How to Be a Writer

Step 1: Turn Back Now

So you want to be a writer? Me too.

Before I give you my short lesson on writing for dough, allow me to fill in my supervillain origin story.

I always wanted to be a writer. Well, first I wanted to be a doctor like my dad, but then I got a D in Chemistry and came to my senses. Wordceldom it would be.

So I graduated from a nice “elite” college with a BA in English Literature, where I read (and pretended to) read books and wrote papers but didn’t take a single writing class of any kind.

My dad loved to tell me the Jay Leno bit about being an English major. Leno would do an impression of a guy interviewing people for a job. He’s looking at your résumé, and he says, “So, you were an English major? Okay, great. Take Cab Number 7.”

The first writing job I wanted was to write for David Letterman. If you’re my age, maybe this was your dream too.

I watched Letterman religiously on school nights from 12:30 AM until 1:30 AM and then I would fall asleep in class the next day. I considered this a worthy sacrifice; I was studying for my future as a Letterman Top 10 writer.

I also wanted to be a magazine columnist, perhaps writing delightfully wry humor columns for The New Yorker or SPY or Details, drinking dirty Ketel One martinis while I typed, a Gen X Dorothy Parker.

How I Met the Father of Our Nation

I also wanted to be a TV comedy writer.

That was it. Those were my three dream jobs, and basically I never wavered.

At college I worked for their equivalent of the Harvard Lampoon, where it was my job to write satirical columns on current events and D-list celebrity profiles. I had to interview Pauly Shore, who was actually sort of B-list for a minute, for a national magazine. A simpler time, foks.

I wrote the anonymous campus gossip column, too. People would call in reports to the paper’s office and I would write up saucy blind items. When the paper came out, I’d sit in class and watch my fellow students read it, giggling and whispering.

So innocent. Don’t judge; we didn’t have cell phones yet.

Then I graduated and got an unpaid internship as an editorial intern at Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, earning zero dollars.

Once they sent me to deliver something to publishing impresario Hal Rubenstein’s apartment. It was in the fanciest 5th Avenue building and it was literally 250 square feet. Interview’s infamous editor Ingrid Sischy was literally the worst human being I’d ever encountered. 4 foot 11 of hideous raging lesbian energy. If you weren’t famous and cool, you might as well go kill yourself.

She was my first post-college boss:

At the time, the office scandal was that she was dating the billionaire publisher Peter Brant’s socialite wife. (Peter later married supermodel Stephanie Seymour; such was life in 90s downtown New York.)

Then I moved to Paris, where I was hired as managing editor (LOL) at a fly-by-night magazine for ex-pats run by an insane alcoholic British woman, who was doing it for the free Champagne and the tax write-off. This was fun because it was a collection of American and English twenty-year-olds working illegally and getting to go to free events.

I’ll always have being an illegal worker in Paris.

The wine tasting our magazine hosted became a debauched bacchanal that ended badly. I wasn’t in the office the day it got raided by immigrations officers who busted everyone for working illegally, which ended our little expat adventure.

Famous Writers I Have Met

I did get to meet a lot of actual writers. I liked to party with smart, funny people, so I used to hang out with, for example, the Simpsons writers a lot. But honestly, what an unbelievable collection of giant nerds they were. They were so nerdy that I think it’s one of the reasons, besides laziness, why I never finished a spec script. Who wants to be in a room all day trying to out-nerd the nerds? Have you guys seen what Matt Groening looks like? And the younger writers were even less sexy.

When I moved back to L.A., my college friends were suddenly getting jobs writing for famous sitcoms. All I had to do was finish my spec scripts, get an agent, and I’d be off to the races. In the meantime, I worked for Larry Flynt Publications, writing fun quizzes for some of their wholesome teenage magazines. (Larry Flynt published a ton of mags, beyond their Penthouse flagship). I became a writer’s assistant to a famous, nay legendary, writer, which involved driving her to meetings with producers, shopping with her, hearing about her new diets, doing tech support, and helping her write pilot scripts.

I thought I was funnier than her, but I found the people I met so repulsive that I never finished my spec scripts. Turns out that most of success really is perspiration, not inspiration, and I didn’t like to break a sweat.

I also survived a memorable dinner date with this famous author, maybe you’ve heard of him?