Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Sue Mell writes about A New Day from SheWrites Press.
+
A Funny-ish Thing Happened on My Way to Becoming a Writer
Did you always want to be a writer? people often ask. But for most of my life, writing was something I steered away from. I still have a tape somewhere, from an astrology reading gifted by a friend, in which the reader asserts that everything in my chart points to writing, while I insist that no, of all the creative arts, writing is the last one I’d choose.
“Too solitary,” I say on the tape, “too hard.” And when the astrologer says he keeps seeing paper around me, I attribute it to my taking an illustration class at Parsons. My return to the visual arts after a decade spent pursuing acting with little to show beyond chorus parts and extra work. (You can still see me for 2 seconds, wearing a black and purple check dress, in a crowd scene in The World According to Garp.)
“Maybe you’ll have an illustrated story,” he goes on to say, “but it’s the words—the words on paper—that are important.”
I didn’t take any steps toward writing, but after moving from Manhattan to San Francisco, I did become a freelance illustrator—work I enjoyed and that paid the bills for a number of years. When those gigs grew scarce, it was easy enough to go back to the ones that had supported me toward the end of my so-called acting career, assisting commercial photographers and photo stylists. But I mourned the failure of my illustration business at the moment I felt most confident in, and satisfied with, the style and execution of my work. So when a friend invited me to an ongoing pot luck gathering that included making puppets out of paper mâché, I was grateful for the creative outlet.
Maybe, I told myself, noodling around with paint, and cloth, and the satyr-like character I seemed to be making would be enough—who said I had to be an artist? Then the puppeteer began performing with a band, wrangled a few of us into helping, and the next thing I knew I had a small part in the four-night run of a cabaret-style operetta, winning the audience’s rapt attention and making them laugh.
When the show ended, I took an improv class—a low-risk way to indulge my rekindled desire to be on stage. Except the class had certain rules: feedback was required, but sarcasm was strictly forbidden, which made it hard for me to even open my mouth. So I whispered my snarky comments to my one friend in class, who kept saying what I should really pursue was standup. And that’s how I became a writer.
No—but seriously. Prone to taking career direction from people I barely knew, I barreled down that road, beginning with an expensive local comedy coach. A megalomanic, really, who staunchly denied the me-too type of allegations I’d later hear attached to his name. (What is it about comedians?) I wasn’t witness to or the recipient of inappropriate behavior, though I don’t doubt the veracity of those claims. But what I did get out of my time working with him was avid encouragement, a daily habit of writing and observation, and the chance to see a writer with a sharp editorial eye at work.
I quit the coach but maintained the daily writing practice I’d begun with him, and was just starting to make a little headway in the Bay Area clubs when my stint in standup was derailed by the unexpected and violent death of a close friend. Suddenly my material felt vapid and trite, and nothing struck me as particularly funny. Grief will do that. But the truth is I’d already begun thinking laughter wasn’t enough. I wanted to make people cry, too—or at least tear up.
I’d saved a flier for a workshop on developing monologues for one-person shows, but then I heard a piece on This American Life—a dark but very moving story of another untimely death. The guy who’d made it credited the website Transom.org for his learning how to produce independent pieces for radio. If he could do it, why couldn’t I? The first pieces I made were a mix of narration and interview, and recording them still held a small thrill of performance. I had some initial success, but it was hard to maintain, and as more and more my satisfaction came from the writing, I once again changed course. An idiosyncratic trajectory that would end up both driving and inspiring my work.
Like many of the characters in A New Day, I floundered through—or never achieved more than minor success in—several creative endeavors. Searching each time for the next, better, and more truly aligning field, the arena where I might best express the humor, pain, and beauty I found in the world, and the failures of romantic and other relationships that affected me so keenly. I wish I could remember that astrologer’s name, that I could track him down and let him know he was right. That it is the words—the words on paper—that have become most important to me.
+++
Sue Mell’s story collection, A New Day, was a finalist for the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award, and is forthcoming from She Writes Press September 3rd. Her debut novel, Provenance, won the Madville Publishing Blue Moon Novel Award, and was selected as a Great Group Read by the Women’s National Book Association and as an Indie Fiction Pick by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. Her collection of micro essays, Giving Care, won the Chestnut Review Prose Chapbook Prize. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson, was a BookEnds fellow at SUNY Stony Brook, and lives in Queens, NY. Learn more at www.suemell.com
Instagram: www.instagram.com/suemellwrites
Facebook: www.facebook.com/sue.mell.58 and www.facebook.com/SueMellAuthor