My Writing Journey
The Literary Process, Faith, Acceptance
*BUY THE CREW HERE
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I’m loving this brand-new 2024 book my mom mailed me about the American Bookstore—The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore—the cultural history of it going back to Ben Franklin and the 18th century in New England. Evan Friss is the author. Really fun, intelligent read. I love reading, man. And of course writing, even more. It’s my thing, my force, my passion, my love, my career, my calling. Always has been, ya know? Even in high school, when I technically wasn’t writing, I was gathering life experience, seeing things, feeling things, reaching into the mysterious Unknown, using alcohol, comradeship, punk rock and rebellion as my light in the dark tunnel that is youth, my angelic guide.
And then, starting around age 22, 2005, living in San Diego (after shooting dope and being my worst blackout self for six haggard weeks in Santa Cruz, in the Beach Flats) I started to write. At first it was poetry—doesn’t every American writer start with poetry? Why is that?—and then, slowly, it became my first amateur sketches of short stories. Even then I had that basic raw talent, but it would require years and years of writing, rewriting, editing, reading, life experience, failure and mistakes to finally land on that style which I call mine. I call it The Mohr Style. (Actually I don’t; I literally just made that up.)
It was then—2005, in San Diego, in that small one-bedroom apartment on Thomas Street in Pacific Beach, living with a drunken roommate three years my junior—that I finally opened the Bible, the literary Mecca, the book which would literally and metaphorically alter my life forever: Jack Kerouac’s seminal 1957 classic, On the Road. That book was like opening a portal into the fourth dimension; it pried things apart inside me which I hadn’t even known were there.
By 2008—now 25 and living in San Francisco’s Ocean Beach—I started writing my first attempt at a novel, which became the autobiographical (at first more or less memoir), novel eventually published earlier this year (Jan 31, 2024), The Crew. In 2008 I was still two years away from getting sober; my life back then was still pretty wild and out-of-control, though in most ways less insane than earlier times. (Although my four-month American hitchhiking saga across America the following year, in 2009, would get pretty crazy.)
In 2010, as you all now know, I hit that spiritual bottom and got sober, something neither Neal Cassady nor Jack Kerouac—nor many other famous authors, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Jack London, John Cheever—were sadly ever able to do. (Kerouac died miserable and drunk, poor and living with his mother in Florida, at the tender age of 47, in 1969, as if knowing intrinsically that the 1970s were not for him.)
My creative energy at that point was startling: All the anger, rage, self-hate, shame, fear and confusion I’d built up since childhood came bursting out in one death-defying manic explosion of literary prose. I couldn’t drink away the pain, so I wrote it all down. That was the initial draft of The Crew, which, back then went through a million title switches, from The East of my Youth and the West of my Future, to The Cannonball Complex to many others. I finished a draft in 2010, close to the end of the year, right before I turned 28, which at the time I thought was “old.”
I remember distinctly calling my mom the day I finished the draft. Mom was an author as well; she’d written, but not published, several books, including an autobiographical novel about her harrowing childhood in the turbulent 1960s. She’d also written a column professionally for a national magazine for a while. And a few short stories were published. She’d dealt with agents and the publishing industry before. When I called her, excited, nearly out of breath, and asked where to send the manuscript, she laughed me out of my own confidence. She wasn’t being mean, though I felt offended and hurt. (Being a writer I was, of course, highly sensitive, egomaniacal, easily wounded, self-conscious and afraid of any criticism at all.)
The laugh had one genuine, authentic source: Her direct experience. She knew what I didn’t, through my own lack of experience: The publishing industry was brutal. What I had, Mom explained to me patiently and thoughtfully, was a rough first draft, which was just the very beginning of the process. She advised me to put the manuscript into a drawer—back then I actually printed out the manuscript—give it a few months, and then reread the thing. Thus began the long, seemingly endless process of editing, revising, cutting, rewriting, etc. This process dragged on for years but while the document was a living figure—like an ageing wine or the U.S. Constitution—ever changing and shedding its delicate literary skin, I also made the rookie’s classic mistake of sending it out to agents.
A lot of agents. Way, way too many.
As early as summer of 2011, newly 28 and back in the Bay Area from my eight-month stint in Portland, with about nine months sober, I began submitting queries (which I had little idea how to properly write) and submitting samples of my novel. I got rejections. Every. Single. Time. Without fail. I was submitting hard copies, which meant a yellow manilla envelope with query and sample chapter. Weeks, or months later, the inevitable rejection slip, always generic, never personal.
Over time I began to improve. I read books about literary agents, how they worked, how to write query letters, what they wanted, and how to woo them. I continued to edit and revise my manuscript. In 2012 I got my first short story published in a magazine. Also that year I joined a local professional writing workshop in the home of a well-known older poet who’d been friends with the Beats in the 1950s. We met once a week at his house on 44th Street. And I went back to college—I attended seven different colleges over the course of 11 years post-high school—and got my degree from SF State in creative writing in 2013. I started attending writing conferences, at first the San Francisco Writers Conference, where I made connections. It was here that I met an agent who convinced me to intern for her. I did this for nine months in 2013 and I learned a lot.
Later in 2013, before I left the agency, I started my first blog, which covered my experience writing, submitting, interning for a literary agent, etc. And I started book editing. The agent I’d interned for had been a developmental book editor prior to becoming an agent; she trained me to perform developmental editing on novels that came across the transom and interested her. I liked it. She said I was good at it. When I left the agency, I turned my blog—which by then was actually starting to get a lot of online traffic—into a business website. Before long I was editing books, making very little but enjoying the process. I handed out editing cards I’d had made at writers’ conferences. I passed the word to agents and others. I wrote regularly on the blog. And all the while I kept getting short stories published in little magazines and I kept submitting my novel (and kept getting standard boilerplate form rejections).
Sometime around 2014 I started a second novel, this one totally different: Suspense, about hard-drugs, prison, recovery, with four different POVs, two men and two women. I called it The Grim Room. I started submitting that book, too. Between 2010 and now I’ve written something like 13 or 14 novels. Only perhaps 5 of them are good/solid/useable.
But it wasn’t until 2016/2017 that I finally, at long last, after what felt like forever, started getting personal rejections, with notes from an actual agent saying some version of, This is good. I’ll read it. Send me the full MS! In all, dozens of agents read the book, some from very big Manhattan firms. (Another rookie mistake: I rejected the agent who I’d interned for; she’d offered to represent me and I’d said NO, ending our time together in bad blood; my reason, I’d actually told her, was that I wanted to get a big NYC agent. Yeah. Me: Asshole. Young. Naïve. I don’t blame her for being angry.)
One agent in particular loved the book in 2017, by now called The Crew. She was a new agent but with a medium-sized firm in San Francisco and hungry for success. She read the book all the way through not once, not twice, but three times, and yet still, in the end, turned it down. She had written long, encouraging emails about the book, and yet still it didn’t happen. Ditto another SF agent who acted similarly. Part of the problem—I discovered—was the fact that I was a “WSM” (White Straight Male) during Trump’s rise to power. My narrator was an upper-middleclass white kid telling his autobiographical story of drinking, punk rock and social rebellion at a time when agents were desperately seeking minority voices, “#OwnVoices,” non-white narrators, women narrators, etc. Without directly saying this as such, the message seemed clear: We already had Catcher in the Rye and The Basketball Diaries, it’s time for you white men to step aside.
But how could I step aside in 2017 when all I’d wanted since 2005—and really as far back as I could remember—was to write my story, the Great American Novel? Perhaps it was just a mistake of history, or bad historical timing. Either way, I never did get an agent, not for The Crew, not for The Grim Room, not for any of the half dozen novels I submitted to agents over the years. Finally, earlier this year, Jan 31, 2024, I self-published The Crew. Of course people love it!
The good news is: More and more people are shifting from legacy publishing, literary agents and the traditional gatekeepers. Millions of books are published each year in America, self-publishing, small boutique houses, medium indies, and the traditional houses. But Big Publishing is dying; it’s an old and wailing dinosaur. They have to change quick or go extinct, and at this point I think the latter is inevitable. I see this mostly as a good thing.
The con to all this is that everyone and their grandmother thinks they’re a brilliant author, even if they’re just now putting pen to paper for the very first time. You see terrible first-drafts get published digitally. You see books that need serious editing. You see people who just simply cannot write. And the competition gets stifled by all of this white noise, this total influx of bullshit. Some of it, though, is incredible. Some of the producers are serious, talented writers. It just means you have to sift through a lot of brown shiny crap to get to the gold. But the gatekeepers aren’t there in the way they once were. And I see that as a boon.
For me, I’m generally happy as a writer at this point. I write regularly on Substack to an audience of a couple thousand. Some of those people pay me. I have one self-published book which has done well and gotten a fair number of good reviews and which has been revised, rewritten, edited literally dozens of times over the years, plus professionally edited by a former Random House editor I hired for eight months in 2017. Several agents have basically given it the unofficial stamp of approval, likely turning it down in the end for more ideological reasons than reasons of talent, salability, readability, etc.
The writers’ journey is rarely a straight line. There’s no “proper course” to follow in this regard. Sure, you can go into incredible debt to get the trendy MFA, but you don’t need an MFA to be a writer, you just need raw talent, innate drive, life experience, and the obsessive, sensitive, self-conscious mind of an author, the ability to “see” in a certain way, to be observant, to watch human beings doing human things, and put this all down somehow on paper.
I don’t regret the rollercoaster, the ups and downs that have been my literary experience since 2005. I’m a believer—if not literally then figuratively—in that old folk notion that everything happens for a reason. I’ve gone down this path, walked along this particular road, for some bigger reason. I trust in that. I have faith.
So whatever path you may have walked or be walking, don’t fear. You have a flashlight in the tunnel, just like I did. Turn that flashlight on and walk.
You’ll find your way.
