My Name is Kate and I'm a Writer

One Author's Version of Success

I had a moment recently sitting in a room full of strangers. I got to chatting with a woman. We played what is affectionately referred to as Jewish bingo, where we try to find people we know in common. Despite popular belief, we are few enough that this game often gets played. And won. 

I was excited to yell, “Bingo!” on my recently obtained New England synagogue card.

“Oh,” she said conversationally, “What do you do up there?”

She didn’t understand how much of a gut punch the question was, nor how often I’ve come up empty trying to answer it. My first literary agent, a close friend I’d known forever, instructed me to declare it. 

“Say you’re a writer. An author if you want to get obnoxious about it.” 

But then the inevitable question comes. “What have you published?”

For a storyteller who’s made a career of never putting myself out there, explanations gets caught in my throat, trip me up, fill me with millions of words the world will never get to see. 

“I’m a writer. A blogger? I’m working on a memoir. Yes for a long time,” I told her. “So long ago, I even have a few novels printed from floppy disks. They live right next to the volumes of short stories and a play I barely bothered to send out for rejection—I mean publication.”

Woe is the writer who cannot handle being turned away. Or I am the writer who confuses rejection of the work for a negation of my very being. It has taken far too long to figure out that while they are related, they are not at all the same. 

If I can’t offer my entire unpublished catalog into a one sentence explanation, does that make me a failure or the ultimate success? If I have never made a dime from writing (not exactly true) can I still claim the job title?

Is that what I’m doing now? Coming to you week after week? Is it as one-note as I sometimes fear it is on my bad and sleepless nights? Does it matter anyway? Are you an actual audience or just a figment of my imagination? Chances are my words will be cast into oblivion or absorbed into an AI margarine of personalities soon enough anyway.

And why is that a relief to me? Is success having written or being read? Maybe the accomplishment is in the banished perfectionism, or varnished bravado it takes to keep churning these out. A one at a time, weekly shot in the arm. And what if that’s all there is? It is pretty darn good. And who the hell is playing score keeper?

In my children’s elementary school, they crowned the kids, “authors.” They handed them blank paper and crayons with which to color their own stories. As if anyone could do this job! The educational system is cocky enough to assume anyone has a coherent, well-formed book in them just waiting to come out and be written. A fiction if ever I’ve heard one.

In order to do any art well enough to touch another’s soul and thereby my own, I have to step forward. It’s taken me a long time to get up the nerve to stand in front of a huge bay window, hold my robe open, wave frantically at people walking by and hope they see me through glass that is thick and tinted. 

The Kate Chronicles dared me to open the window to check the weather. There’s no charge to march in this parade even if I think I’d have takers. I am curious if someone might pay me to be clever. Not enough to test it, or prove my imposter complex to myself.

My problem with attention for my writing began young and in the 80s. My father took his shot as a playwright. And he hit one out of the park. For the rest of his life, I watched him chase that fame. And he was never that successful again. But no one thinks of him as a failure.

I wrote secretly and often, trying to make sense of the world and fending off boredom before the days of the doom scroll made that easy. 

It turned out my history degree was worth little besides seeing the patterns in the repetitious mistakes we humans are doomed to play out. Over and over again. And maybe to write about them?

This Substack began as a life plan for my future Chroniclers to read when something happens to me. Maybe they will hear my voice call out to them as long as the world remains recognizable. And what is more accomplished than that?

That you, my dear readers, are along for the ride, is the surprising gift of it, far more precious than a publishing contract these days.

I began this journey because I’d stayed quiet longer than I’d meant to, and I knew the only way to find peace was to speak out. 

I claim all this is for my family, but my kids haven’t acknowledged my wisdom in years and I’m not sure my husband’s ever listened. Week after week though, you are here. And when I look at it from all the angles, that’s what I consider a successful career. Yes, I’m a writer. Thanks for asking.