The Failed Writer

Sometimes you feel like the failed writer when you see how well all the other writers are doing. Take grants for example. How the hell do all these writers get these grants? Authors are always thanking this foundation or that for getting large sums of money to work on their fiction. Or the more obvious one...the writers who get a million dollars for a book or a quarter million or a tenth of a million. How do they do that? Or how about the writers who are guest columnists in the NY Times? How did they score that gig? Or the ones that pop up on television. Or hit the NY Times Bestseller list. How did they pull it off?

So you think well I am not doing something. And that something could be a lot of things. Maybe you aren't blogging enough. Maybe you aren't sending out your manuscripts to the right people.  Maybe you don't have a great agent. Maybe you are just writing the wrong types of books. Maybe you have been barking up the wrong tree for years in your pursuit of literary fiction and really someone should have gotten hold of you way back when and said...THIS...THIS is what sells, not...THAT! And you could have made the change then.

But years have passed and you have been pounding away on your piece of stone and your hammer is bent and dull and your stone is chipped and scratched and sort of a dully putty color. But it is your stone. And so you pick up your hammer once again with all these questions smacking around your skull. And you hit that stone one more time. Then again. Then again. For all those questions without answers.


www.billhazelgrove.com

My Best Writer Job

The best writer job I ever had was Gonella bread. I worked the night shift and took the bread orders . Everyone spoke Italian and yelled at each other all night long. Men covered in flour with aprons would scream obscenities then go back and work side by side wall night long. The long loaves and short bread would float around the bakery on a conveyor belts and fall all night long with a plopping sound I can still hear now. The bread that fell would be kicked to the side by the baggers.

The baggers all had red ink on their tennis shoes. That's because they would hold the Gonnella bags with the red ink against their shoes while they slipped the bread in. They stood all night long at the end of the conveyors bagging hundreds of loaves. They were different from the bakers who worked upstairs and were covered with flour. They walked around in their white t shirts and ignored the baggers. When it got really hot upstairs the bakers wore little white 1970s shorts and strutted around with their potbellies.

Why you read all them fuckin books jack? That's what I heard all night long. I told them I was a writer and they shook their heads. The bread orders died down at about two AM and I could read the rest of the night until the drivers came in for their routes. They asked the same question. Why all you read them fuckin books jack? After I while I didn't bother to answer.

At the end of the night I stuffed my leather jacket with warm bread and rode through the streets of Chicago in the early light. When I got home I took the bread out and my wife and I had some before she went to her job in an office building. That was a good job.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/