Stacey Gross

Writing the next David Sedaris Novel

I took a break with my kids today. I knew I told Jess, who’d asked me to write her a story, that I’d send her the story I’d written tonight. I knew that I could park my kids in front of the YouTube machine and write that story earlier than I currently am. But I took a break instead. With my kids. Knowing that it would mean I’d have to write instead of play Candy Crush after they went to bed. 

This is not how I pictured my thirties. Working nonstop and then coming home and working some more. Working to live and then working more, separately, to live meaningfully.  I truly thought, like all bright eyed and bushy tailed undergraduate writing majors I suppose, that I would be David freaking Sedaris by now. 

Life is full of disappointments. That’s why we have to take breaks. Even when it’s inconvenient. Because if we don’t we wind up parked at a rest stop off I-80 staring down three tiny Cheesecake Factory cupcakes from the Sheetz in Dubois and contemplating walking out into the woods before you, past where your headlights can reach, and just laying down in the snow and assuming a new life as a wild Pennsylvania bear woman. 

Hypothetically. 

A Measure of a Life

It’s not something that comes naturally to me. Taking a break. By day, I am a mobile phlebotomist, carving my way through the northwestern portion of Pennsylvania and the southern part of New York State, exsanguinating the locals in little hamlets along my way. 

I measure my life in successful pints. 

A good day could bring as many as 20 or more pints of blood drawn from someone’s willingly exposed antecubital fossa by yours truly. On a bad day, which are the only kinds of days I’ve been having lately, it’s more like two to five. 

I work long hours, but the majority of my on-the-clock time is spent on the road. I could end up driving three hours one way to spend four or five hours actually, actively bloodletting. 

I spend a lot of time just observing this region known as Northern Appalachia. Born and bred on a little farm at the top of Mohawk Avenue, in Warren County, I’ve spent my life growing accustomed to the forest, the farmland, and the endless miles of glacial rock deposits. 

I’ve ridden my horse along an old service road used to build the Kinzua Dam and watched, cross-legged atop a wide, flat boulder wedged into the edge of earth, as cars like ants marched between Bradford and Warren. There is no more freedom on this earth than watching the world happen from a secret aerie, invisible and unbeknownst and omniscient.

I drive many days to work through that very winding, whittled notch of road between reservoir and boulder. I’ve been a reporter and columnist for two local news outlets. I’ve ridden along with our police officers as they run DUI crackdowns and commissioned home repairs and handmade furniture from my quiet Amish neighbors. 

I am steeped in these hills and valleys. And while spending so much time each day driving them cleans my clock, and I limp through my front door some nights with every muscle from hip to knee hot and screaming, I find that such time spent immersed in this place ultimately leaves me feeling safe and grounded within it. 

When I’m not sucking blood and catching up on podcasts, I am a mother to eight-year-old twin daughters whose existence on this earth was as unplanned as it turned out to be essential. A thousand years ago, in another life, I was going to get my master’s degree in creative writing. I’d found, I thought, the perfect loophole to the inconvenient truth of graduation. 

Writing Paydirt

They say that those who can’t do teach, but I think the brilliant folks who populate the hallowed halls of the state schools where I was honed and educated, developed and encouraged to write, might be the smartest people in the whole wide wicked world. They’ve found a way to spend their lives talking about literature (or math and science if they’re total weirdos or whatever) for the rest of their lives, and get paid – well – to do it. 

They have hit that fabled paydirt of doing what they love and not also starving and freezing to death simultaneously, like a poor person in some lesser Charles Dickens novel. 

These people are geniuses, you guys. It’s bananas.

I am passionate about a lot of things: wine; the fact that we should strike spring and summer altogether, allowing autumn to run for nine months a year with a brief, three-month winter to shake us all up a bit and accommodate the continued celebration of Christmas. 

I mean I’m not a monster.

I also wanted very much to meet kids like me, when I grew up, and to teach them sacred truths about the craft of writing that would crack their own brilliant minds and worlds entirely open, expose their glorious brains to the fierce light of day. 

When it comes down to it, I’ve always savored an opportunity to help someone else discover their voice, after having experienced the jarring power of my own. 

Writing Ain’t Easy

I’ve loved writing since I was little. When words were hard to form with my lips and tongue, but flowed freely from my fingertips with the help of just a pad and pen. Expressing myself and telling stories has always been the only way I know to take control of my own thoughts and put them into something resembling an orderly, coherent sentence.

It’s magic, really, good storytelling. The best storytelling is a sort of alchemy arriving unassembled, in bits and pieces.

Little bolts and cam locks. 

Learning how the best writers have written their work is like being given an allen wrench and an instruction booklet and told to go to town. 

It’s so powerful that I almost hope too many people don’t discover it. Because if our leaders and lawmakers were ever to discover the profound and righteous power of a bright brain with a good liberal arts education they’d regulate and defund the hell out of it immediately and then tell every reporter they knew about this terrible new threat to their retention of whatever power they’ve gathered. 

But it’s also hard to be a writer. Like really really stupidly difficult.

Even as graduation from my undergraduate degree program at Clarion University loomed before me I had enough significant doubt in my ability to sustain the dogged intensity it would take to pay my car note with a pile of words on pages. 

Teaching, though. Teaching was a real job and teaching writing at the university level smelled close enough to making a living off writing to be worth directing my every effort toward. 

Fast forward…God, what is it now? Eleven years?

Eleven years since I graduated with a B.S. in Liberal Studies. 

With minors in Creative Writing and Psychology.

And for the amount of debt I carry, in terms of tangible value, that education feels pretty much like just that. B.S. Not because the education wasn’t legit. Because it’s not an education that imbues one with a skill that people value enough to pay actual, you know, money to have you do for them.

That dogged intensity I feared I lacked, though? Turns out it was lying there dormant within me all the while. 

Even without a graduate credential I managed to find someone willing to publish my silly nonsense every single day in one newspaper, then every week in another Professors who had once nurtured and honed my unrefined tendency to emote openly kept in contact. Saw enough potential in what I produced for them to suggest that I produce things for other entities and publications.

Had it not been for that fact, I cannot even begin to imagine what my life would look like. 

I even started a podcast, between my two writing stints, to give others the platform I’d been gifted on a silver platter in my first newsroom. 

How I find the time to do that remains, to me, one of life’s greatest mysteries. 

The Risk

When Jess reached out a week ago asking if I’d be interested in producing content for The Watershed’s blog, I was honored and thrilled to say yes, of course. But I was also humbled. To have someone see enough value in your work to request that you do it more, and for their own creative project, which any artist will understand is a sacred, holy thing? That’s a validation of every sacrifice and every choice you’ve ever made to prioritize your writing over your time, your money, at times even your sanity itself. 

One of the things I heard over and over again as I fumbled my way toward graduation was that writing is not a job that you get. It is a life that you live. Very few writers long to sit at that desk and stare down that blank, blinking cursor. To glance back and forth between the clock and the page, praying for the intangible power to make it happen again. 

To place fingertips to home row keys and fling open the doors of their crown chakras and let a story filter, through them, into the world. It feels like a fluke, when it works. There’s no consistency whatsoever. Some days it’s like a warm knife through butter and others it’s like yanking a rotten molar out with a serious looking plumber’s vice. 

It’s terrifying, to hang all your hats on this one hook that never, ever guarantees to be there when you’ve got a hat to hang. Stories you’ve lusted to tell, epiphanies that have changed your life and leveled you up into whole new versions of yourself, and could for someone else too, if you could just get them out into the atmosphere for others to find. 

How in the world does anyone manage to do it? 

Writing Your Story

I certainly don’t speak for all of us. There are as many how-to manuals on writing your bestselling novel as there are people writing novels. Everyone who winds up, in the end, answering the question “what do you do“ with “I am a writer” gets there via their own, unique path. 

But many of our paths look very similar. And I spend so many hours staring at the actual real world road either thinking about, or actively walking, my own intangible path as a bonafide “writer,” that I’d love to share the things I’ve seen and the lessons I’ve learned along the way. 

Maybe you’re trying to figure out how to follow that smoke-and-mirrors advice in your latest late night Kindle Unlimited writing textbook download, urging you to “live a writing lifestyle,” whatever that even is anyhow.

Or maybe you’re stressing over how you’re going to respond to that magical call for submissions between working and momming and just decompressing from the first two. 

Maybe you’re that awkward undergraduate kid who knows she wants to write but assumes that being a writer means being on every paperback shelf at her supermarket (it doesn’t). Or appearing on lists with people like David Sedaris (everyone wants to be David Serdaris when they grow up, kid, and no one ever will, so adjustment of expectations is an important skill to develop).

I’ll bet you I have a story that has illuminated my way at one time or another, and could do the same for you. 

I’d love to tell you that story. Right here, at The Watershed. Every week or so. 

Because lesson number one is that life will not stop for you to write your bestselling novel. 

You’re going to have to get in its way.