she says, “I hope you don’t mind the interruption...”

She’s a regular like me, though we only know each other well enough to share a passing nod.

I remove an earplug and cock my head in her direction.

“Do you mind telling me what you’re working on?” the lady asks.

That’s a personal question I think at first, but I’ve been making good progress lately, so I don’t mind answering. “I’m writing the story of my life,” I tell her.

“You must have had an interesting life,” she says.

I know she reads the paper every morning at the café. I also know she likes almond milk in her lattes and often orders a chocolate croissant. After pausing a few seconds to ponder my

response, I tell her I’ve led an ordinary life, a life not unlike hers, I imagine, or anyone else in the café, though in my case I’ve somehow, someway been able to make a living as a writer.

The words “somehow, someway” strike a chord. Maybe I’ll use them as a theme, I think. Because it’s not like I slid from the womb spouting iambic pentameter or penning the next great American novel. Instead, somehow, someway, after working at a variety of odd jobs, I figured out how to get paid for working with words. I hunt for an apt metaphor for my career trajectory but can only envision a drunk tumbling down a staircase, climbing back up, brushing off his clothes, and tumbling down again. Somehow, someway he keeps finding his way back to the top.

Somehow, someway, I keep getting paid for my writing.

I’m about to say more but the lady has turned her attention to the newspaper. So, I reinsert my earplug and focus on my book.

Lock in! I tell myself, like Stephen Curry, the babyface assassin, icing the game with a barrage of three-point daggers. Lock in by ignoring the chatter of the baristas grinding beans and steaming milk. Lock in by not crossing the room to pet the Rhodesian Ridgeback chewing a ball in the corner. Lock in, most importantly, to shut out the self-doubt ricocheting around my brain as I write about navigating twelve years of Catholic school education, about obsessing over medieval literature in graduate school, about tramping across Europe for months like some kind of wannabe Ernest Hemingway, and about floating from job to job until landing my first paid editorial gig as a writer of abstracts at an information database provider.

Somehow, someway, I survive the tumultuous first months of that job, even after my supervisor marches me into a conference room to say he doesn’t think I have what it takes to do the work—he doesn’t think my writing is good enough!

I not only prove him wrong, but I rise through the ranks of editorial middle management for five years before leaving to join the writing team at one of the world’s largest videogame companies, where I work for fifteen years, climbing the rungs on another editorial-career ladder before stepping away to become a freelance writer.

I don’t imagine anyone thought that was a good move at the time.

Hell, I know I had my doubts—which is what my writing life has been all about, hasn’t it? The doubts that rise like clouds of dust and smoke kicked up by the legions of angels and devils going to war on the battlefield of my brain. Lean in close and you might even hear the devils as they fill my head with doubt after doubt after doubt. Like the boatload of rejection slips I file on my hard drive.

Like this.

Dear Greg. Thank you for sending us your work. We’re going to pass on this piece, but we wish you the best of luck finding a home for it elsewhere. Or this. Dear Greg. It’s with a heavy heart that we must say your work wasn’t selected as one of our finalists. Or this. Dear Greg. We enjoyed reading your story but don't think it fits the needs of our next issue. This isn’t a judgment of your skill as a writer. Rather, this is our regretful sigh at having to pass on something that will be a perfect fit somewhere else. “Holy bejesus!” One slippery devil hollers in my ear. “You could wallpaper City Hall with the rejections you’ve collected over the years.” “Shut your filthy piehole!” a dulcet-voiced angel claps back at the devil before reminding me of the acceptances that have also come my way. Like this. Dear Greg. Your story will appear on our home page next month. Thanks for your submission, and we hope you contribute again. Or this. Dear Greg. We’ve selected your story for our next issue. Please send the final version as soon as possible because we’re up against a tight deadline. Or this. Dear Greg. We love your flash fiction! Be on the lookout for your story in our next edition. Thank you. Now that’s more like it. For the record, this angel-versus-devil exchange is exactly what happens when I don’t lock in, when I let self-doubt, the dog in the corner, and the hiss of the espresso machine conspire to distract me from the words on the page. “Get to work!” says a voice in my head.

Janelle Monáe is playing now on the café stereo. My tea has cooled. The lady reading the newspaper has left, her table occupied by two young venture capitalists plotting their next big cash grab.

I nudge both earplugs deeper into my ears.

“Get to work!” the voice says again.

My pen is poised over the page, but before I write, I check the clock hanging near the magazine racks, with the glossy faces of writers, rock stars, and supermodels staring me down, brows furrowed and lips pursed, as if waiting to see what I’ll do next. Nicki Minaj on Vogue. Snoop Dogg on Rolling Stone. Amanda Gorman on Time. Even venerable Allen Ginsberg on the cover of a slick, new literary journal. A young man wearing paint-spattered jeans and a velour shirt (like the kind I used to wear) struts up to the counter to order a cappuccino, and I flash back to my college days when I’d hang out at the Owl and Monkey, a cosy Sunset District café I thought would be around forever but is now long gone.

Lock in! I urge myself one more time, because I now have less than an hour before meeting a new client who’s hired me to write a lengthy instruction manual about workplace design. Space planning and ergonomic furniture. Flexible work models and environmental graphic design. Soon I’ll be buried up to my eyeballs in a mountain of research materials and conversant in a whole new lingo needed to circumnavigate this unchartered editorial terrain. Until then, all I have are these few precious minutes to polish the opening pages of my manuscript about how I became a writer in the first place, even with a chorus of devils bellowing “you’ll never make it.”

Oh yeah, I tell them. Just watch me.