My Year in Writing

A (very late) 2024 retrospective.

a few of my books

I thought about writing a post about my year in reading, like people do. But I hate lists and I have very little to say beyond the obvious. I read some great books (The Portrait of a Lady, Reasons to Live, Kairos, The Copenhagen Trilogy, Leaf Storm…), a few bad ones (Exciting Times is one of the worst novels I’ve ever finished), and a lot of stuff in the middle. I read The Incest Diary, sort of as research for a fiction project, which was an experience I can’t categorize: horrific, upsetting, but, also, I think that book is one of the greatest works of literature of the 21st century (I recommend reading Amia Srinivasan’s review of it in Harper’s, if you—understandably—wish to read nothing else about it).

I also read some books by my friends, which is a cool thing to do, and those were all fantastic, although of course I’m biased. My only real takeaway is that I’ve got to stop slogging through extremely short books I know I’m not enjoying because there’s “only” 75 pages left. I didn’t need to spend what felt like weeks finishing Exposition or The Verificationist. (Sorry, Donald Antrim! I love some of your work!)

So instead I decided to write about my year in writing. I’m not sure if this will be interesting to anyone else. I think it would be interesting to me, though, if someone else did it, so here goes.

I wrote tens of thousands of words in 2024. Maybe closer to 100,000. None of them—with the exception of the handful of pieces I wrote for this Substack and my gas station order, thanks Dirt, shoutout Dirt—were published.

I only published one thing in 2024 (and if I’m forgetting about something else it can’t have been that notable): a short story called “The Animal” in the Cleveland Review of Books. But I wrote it in 2023—at least, the parts I didn’t write in 2019, or even 2017. “The Animal” grew out of a terrible one-woman show I thankfully never performed as a freshman in college, which I then turned into a terrible short story that I published in my college newspaper as a junior (you can probably find it if you’re good at Googling but I will not be linking it here). I repurposed the bad story into a story-within-a-story, and, suddenly, it worked. You can read it here, but only if you’re a subscriber. A CRB subscription costs $3 a month and I thoroughly recommend it.

Here’s how I spent my year.

January through April(!): I spent the first four months of 2024 working almost exclusively on a personal essay an editor at a publication I regarded (and still do) as highly prestigious had asked me to write. I was a little hesitant to write about the topic in question as nonfiction, for all the usual reasons, but I wanted to publish something in this magazine, and I had been commissioned, so I tried—quite literally—my best. I think I wrote 20,000 words just to try to get to one good 3,000 word essay. I had three separate drafts with entirely different approaches. I wrote constantly and revised endlessly. I went a little crazy. I began to believe in the project. I began to believe, in fact, that this essay could change my life. I sent it to the editor. I told some friends about it. Then, after about a month, the editor rejected it.

This was obviously devastating in the moment but, I’ve come to understand, the right decision. The essay didn’t work, and probably would never work, for reasons I’m not getting into. I’m now extremely glad I didn’t publish it. Besides, now I get to exploit the raw material for fiction. (Also, they paid me a kill fee. Was I slightly embarrassed to get paid not to publish something? Yes. But after all that work I was happier to have the money.)

Other highlights from this time: I got into grad school, and, a little later, found out I got the funding that would allow me to actually go.

I finished a short story I’d been almost done with at the end of 2023, inspired by the happy hour menu at the Barcelona restaurant chain (yes, really). I realized the list of places where it’s worth it to publish fiction (in terms of getting paid, getting read, and ideally at some point getting an agent) is extremely short¹, and very little below that tier seems worth it to me right now. (Commissions from friends doing cool shit—like Helen at the CRB—are obviously an exception.)

April through June: I submitted the happy hour story to most of these worthwhile places and it was kindly, encouragingly rejected by all of them. I finished another short story that I’d been working on for almost a year and sent it to The Drift, which has published me previously² and is staffed by friends. I still haven’t heard back, which is a mark of how overwhelmingly popular they are. (Love you guys.)

I worked on more short stories but didn’t finish anything. I was trying, for the first time, to put together a collection, and suddenly I had to think about how these stories might fit together.

In July, an editor at another magazine I liked reached out to me with compliments about my work and asked me if I had any ideas for essays. I rattled off a half-dozen ideas to see if any seemed interesting. One (about the artist Kathe Kollwitz) did. I wrote a full pitch. We went back and forth over email, just tweaking the pitch, for over a month, before the editor told me it wasn’t going to work. Again, frustrating! I don’t think I’ll try to write for that pub anytime soon, not because they did anything wrong, exactly—the editor who reached out to me was very apologetic about the whole thing—but because I just don’t work the way they do. They care a lot about the pitch, and I hate writing pitches. I like picking topics and seeing where they take me. I’m not an ideas guy. I’m a stylist. I’m arbitrary. This is also how I figured out I would never make it in journalism.

I kept writing short stories.

In August, I quit my job. I was very glad to do this for a lot of reasons. I went to France. I didn’t write anything. I came back.

A friend of mine had said she might want to publish the aborted personal essay if I turned it into fiction, and made some changes; I did this, and sent it to her.

I started my MFA. I thought I would have infinite time to write, which turned out to not be true—even without a full-time job, there are still, like, not that many hours in a day? Also, the classwork (mostly reading Henry James and trying to write helpful, thoughtful feedback on my classmates’ work) took a long fucking time.

Still. The time wasn’t infinite, but it was abundant. From August through December I worked almost exclusively on short stories for my collection. In that time period I only wrote four new stories, start-to-finish. I remixed and rehashed and revised five more, including a couple I had thought were done. And there were five stories I basically left alone (four that I’ve published, one that I haven’t) that are going in there. This does not seem, to me, like explosive productivity. But I wanted to finish a short story collection before I started the spring semester, and I did that. So I guess it worked.

Interestingly, one relatively short manuscript³ took up all my time. I thought I would pitch and write more freelance nonfictiony stuff—reviews, blogs, essays—once I was in grad school. I didn’t. I wrote study guides and the occasional advance obituary, purely for money. I started—but didn’t finish—another personal essay on the same topic from before, sort of, but I found I didn’t have the energy to finish it when I was trying to work so intensely on my fiction. Also, honestly, it would probably work best as the kind of essay you publish to promote a book? I’m sitting on it.

In class I workshopped an 11,000 word story I’d stitched together from two separate, failed essay projects—the one I’d sent to my friend, actually, derived from that four-month failure. Workshop went well but people said it felt like two separate stories. Later that week, my friend passed on it, for similar reasons. This was understandable (11,000 words!). But after so much rejection it was frustrating. I have since split the story up into two separate pieces and I think they’re both much better.

Then I workshopped a story I had thought was done but wasn’t, and a 700-word flash piece I thought everyone would hate but that they loved. And then the semester was over!

Is this interesting to anyone? It’s interesting to me. And cathartic, I guess, because in some ways this was a very frustrating year. In 2024 I experienced sooooo much rejection and wasted soooooo much time but, like, it’s fine? I’m still standing. This is just how writing works and will work for the rest of my life.

Also, I made real progress in 2024, even though I didn’t publish much. I finished a manuscript. I started an MFA. I started a reading series with my best friend. I had a great time!

2025 is all about writing a novel. We’ll see how that goes.

1. The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Drift, maybe Granta and n+1. Of course this isn’t exactly true. But it’s kind of true.

2. There was a period when I genuinely worried this story was the last good thing I would ever write.

3. 52,000-ish words.