Listen to Michael Keaton

You have the job

Hi friends,

This past weekend I had to do a lot of driving—about eleven and a half hours—to see a periodontist on Long Island near the town I grew up in. All I have to say about so much time in the car, alone, is thank god for podcasts.

First off, if you’ve never listened to Don’t Ask Tig (which is no longer running but all the episodes are still available), you’re in for a treat. I spent several happy hours, even in traffic, listening to Tig Notaro dish out advice—about everything from love to friendship to nicknames—along with Paul Rudd, Esther Perel, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

But the advice I want to share with you here comes from a different podcast: SmartLess with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett. They were interviewing Michael Keaton about his long, successful career and all the ways he’s managed to avoid being typecast (amazing, right?), and they asked him what it was like at the beginning, how he first broke into acting. Like most actors, Keaton was sleeping on floors, working in restaurants, parking cars, and pounding the pavement for auditions.

What he credits his success to is the perspective he learned to bring to the process:

The thing that turned it around in terms of the audition process was I was an okay auditioner but what I tell when young people ask me, I tell them this all the time: Forget I want, I want, I need. Forget it, throw that out, you're fucked. You have the job; the job is for the next fifteen minutes, you're at work. The audition is the job; that's the gig. So you got to go to work today for fifteen minutes. You know, it's excruciating, it's a horrible setup. There's nothing good about it, but…once I said, I'm not gonna look at this like, I gotta get this, I turned the corner where I said, ‘You know what, man, I felt pretty good today about what I did…’ Freed me up. Totally freed me up.

I loved this so much, I smashed the back button and listened to it again. Because this is a perspective I’ve tried to cultivate for myself as a writer. In fact, the very first rejection I got from a literary journal made me surprisingly happy. Even though my story didn’t make it into the magazine, someone on the other end had read it. It had gone beyond my lonely computer and my sister and the few friends who were kind enough to look at it to a reader I didn’t even know. In terms of my goal to become a published writer, I’d never gotten so close.

More than a decade and many submissions later, I still try to keep that sense of accomplishment as the rejections flow in. Which they inevitably do.

It’s dark in the morning when I write. Moishe loves my new candle.

To be clear, auditions and submissions are not what make someone an actor or a writer, or any other kind of artist. They’re what make someone a working actor or a published writer. If your goal is to publish, then part of the process is you have to do that work. You have to spend fifteen minutes or an hour or many hours submitting to journals, writing query letters, drafting personal statements—even though 99 percent of the time (for most of us anyway) it will not end in publication or funding.

Okay, even as I typed that, I realized those odds are depressing. So why do it at all? I can only answer that question for myself, and you’ll need to do the same, but I bet our answers will be similar. I was born with a need to create, or invent. That’s it. Whether acting or drawing or binding books, I’ve never felt like any of it has been something I’ve chosen; it’s just part of who I am. For the past decade, writing has been my primary way of processing the world, relating to people, dealing with grief and trauma, pushing myself to make new things in new, exciting ways. Writing brings me alive. And publishing is the best way I know how to share this part of myself with readers, to become part of a conversation I could only ever observe before.

In short, I believe we do this because we have to. So if you know you’ve written the best story you can and you’ve taken the opportunity to share it with some willing reader/editor on the other end of the submission portal, then you should congratulate yourself on a job well done and move on to the next one. Because the submission is the job; that’s the gig. And I’m willing to bet you are crushing it.

Meanwhile, I have challah in the oven and it smells so delicous I need to check it right this second. Shanah Tovah and Happy New Year to all my Jewish family and friends! I look forward to next time!

Yours,

Jen