When I decided to give freelance writing a try in 2016, I started off at a pretty big disadvantage. I had never graduated from college, had no network or connections and I didn’t have a single writing sample to send potential clients.
I know that’s a little dramatic but the minute I learned about Upwork, I saw a path to being a writer that I had never seen before. I figured if I just kept pitching potential clients, eventually, someone would have to hire me.
This strategy quickly paid off and I landed lots of freelancing writing jobs, banking roughly $500 during my first full month as a freelancer. Four years later, I’ve earned over $100,000 using Upwork alone.
Why do some freelance writers hate Upwork so much?
Once I started networking with other freelancers, it was a pretty big surprise to learn that most people are not a fan of Upwork. In fact, many freelancers will recommend you avoid it at all costs.
The interesting thing is that many of the people who hate Upwork the most have never tried it.
But of those who have, here are some of the biggest complaints I’ve heard:
Upwork charges high fees: When you start working with a new client, Upwork charges a 20% fee on the first $500 you earn. After that, you’ll be charged a 10% fee until you’ve earned $10,000 from that client. Once you reach $10,000 in earnings, the fee drops to 5%.
It’s a race to the bottom: I can’t even count the number of times someone has told me Upwork is a race to the bottom. The theory being that you’ll be forced to charge less for your services to compete with low-bidding freelancers.
Upwork never worked for me: Of those who have tried it, the most common argument I hear is that Upwork never worked for them. Usually, this means they joined, sent a few proposals and didn’t get the results they hoped for so they moved on to something else.
Is Upwork legit? Here’s why I still use Upwork to this day
So given all the supposed disadvantages to being a freelance writer on Upwork, why do I recommend you use it?
Here are the five biggest reasons why:
1. It’s an easy marketing strategy
I once heard someone say that anyone who looks for writing work on Upwork is lazy. At first, I felt offended, then I realized they were absolutely right.
Yes, I choose to make things easier and more convenient for myself whenever possible. Call that lazy if you want, but this strategy is what allows me to earn six-figures as a freelance writer working roughly 25 hours per week.
To this day, I have not found an easier way to drum up new freelance writing work than by using Upwork. I can log into Upwork and immediately find 5-10 writing jobs to apply for. On average, I spend about 30 minutes a day (or less) looking for work.
2. Great clients use it
Great clients are on Upwork looking to hire writers and that is a fact. Many of my best clients came from Upwork jobs, or as a result of referrals from clients I met on Upwork.
I’ve landed writing projects with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, PandaDoc and Business Talent Group thanks to Upwork. Those kinds of clients aren’t interested in hiring someone who’s willing to write a $10 blog post because they know that person isn’t a professional.
3. Payment is guaranteed
Many people love to complain about the Upwork fees, but can we take a second to talk about the fact that payment is guaranteed on Upwork? This is true whether you do a fixed rate or hourly contract.
Upwork offers payment protection on hourly work, and you can see if the milestone is funded before you begin a fixed-rate contract. Plus, I receive payment on most of my Upwork jobs within a week of finishing the work.
As someone who regularly works with clients that have invoicing terms of either net 45 or net 60, getting paid that quickly is a huge advantage in my book.
4. Your success builds over time
I think most people give up on Upwork too soon because they are expecting overnight results. But Upwork will work best for you if you use it as a long-term strategy.
I’ve been on Upwork for over four years now so I regularly get invited to apply for new jobs and don’t have to spend much time looking for work. This doesn’t happen overnight, but if you put in the time, you’ll start seeing success a lot sooner than you might think.
5. Upwork levels the playing field
And finally, the biggest reason I like Upwork is that it levels the playing field for all freelancers. And this is especially important right now when so many people are being forced to start over in their professional lives thanks to COVID-19.
With Upwork, you don’t need a journalism degree or tons of experience to start finding clients. You can start exactly where you’re at right now and raise your rates slowly over time.
The bottom line on Upwork
If you find tons of freelance writing work using LinkedIn or cold emailing, then I’m not here to convince you to switch to Upwork. I wrote this article for the person who finds themselves where I was four years ago — desperate to try something new, but unsure of where to start.
If you want to make money as a freelance writer, then you can do it using Upwork. Just like any other marketing strategy, it “works” based on the level of effort and energy you put into it.
What are your favorite platforms to use to find freelance writing work? Let us know in the comments.
Although natural births are making a comeback in the U.S. today, midwives have historically faced opposition for being as dangerously unprofessional, unhygienic, or just too “hippie.” However, midwives and doulas—birth workers without formal obstetric training—can often play crucial roles in forming female communities of power and support. Additionally, alternative birthing practices have deep roots in reproductive justice, with many midwives drawing upon indigenous practices and traditions. (If you’re looking for further reading on reproductive justice and women’s health advocacy, check out Efe Osaren’s list of books here.)
All this makes for rich literary fodder; the list of books below run the range of midwife narratives, addressing topics from legal battles to rural community drama, gristly birth descriptions to tender midwife-patient connections.
A politically and emotionally complex saga centered on Nisrina Huniah, a Palestinian woman who turns to midwifery. Set in the Middle East right around WWI, The Fig Orchard paints a vivid historical portrait of one woman’s journey: when Nisrina’s beloved husband is kidnapped to serve in the Turkish army, she chooses to go to a Catholic university and study midwifery, so that she can support her children without re-marrying. Fiske’s debut novel is an exciting exploration of tradition, religion, and female agency.
Rural midwives are often stereotyped as “backwards” or “old-fashioned,” but this Canadian bestseller shows that they can actually be feminist pioneers. Dora, the first daughter in five generations in the Rare family, finds herself as a midwife’s apprentice. When a new doctor threatens to shut down midwifery, Dora must decide if she wants to keep practicing. Set in a rural Nova Scotia village in the early 1900’s, McKay’s novel highlights the struggle for women’s rights, both in and out of the hospital room.
At age 91, Margaret Charles Smith was one of the oldest surviving traditional midwives in Alabama. Lay midwives like Smith were vital to the Black female community, drawing upon traditional knowledge and building a sense of solidarity. But in 1976, a state law condemned midwifery, causing many to lose their permits for the next five years. Published in 1996, this oral history documents Smith’s lifelong work of providing racially equitable healthcare for women, offering a view of the Civil Rights Movement from a rarely-seen angle.
Birthing is always messy—and fairly often fatal—in Worth’s memoir. In this first book of the Midwife Trilogy, Worth writes of her real-life experiences as a midwife in the slums of 1950s East London. Featuring a cast of deftly drawn, unforgettable characters—from the lovable nuns that she lives with to the prostitutes of poverty-stricken streets—the book vividly describes Worth’s female-centered community. If you’re a fan of period British shows (looking at you, Downton Abbey fans), check out the critically-acclaimed BBC show of the same name, which is an adaptation of Worth’s series.
When a home birth goes fatally awry in rural Vermont, midwife Sibyl Danforth finds herself accused of manslaughter. That night unleashes a long court case, with doctors and attorneys that are only too happy to use Sibyl’s case to attack the midwifery profession. During the years following, Sibyl struggles to prove herself not guilty and, amidst the pressure, keep her family intact. If you’re looking for your next thriller, try Bohaljian’s tension-filled examination of human responsibility.
Patricia Harman runs a women’s health clinic in the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia; she works there as a midwife and manager, while her husband is the clinic’s ob-gyn doctor. Through her interactions with pregnant teenagers, abusive husbands, and transitioning patients, Harman shows the day-to-day life operations of midwifery. Meanwhile, she herself must deal with financial struggles and marital tensions. Focusing equally on individual midwife-patient connections and the larger logistics of operating a clinic, Harman intertwines both the professional and personal aspects of her life beautifully in her memoir.
Hill’s emotionally wrenching novel is told from the perspective of Aminata Diallo, who was kidnapped from her hometown in West Africa and forced into slavery in South Carolina. Because of the midwifery skills she learned from her mother, Aminata is considered to be more useful. Set against the backdrop of the American Revolution, Someone Knows My Name shows Aminata constantly fighting for her own and others’ freedom.
A historical drama that addresses forbidden love, mystical studies, and birthing babies in the 17th century? Add in the Spanish Inquisition and Jewish ghettos, and you’ve got The Witch of Cologne. Learner’s novel centers on Ruth, a fierce Jewish woman who is determined to practice kabbalah andmake a life for herself through midwifery skills. Through Ruth’s story, who faces torture for her religious practices and simultaneously falls in love with a Catholic churchman, Learner explores the ideas of faith and love.
This memoir begins in court, with the State of Florida Health and Rehabilitative Services vs. Gladys Milton. When Milton started practicing in rural Florida, many hospitals refused to serve Black and brown women; Milton was able to help by safely delivering thousands of babies. However, when the state medical agency unjustly asks her to “retire” or face charges, she must go to court to fight for her case. The struggle for reproductive rights and access to adequate healthcare rings only too true today, with a Supreme Court Justice nominee who could help overturn the Roe vs. Wade case.
This memoir talks about Vincent’s own journey from a nursing school student to midwife in the 1980s, and her experience with “catching” over 2000 babies. Vincent’s humorous prose and her details—from jealous pets to oven-warmed blankets—make this an intimate, page-turning read. And if you’re looking for another contemporary midwife memoir after Vincent’s, try Carol Leonard’s Lady’s Hands, Lion’s Heart.
A midwife’s profession itself is based on bringing new life into the world. When a young midwife commits suicide, her friends are left struggling to make sense of her previous commitment to life with her abrupt and tragic death. In the wake of her death, they discover that Noelle, the midwife, has been hiding a shocking secret. Chamberlain’s page-turning thriller combines regret and hope, death and life to keep you reading late into the night.
No book list on contemporary midwifery would be complete without this classic text, written by founder of the Farm Midwifery Center. Gaskin’s 1977 book was a radical departure from previous medical texts that treated birth only from a clinical, scientific perspective; Gaskin draws attention to the emotional and generative aspects of childbirth. She includes tales of amazing births she has witnessed, as well as including practical techniques, statistics, and resources for natural birth. Already read Spiritual Midwifery? Try Gaskin’s more recent publication, Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta.
The humorist talks about putting together a book proposal, leaving Hallmark for freelance writing, and where she finds her writing ideas.
You’ve probably had enough time in the past seven months to contemplate which parts of our lives are actually really weird and if it quite necessary to continue doing them every day. Why did we drive to the office when we can do our jobs at home? What is the point of putting on outside clothes anymore?
The humor writer Mia Mercado is ahead of her time. She began questioning things that are quite strange but society accepts as normal before the rest of the world shifted—the suburban nonsense of Bath and Body Works, child beauty pageants, Hollywood standards on how women age, etc.—for her collection of essays and satirical pieces Weird But Normal (May 2020, HarperCollins). Mercado’s work also touches on how uncomfortable things most people think are weird are actually very human and normal, such as her personal essays that recount hiding her soiled underwear in a wood pile and once believing that sex involved pressing index fingers together.
Before releasing her debut book into the world, Mercado’s work had been published in The New Yorker’s Shouts and Murmurs, McSweeney’s, New York Magazine’s The Cut, The New York Times, and more. She lives in Kansas City.
In a phone interview with WD, Mercado talked about putting together the proposal for this weird, colorful, gem of a book with literary agent Monica Odom; learning how to write while working for Hallmark and leaving the comfort of a full-time position for freelance writing; and where she finds her writing ideas.
Can you tell me a little bit about what your book proposal process was like?
I signed with a literary agent, Monica Odom, in March of 2018. I had an idea when I first started talking to her that was pretty loose. I knew I wanted to write a collection of funny essays that were both personal essays and some conceptual/humorous/satirical pieces. She helped me shape that into something that made sense and wasn’t just a bunch of things that I think are funny and now they’re in a book. She has a good sense of what publishers are looking for and what is oversaturated.
I knew a thing that was going to be important to me was feeling like I could talk about my experience as someone who is biracial as a female in the Midwest. I wanted to make sure I could talk about all those things at length and not feel like I had to self-censor or ignore them entirely. Some of my initial ideas were like very heavy like, “This is going to be a book about gender and race and that’s it.” And she was like, “That’s great. But I don’t want you to limit yourself.” You can talk about those things under a bigger umbrella, which was a helpful way to think about it. What the book shaped up to be is pretty similar to what the proposal was. This is my first book and I had no idea what a book proposal was.
I understand having to sell the thing before you make the thing, which is always strange where you have to prove that you can write by writing a bunch of stuff that isn’t the thing that you’re writing. So I had this proposal that was like, “Here’s who I am, here’s what I’ve done. Here’s the stuff that I want to write. Here’s the stuff that I have written that’s similar to that. And also here’s a couple of sample chapters, some of which were pieces that had already been published, places that I thought fit into this theme of things about ourselves that we think are strange that are normal, and things about culture that we take as normal that are actually strange, if you take a second look at them.” That idea was really shaped in partnership with Monica Odom.
We shopped it around to a couple of publishers and ended up going with HarperOne. The editor I worked with there, Hilary Swanson, really understood what I wanted to talk about holistically. I think she said she read a line about knowing that a partner isn’t right for you if they have a particular affinity for Dane Cook or some random lines in the book, and I was like, “Yes, this is the one she is going to be my editor wife.” I got lucky and also had good people surrounding me to help me find other people who understood the thing that I wanted to write. We were able to shape it into this thing other people would understand and that makes sense in a book format.
I sold the book to HarperOne in fall of 2018 started writing it in January of 2019 spent most of 2019 writing the book and turned in the final draft in August of 2019. So it’s been a minute since I’ve written the book and like anything else I’ve ever written, I keep having moments of, “What if everything that I wrote makes no sense and isn’t funny, and it’s just garbage from my brain I thought was funny by myself in a coffee shop that no one else is going to get?” It’s very reassuring to know that even though there’s a lot of things that are changing or a lot of things we are talking about right now that we were definitely not talking about as loudly when I was writing the book. I’m glad there are parts of the book that still feel relevant, even though this is an idea that I had years ago.
How long have you been writing pieces toward this book?
I have been freelance writing for five years. Like anybody who got an English degree, I always thought in the back of my brain it would be cool to write a book. But that also sounds like someone being like, “It’d be cool to fly. It’d be cool to go to the moon.” I thought it was just a pipe dream. As I was writing one-off humor pieces for different outlets, I got a better sense of the kind of stuff that I wanted to write and also realized I love doing conceptual humor pieces where I, as the writer, like writing from other people’s points of view, but the stuff that resonates with me the most is personal essays.
There are four or five pieces in the book that had been previously published in places like McSweeney’s or The New Yorker. There’s one piece that was published on The Belladonna, which is one of the first places that I had a piece published. I had these pieces that were not meant to live together, but as I started thinking more seriously about what’s this book is going to be, I was able to pick from those satirical pieces and I had nuggets of ideas from different things that I’d written that were more personal. Definitely nothing that was completely formed.
There are a couple of stories in the book that I’ve written about before, but never at the length I did in this book. And also not with as much thought behind it. It was more just like, “I remember the story and I want to write it down so I don’t forget it. I want to make sure at some point in the future I write about this, but I just gotta write down all the details.” Like the story where I hid my poopy underwear in a wood pile. That was a story I had forgotten about for so long. Then I remembered it while I was still working at Hallmark and was like, “Oh, I did that. That was a real thing that happened. I need to remember I did that because I feel like other people will enjoy it.” So I really only was writing stuff for the book for about six or seven months during the time period right after I got the book contract.
Can you tell me about how you found your agent?
I have been very fortunate to work with a lot of people who have championed my work and understood my voice for a while. A friend of mine and a very talented author and artist, Rachel Ignotofsky, is someone I worked with at Hallmark. She left a couple of years before I did to start writing books. She wrote and illustrated a book called 50 Women in Science. That was a bunch of different short biographies of women with beautifully illustrated accompanying pieces. Monica Odom is also her agent. Rachel was working with her and as I was talking to Rachel after I left Hallmark, I said I want to write bigger things, she was like, “Let me introduce you to Monica.” Which was very gracious of her and is a thing that I’ve been trying to make sure I perpetuate.
I appreciate people that are nice for the sake of being nice and helpful just because they know how helpful it is when other people give your name to somebody as a boost. Monica was kind of familiar with stuff that I had written. She’d read a couple of big pieces. We had an initial phone call and she was like, “What are the kinds of things you want to do?” And I asked her about the kind of projects she’s interested in. From that conversation, we were like, “OK, we both have this other person whose opinion we trust, who can vouch for each of us and the projects we want to work on really meld.”
When I started those initial calls with her, I did have a couple agents reach out to me. That happened after I had a piece published in The New Yorker. That was the first time that I had agents reach out and say, “Hey, I like the stuff that you’re writing. Have you ever thought about writing a book?” Which was exciting, because I want everybody to love me all the time and also like strangers with like fancy job titles sending me emails—the little serotonin that my brain needs all the time.
That was helpful context to see what other agencies are out there. My experience with publishing is limited to this book that I’m doing. Seeing what other agencies were doing, talking to other people who had a similar path as I did, where they published humor pieces and then signed with an agent was helpful. Mostly just to know what kinds of agencies are out there and what different agents do for different people.
The thing that I’m finding is usually bigger opportunities come from somebody who’s already at that space and helping pull people up to that level. That’s a thing that I want to make sure that I’m perpetuating. I want to make sure I am opening the door for other people and other groups who might not otherwise get the opportunity to do the things that they can do very well.
Well, that’s being a good literary citizen.
That’s the motto I’m trying to live by. There’s a lot of things happening right now and it feels silly to talk about a book that is just about me and my experience. But like I said, the things that have helped me understand myself better are when people write about themselves and rather than being like, “Here’s this thing that’s happened. Here’s how you should think about it.”
I get a lot more from somebody talking about an experience, saying how they dealt with it, saying what it was for them, and then giving me the space as a reader to be like, “I can see how that’s similar to things I’ve experienced or seen. What does that mean for me?” It’s hard not to feel personally tied to every part of my job when my job is very personal, sharing parts of myself. I want to make sure I’m doing things in the writing world that I am trying to do as just a human first.
The kind of writing you described is the kind of writing I love to read, so I totally get it. Where do you get your writing ideas from? How do you decide what’s funny and when you should roll with it for a piece?
Man, I wish I had like a scientific explanation for you. I wish I could say “I do this, and then, oh my god, it’s so funny and everyone laughs at it.” It’s a lot of different things.
For conceptual humor pieces, usually those ideas come from things I’m experiencing in real life. The first piece I got published in The New Yorker was called a compiled list of collective nouns—names for different groups of things, like a group of ants is called a colony. That idea came from a time I was driving home from a coffee shop and I saw a group of 20-somethings in business casual clothes, standing outside of what definitely looked like a new coworking space. My brain went, “A group of a group of millennials is called a coworking space!” Then I was like, “Maybe there are more of those. Maybe I could do a whole thing like that.”
Best case scenario, I’m doing a thing and then my brain forms a joke. Usually I notice something and think it’s funny or strange, and I don’t think other people are calling much attention to it. And so trying to frame it in a way that I’m like, “We need to talk about how ridiculous this thing is.” I also have a running notes list that’s half ideas that make no sense and if anybody saw it, they would be concerned.
When I was writing a book proposal, I had days where I was just making lists of different stories that I know I have, or moments of taking inventory of the things I know I can talk about at length. I guess that’s how I come up with ideas is making lists. It feels productive, but also like you’re not actually having to write, which is the hardest part of writing is actually doing it.
So, once you’ve gotten your ideas out and you’re picking ideas from your list, what is your writing process like?
Right now, it’s very different. I have zero routine right now when it comes to writing. But I usually work from home most of the time. I commit the literary center of writing from my bed all the time. I know people say you shouldn’t do that, but it’s comfortable. Isn’t that the dream, to sit in your bed all day and somehow you make money because of it?
When it was still a safe idea to go into public spaces, I would go to coffee shops and mostly rearrange my phone and computer until they closed and pretended to write, made sure nobody was looking over my shoulder and seeing that I’ve been sitting in the same spot for five hours and haven’t written anything. Because I live in Kansas City, I have a car and I can drive places and it’s a relaxing thing for me. Probably not a great thing for the environment—sorry environment, but driving around is my muse. If I was ever feeling stuck, I just drove around a bit. I am not somebody who gets ideas in the shower. It’s sitting in a car driving down very Midwestern streets.
I did that too back when it was safe to go out!
So, you have a chapter on procrastination in your book. I giggled at how you turned in a blank CD to your professor and just pretended there was something wrong with the file that was supposed to be your class assignment.
Obviously, you had to do something different to get this book out there. Can you tell me if your procrastination was still a problem when you were working on the book and how you overcame it?
The thing about procrastinating is regardless of whether you’re doing something boring or the thing that you’ve been telling everyone you want to do for a long time, it feels good to not do the thing you’re being told to do. I have a pretty good balance of never wanting to do the thing I’m being told to do while also desperately wanting the approval of anybody who’s remotely in charge of me. So that part of my brain took over a lot of the time where I’m like, “I need my agent to like me. I want the publisher to like me.” Usually what I would do is having the routine of a drive to a coffee shop and sitting there for however long and pretending to work and then actually going to work.
I had to play the game of, “If I write for 30 minutes, then I can look at Twitter once,” which is ridiculous that I’m almost 30 and my lizard brain is still like, “What’s the treat that I get for doing even the smallest amount of work?” I probably embellished how much of a procrastinator I still am. I’m fortunate enough to mostly like the job that I’m doing. Sometimes it feels like I’m procrastinating real life by writing about things that happened to me 20 years ago. So I definitely did procrastinate, but probably not. Then it was not turning any blank Word docs into my publisher. Like, “It was so weird! There were words on it and now they’re gone.” They’d be like, “You tried that last week.”
How did you find the balance between personal essays and satire when you were writing this book? I’m wondering if it’s difficult to switch in between things where you’re not the character in one piece but you are the character in another piece.
The thing I found easiest was going by thematic section. There’s five sections of the book. Part of that is because that’s how I wrote the pieces, grouping them together. It was helpful to see “What am I talking about? How much am I talking about each of these things? Is there an equal balance?” It was also helpful to see if I wanted an equal balance of personal essays and satirical pieces, mostly just in number, not necessarily in length.
A satirical piece can feel like a breath of fresh air after you read like a big, long thing. That’s why I tried to work through that balance. As far as switching gears between the two, because I’ve been writing those conceptual circle pieces for a while now, if I have like a solid idea I’m able to write a full first draft fairly quickly. It takes me a lot longer to write a personal essay. Usually what I do is I would have a day where I’m like, “I’m gonna finish the section on being professional.” And I like, “I have a couple of satirical pieces left and I have a personal essay left” and I would decide whether or not I was in the mood to talk about myself or think about something else entirely. It’s very much like a, “What am I feeling in this moment?” kind of thing. I’m not somebody that can crank out a satirical piece and then also write a really in-depth personal essay. The essays I had to be in a mindset ready to talk about whatever personal thing I was going to be talking about.
How did you make the leap from writing and editing greeting cards to full-length humor?
That came mostly from an itch inside of myself, feeling like I wanted to be writing something else. Like most people who graduated in the early 2010s, finding any job that was going to help pay off my student loans was my initial goal and Hallmark did that. And it also somehow applied to the degree that I got.
Hallmark was a very good introduction to adulthood as well as being a pseudo graduate school where I was learning things about the writing world that I wouldn’t have learned in school that I only had to learn on the job, learning that I enjoy editing and I can do it, but the thing that I actually want to do most of the time is write.
Making that switch from working at a corporation to doing quite literally the opposite of that came from the feeling of, “This is a thing I want to do and if I don’t do it now, I don’t know if I’m ever going to do it.” The reason I left hallmark was I was offered a job at an advertising agency. I left Hallmark with the assumption that I’d be writing more and I’d have more creative liberty and it wouldn’t be just writing the same things about birthdays every couple of weeks.
When I got to that ad agency, I was like, “Oh no, this is not the thing that I wanted.” I realized that even if I was writing more, I needed to be writing about something I cared about, that didn’t feel like it was soul sucking in order to do that job. I pushed myself into the pool of freelance writing because I was in a job where I was miserable.
I had months where I was freelancing for Hallmark actually. I had a good four or five months where I didn’t get any humor pieces accepted. Everything I wrote was rejected, but for good reasons. That switch from working at a company to working for myself was not as gradual as it is for some people, which mostly came being at that advertising job and realizing that I don’t have a full load of creative writing clients, but I would rather try and stay afloat in that pool than try and survive in this one.
How were you able to manage your time and overcome the hiccups of launching your career?
I definitely had panic moments where I was on Indeed, just searching creative writing jobs anywhere and was like, “Should I go back to work?” Fortunately, I was able to freelance for Hallmark because I had been away for whatever allotted amount of time that I needed to be away for. So that was enough of a small, steady thing that I was able to start figuring out what I want to write.
I started looking at the websites that I read to see if they were hiring writers and if they accept submissions. I saw that Bustle was hiring part-time writers so I applied for that. Freelancing for Hallmark and getting that part-time job with Bustle were the two things that set my anchor so I could start to figure out the fun stuff that I wanted to do. But I didn’t jump from writing content for a women’s website to writing a book overnight. Trying to build my portfolio of pieces that were actual things that I wanted to be writing took a while.
It was a lot of writing humor pieces. Then as I started to build up enough of those pieces, I was able to start getting this portfolio of the stuff that represents me and the stuff I want to write and was helpful to try and talk to a literary agent about turning that into a book.
So would you say you got rejected a lot? How did you cope with that rejection?
Probably a lot of crying and feeling like everything that I’ve written is bad. My brain still does that a little bit. As cliche as it sounds, I have grown a thicker skin from mere exposure. Hearing a “no” from a place where I submit a one-off piece does not feel nearly as bad as it felt when I was first trying to get things accepted.
Part of that is because I know that I have had pieces accepted by places that were dream publications. So I have that the part of my brain, that’s like, “No, you you’ve done the thing. You can do the thing. And you getting a no does not mean that you’re a bad writer. It doesn’t negate everything you’ve ever done.”
Every single day I was trying to write at least one good new thing that I could submit so that I would have a volume of things I could use and at least one of them was a good fit. Obviously not all of those pieces were good, but that first acceptance always feels so good. The first piece I got accepted when I started freelancing was for Bust and was “Bath and Body Works is the Suburban Nonsense I Crave,” which ended up being in the book. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve written.
It does feel a little better knowing that every other person I know who writes or does any kind of creative field has been rejected more times than they’ve been accepted and even people I admire still get told no. So yeah, knowing that it has less to do with me as a person and more just like, it’s a job. People are gonna say yes or no based on what’s right for their publication.
So what’s next for you now that you have your first book published?
I have ideas for book two. I’m in very early stages of pitching that. It will be another collection of funny essays and satirical pieces. I would love to write for TV. I’m in very early talks about how to adapt Weird But Normal into a [TV] series, what that would look like as some sort of fictionalized thing. And also just hoping that we all don’t have to live inside of our house for the rest of our lives.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
I touched on this a tiny bit, but I’m trying to be conscious of the fact that I’m promoting something in a time where there are much bigger things going on. While big things are going on, I still am seeking out little bits of like levity that don’t ignore what’s happening, but at least lift a tiny bit of the weight off of your shoulders. There are a lot of writers and comedians who have dedicated their days to fighting for racial justice and doing things within their own community to like help with homelessness and help with issues that disproportionately affect Black and brown people.
I hope that is the thing that continues and it’s not going to stop. Part of thinking of ideas for this book was like, “I don’t want to write a book that feels like all I’m talking about is I’m a half-Asian, half-white woman who’s living here and I’m this age.”
There’s been this weird, both encouraging and disheartening sway in a lack of representation in any sort of inclusive voices, anybody who isn’t basically a rich white man. There’s been a huge sway from things we haven’t heard from literally anyone else to acknowledging that we need to hear diverse stories to everybody needs to hear about everybody else. And kind of using that as people of color can only talk about being a person of color. Women can only talk about being a woman, anybody who identifies as LGBTQ can only talk about that.
A thing I appreciate and the people that I read and follow, like Samantha Irby and people like Patti Harrison, we’re able to consistently do things that are so funny and also acknowledge the fact that their experience is shaped by who they are. But that is not the only thing there. I don’t know people who have been able to exist in these traditionally exclusive spaces in a way that doesn’t feel like they have to like capitalize on their differences. That’s a thing I’ve been trying to figure out how to do.
I love that people are excited to read books by women of color. I love that people are wanting to support Black-owned bookstores. I also hope that we get to a point where we realize that’s not the beginning and end of who a person is. The whole point of my book is like, “I hear all these things that shaped who I am and some of them are specific to me, but they’re all under this guise of no part of who you are as a person exists in a vacuum.”
Early in Rumaan Alam’s third novel, Leave the World Behind, the author introduces the kind of alarming, unplanned events that are both becoming increasingly common and difficult to adapt to: vast blackouts, lost cellphone reception, social isolation, animals exhibiting mass unusual behavior. It could be nothing, a mere inconvenience, or it could be a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.
For the white family on vacation who rents a house on Long Island from an older Black couple, the unknown possibilities of the environment disrupt everything.
The novel seamlessly bounces between perspectives and occasionally zooms out to provide clues to the world’s state of emergency. The result is a panoramic view of how we handle being stuck in place and navigate personal and collective fear.
In mid-September, more than six months into the global pandemic, I spoke with Alam on the phone from my house in Tallahassee.
Aram Mrjoian: How were you thinking about this novel as both looking toward a speculative future, but also toward our present moment?
Rumaan Alam: When writing a book about people who are effectively trapped inside of a home, now with a readership who are also effectively trapped inside of their homes, it’s sheer coincidence. The bigger question that you’re asking is whether or not it’s the role of the artist to predict stuff, maybe not in terms of lottery numbers or concrete facts, but to predict a feeling or sensibility that will be prevalent. I think that’s probably the case. I keep forcing myself into conversation with these two other much better books. I should probably email the writers and ask for their forgiveness, but I think of these books as being really engaged in some sort of a similar pursuit as my own. One is Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible and the other is Jenny Offill’s Weather. They’re both books that are thinking about climate change and its effects on society and the individual psyche, they both possess a feeling of being trapped. They’re talking about a lot of the issues that I was talking about in this book. It’s maybe helpful to think of my book as a part of a larger segment or part of a larger interest in literature. Sometimes you can only make sense of these things retroactively. You need the context of a couple of years to understand what that movement was or what that line of inquiry was.
I don’t know if it’s my work as a critic that’s helped inform that, although it is a case that since I’ve been working more as a critic, I’ve been reading more up to the moment. I’ve been more conscious of what some of the better writers out there are working on. Actually, you will have to include Ali Smith’s novels, the seasonal quartet, in this grouping of works that are interested in the individual psyche in a moment of global existential turmoil.
I didn’t read any of these works I’ve just mentioned before I wrote my own book. So, again, it’s either just coincidence or it’s not and it’s really hard to say. The only thing I’ve been saying a lot is that it’s sort of like when people who watch fashion very closely, when a bunch of fashion designers use the color lavender in their collection, it’s like, well, where does that come from? Where do these resonances among artistic peers come from? I don’t really know the answer.
AM: You mentioned the way even something like reality TV can make it feel like we’re moving quickly and consuming a lot quickly even if we’re stuck at home. I’m paraphrasing, but I heard you on a podcast discussing the idea in Leave the World Behind of giving the readers the same sense of immediacy that the characters in the book are feeling. As someone who writes books and also has consumed a lot of books, film, music, art, what do you think about the notion that we are consuming culture and information differently today? Is that part of the vision of the book, that we have to adapt to things so fast?
RA: The book aims to talk about the pace of contemporary life, which is a very commonplace motif. We hear all the time about lamentations of people’s attention spans, things like the discrete chunks on Twitter has affected people’s ability to actually read something, read like a 40-paragraph newspaper story, let alone a 500-page novel. I don’t think you can deny any of that is the case, right? That’s just what’s happening to us. And in the book, the way that plays out, or the way some of it plays out, is that the characters don’t have access to the Internet. And they experience to varying degrees, almost what you might describe as withdrawal symptoms. I’m just having fun with that in the novel.
I wanted you to feel like you’re inside of this book. I wanted you to feel like you were stuck.
In a bigger sense, how will the actual book be received in a culture that reads this way now? I can’t control how people read or don’t read the book. I can only do what I’m doing on the sentence level or the page level. I do think that this is a strategy of the way this book functions, which goes back to what you were asking about, the reader inhabiting the same space as the character. It’s just a strategy for getting people to engage with the story. And in a way, I think that’s a question about genre, because it’s a book that is trying to use the conventions of genre, as I understand them, to create a certain kind of reading experience that I really wanted. I wanted you to feel like you’re inside of this book. I wanted you to feel like you were stuck. I wanted you to feel like you couldn’t stop turning the pages because you felt so much like the other characters in the book, which is that you just want to know what is happening.
And, of course, in the book and in life, there’s no real answer. Even if the book tries to deploy the strategies of the thriller or the work of horror, the fact remains that it’s fundamentally a realist book, because that, to me, is what reality is in a nutshell, your desire to know how the story ends, which you have to reconcile with the fact that you will never know how your own story ends.
AM: Yeah, I definitely felt that when I was reading. I read this book very quickly. It was one that I just sat down with over a weekend. I think it speaks to your expertise in doing exactly that. You mention the withdrawal symptoms from technology. Two of my favorite chapters in the book are early on. Amanda and Clay stock up on all this expensive and decadent food, these groceries for vacation, and there’s just these really beautiful details. I just kept thinking, well, what do we do with the fancy wheel of cheese, when the world goes to hell? Can you talk a little bit about your attention to detail and what details you were really focusing on?
RA: I mean, it’s funny, because one of the other ways in which I couldn’t predict this would be newly resonant is that the first thing so many of us did, upon hearing that we needed to stay home back in March was go to the grocery store. And there were people who wanted to get their hands on heirloom beans, then there were people who just wanted to get a case of ramen, or you know, whatever it is that meant to you that you would have sustenance. I spend a lot of time on a shopping list in the beginning of this book. I think that it provides a lot of exposition if you look at it closely. I’m sure there’s a reader who will just think it’s terrifically boring, but I think it establishes who these people are, how they see themselves, what exactly a vacation means for them, what their perspective is on their place in American society. There’s a certain kind of person for whom the splurge on those ugly heirloom tomatoes coming out of really crinkly cellophane wrapping tells the story of who they are as consumers and the story of people and where they stand in the class hierarchy. And that’s important. I found it really fun to write. And I hope there are readers who find it really effective as a tool for explaining these people to you.
The details contain the interesting stuff, right? Rather than saying, these are people of the middle class, who aspire to see themselves as people in the upper class, but they really aren’t. You can just have some fun writing about somebody buying cilantro at the grocery store.
AM: Amanda goes from very untrusting and standoffish to defensive and then kind of bounces between these feelings until eventually at one point she looks to Ruth for wisdom and security. For a minute, I was worried about the novel going in the direction of a stereotype by having Ruth as the wiser, older Black woman that is there to comfort Amanda. But I think that with Ruth’s character, internally and externally, it feels like you’re fighting against that. I was interested in that choice and if and how you are pushing against the problematic ways that Black women are portrayed in literature.
RA: That is a really good question. There’s a challenge in writing about stereotype or archetype or convention. Because if you deploy the convention, are you then reifying it or are you critiquing it? It’s really, it’s sort of in the hands of the reader. In my second book [That Kind of Mother], I was writing about a white woman and her relationship with her Black nanny. And that’s a thing, right? There’s a tradition of that in this culture and it’s a valid thing to write about, but how do you write about it in a way that looks at it critically, but is also deploying it and playing it for what it is on the page. It’s a tough thing and so I wanted exactly the confrontation that you’re describing, where you might begin to suspect that the Black people are in this narrative to provide comfort or wisdom, which is such a trope, especially in Hollywood, the sort of typical Black person who is there to solve problems for the white person. That’s exactly what Amanda tries to do in the end. Ruth resists that, but I also think it’s a human impulse on Amanda’s part that she’s looking for human comfort. It just happens to be that a Black woman is the only person there and so there’s a complex moment where you think, no, it’s rubbing right up against stereotype and kind of looking at it and kind of not looking and not really resolving.
I think you could argue that the book is deploying somewhat discomforting racial conventions from the outset. The notion of a Black person turning up at the door, unannounced or unexpected, and then you have to deal with the problem of their race—that’s just a convention from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It’s a way of doing storytelling that we are comfortable with in this culture and it’s fun to deploy those conventions because people recognize them, which gets your guard up and it makes you react. Your hackles are up and you’re like, oh God, what’s going to happen right now? Hopefully, you feel like what happened isn’t necessarily what you would have expected.
AM: It’s out of your control, but thinking about this idea of critiquing or reifying stereotypes, I know this has already been picked up by Netflix with some big-name actors to hit screens. What’s it like having the work kind of out of your hands? How involved are you in the process of seeing this adapted?
RA: But that’s precisely what it’s like to publish a book anyway. You do the work on the page. You hope that you’ve done it well, and then you hand it over to the reader and the reader makes of it what they will. You may feel that you’re picking apart a complicated thing about racial dynamics and another reader may feel that you’re just reifying a really base stereotype. There’s no way to know, it’s just utterly out of your control and that’s just one of the things you have to make your peace with as an artist. The book only lives when it’s in the hands of an audience, but you have no role in dictating what that audience’s response is. In a way it’s something I’m familiar with, because this is my third book and I know that’s how it goes.
With respect to the adaptation, I don’t really have a creative role in making the film. But I do have a lot of faith in the person who I chose to make the film with. Sam Esmail has a signature artistic approach. When you look at that work you see not only visual and narrative sophistication, but also an understanding of hard to articulate dread, things that are not quite said. I just have a lot of faith in Sam. I think he’s a brilliant artist. And I also accept that it will be his work more than it will be mine and that’s that’s totally fine. That’s part of what it is to work as an artist is to trust to whatever degree you can in what you’ve done. If I could have the conversation I’m having with you with everyone who picks up the book, then I could guide how the book went out into the world, but I can’t. It’s not part of a deal. It’s not part of the bargain. And so here we are.
AM: Sorry, this is kind of both a bleak and hopeful question. I know you’re a father. In this novel, you have two teenage characters, who are kind of just finding themselves and still figuring out who they are. Again, to use a convention, two teenage characters are going on a family vacation and may not be the most excited about it, but then everything goes up in the air. Writing something like this, what are you thinking for the future and about the world that your children are inheriting? What was on your mind when you were writing those characters?
There’s a kind of animal instinct in protection of children and protection of the species.
RA: Absolutely. For me, that was the animating interest of the book. That was the principal concern and principal interest. You often hear this ascribed to Stephen King. I don’t know if it’s something he actually said. Stephen King said of the horror that animates his work, especially the early work, that it was about him as a father imagining the worst for his children. And I know what he means when you look at some of that work. That sentiment holds water for me. I hope it’s a book that’s not only effective if you are yourself a parent, but I do think there’s a kind of animal instinct in protection of children and protection of the species.
I’ll leave it to you to tell me if the book is optimistic or pessimistic about what it’s actually saying about the world we’re going to hand over to our kids. I think it’s pretty clear what my take is on the state of the world is and what we have done to it and what previous generations have done to it and what children today are going to inherit from their grandparents and great grandparents’ generation.
Our first official date was at the cinema, where I fainted in the lobby. We already knew each other because he’d dated my best friend when we were still at school, though I hadn’t spoken to him for a long time. I’d recently broken up with my first serious boyfriend. I probably wasn’t over it, but I was trying very hard to appear as though I was. We’d been together for a few years, I was studying up North while he worked in London. There’d been a growing distance between us for a while, and we’d stopped calling as much as we’d used to, made excuses not to see each other at the weekends. Sometimes I’d find myself forgetting that I had a boyfriend, his presence only floating back if someone asked about him. I’d kept a photo of the two of us on my bedside table, and as the months went on it’d become more absurd to look at this image of the two of us together; teeth bared, eyes manic and searching.
We broke up over dinner, where he agreed very quickly that we weren’t compatible. We didn’t say much for the rest of the evening, ate quietly and tried not to look at each other. It was unclear to me if I felt sad or relieved. At one point he excused himself to go to the bathroom, and I hoped he was going there to cry. There were other couples seated near us. Dressed smart, talking and gesticulating with their forks. I wondered if to them we looked like a couple who’d just decided not to be together anymore, or if we looked like the kind of people who enjoyed going out to chain restaurants to eat in amicable silence. It would look bad either way.
Soon afterwards, I contacted James. I’d had a brief crush on him while he’d dated my friend, though I’d never told anyone about it. He’d been in one of the more successful bands at school, regular gigs at pubs that stamped your hand on entry and served alcohol to pretty much anyone. My friend and I would drink cherry shots while they played and ask people for cigarettes outside. Sometimes he would talk to her after they’d finished playing, but they mostly interacted online, and at school they pretended not to know each other. We discussed their sort-of relationship on her bed after school; why he never liked her Myspace photos, why he didn’t say hi in the cafeteria. He has issues, we decided, making quotation marks with our fingers when we said issues. After a while he began to distance himself, stopped messaging her so much, and then she got a real boyfriend and we started talking about him instead. I’d known then he probably wasn’t a great person, but secretly I’d been pleased nothing ever came of their relationship. He’d sent me messages too. Long emails that I sensed were more personal than the ones he sent to her. He told me he was terrible with girls, which I found endearing because boys never said stuff like that. You’re different, I said one evening. I got a feeling he would like it if I told him that, and on some level it was true. He didn’t smoke weed in the park at the weekends, hadn’t tried to get girls to sleep with him at parties like other guys at school had. That means a lot, he replied, though I’d wanted him to say the same of me. He only called me pretty once, and I saved the conversation on to my phone so I wouldn’t have to keep scrolling up to read it again. His parents had separated when he was young, and my parents were just about to. I told him about the night I found my father sleeping in his car. He wasn’t as sympathetic as I’d wanted him to be, but I still imagined myself weeping in his arms as though I was his girlfriend.
Then he went to university and his replies became blunt and scarce. I assumed the whole thing was done and didn’t bother to open the last message he sent me. Then I went to university myself and got together with my boyfriend. I didn’t think about James again until my boyfriend and I broke up three years later. I was listening to a band that I remembered James liking, and I felt an intense urge to tell him, an urge that I would later claim was symbolic, almost biblical. I searched for him on Facebook and saw he hadn’t updated his profile picture in over a year, that he had a beard. He’d whittled his list of friends down to thirty, deleted most of the people we’d known from school, even my friend. I started writing him a message, held on to the dim memory of the late-night emails we used to send each other as I typed. I apologised for my silence over the years, as though it’d been something I’d chosen to do. Then I told him about listening to the band we both liked, how it’d made me think of him and isn’t that weird? Then I sent the message and felt that it had been a good, spontaneous thing to do.
He replied within thirty minutes. Emma, wow! It’s been so long! He said he was a teacher now at the school we’d both attended, and not much else had changed for him. I’ve been single for a very long time, he added, and I felt an immediate shift in our conversation, like a space had been opened up for me. We started messaging back and forth, as frequently as we had as teenagers, and I felt as though our conversation had a new meaning, like we were supposed to find each other again. We talked about the books I was studying, the big and banal things that had happened to us. I operated automatically, as if my brain wasn’t fully aware of what my body was doing. My knees bounced as I waited for his replies. Then he asked if we could meet up when I was next home, and I replied, sure, I’d like that.
*
He hadn’t mentioned that he still lived with his mother, but there were neat flowers and plants with glossy leaves lining the driveway outside his house, a pair of jewelled sandals by the door that I noticed as I took off my shoes. He hung my coat up for me and a small dog barrelled out from another room and started to bark at us. On the wall was a photograph of him as a child in a baggy football shirt and flappy white shorts. I pointed it out and said it was cute, and he ushered the dog into the kitchen, said that he’d only recently moved home after a stint in London that hadn’t worked out. Why’s that? I asked, and he said it was a story for later, waved his hand for me to follow him upstairs.
His room looked as though he’d tried to tease it out of his teenage years, shirts and ties hanging outside of the wardrobe and on the back of the door like a statement, I work now. There was a widescreen TV balanced on a small coffee table that shuddered as I entered the room. He asked me if I wanted to play Xbox and started turning it on before I answered. Then he sat down on the floor and I joined him, our legs stretched out in front of us, feet nearly touching. He played a game that I didn’t really understand, something about fairy tales that he thought I’d like, and once in a while a character would say something and he would laugh and turn to me to see if I was laughing too. Every now and then the dog would bark downstairs and he would ignore it, even when it started to make a sad whiney noise. I felt the afternoon slipping away, pulled out tiny hairs from the carpet and looked at the photos in shiny wooden frames on his desk. The pictures were more recent, him standing at a lake with a big fish in his hands. Him next to a field full of yellow flowers, holding a long tree branch like a staff. The sheen of the glass was new and clean, as though they’d been bought specifically for my visit.
After a while, we moved from the floor to the bed, and I sat with my back against the wall while he laid down, his head on the pillows. The sheets were rough to touch, little balls of cotton coming away in my fingers, and I wondered if his mother still did his washing for him. We were quiet for a moment, and I listened to the buzz of someone mowing their lawn outside. Then, unprompted, he started talking about his ex-girlfriend, a girl he’d met at university. He said she was crazy. So crazy, Emma, and I liked the way he said my name, as though he wasn’t afraid to say it, in the way I was too nervous to say his. He’d had to have therapy after they broke up. She had problems. He told me she would lie awake at night weeping hysterically for no real reason, and he couldn’t help her, couldn’t tell what was wrong. I agreed that it was strange, even though I could recall several occasions where I had done the same thing. He went on, said she’d once gotten so drunk she’d thrown up over his carpet, that she’d come round to his house in the middle of the night even though he hadn’t asked her to, and he’d had to clean it all up himself. With my bare hands, he said gravely, and he turned to look at me while he said it, his expression so intense I wasn’t sure how to arrange my face. Then he stared up at the ceiling and let out a deep, agitated breath, as though he hadn’t really wanted to talk about any of it. I tried to change the subject, told him about an ex-boyfriend who’d cheated on me. Twice! I said, as though it was a big joke. He didn’t react to this, just closed his eyes and sighed in a loud, dramatic way. She was awful, he said after a pause.
I tried to talk more about my ex-boyfriend, tried to mash our experiences together in a way that would make us seem as though we were suited to each other. I thought that he might pick up on this, but I could see he was distracted, his face blank. I started babbling, answering questions that I wanted him to ask me. Talked about an eating disorder I’d had when I was younger, rambling about diet pills and starving myself. I didn’t normally tell people this stuff, but I felt compelled to talk about it, as though he’d been the one to tease it out of me, reeling it in like the big fish in the photo. When I finished, he was unmoved, still blinking up at the ceiling. He cleared his throat, like a teacher, I thought, then told me my problems were the product of being young, naïve, that everyone experienced these kinds of issues at some point in their life. He spoke in a mild voice, like he was listing the ingredients off the back of a packet, and didn’t look at me. I remember looking at my hands in my lap and thinking about how ugly they were. Then I said something like, I guess I worry too much about what people think of me, and he turned to sit up on his elbow and faced me. You shouldn’t care so much, no one goes home at night and thinks about other people, you know? He said this gently, and I thought for a second that he might take my hand. Then he changed the subject and I felt my body go heavy, like it was full of thick, oily water, as though what he really meant to say was that no one ever thought about me, not even in a bad way, not in any way at all.
*
We met up a few more times while I was home. We played chess in his garden and built a new hutch for his guinea pigs. On Friday nights he would travel up to London with a group of Christians to give out soup and tea to homeless people, and he talked about this a lot. I wanted to do it too and asked if I could come with him, and he’d said, sure, of course, but he didn’t invite me. Sometimes he would call on his way home and sound distant, as though he didn’t really want to call me at all, and when I asked him what was up he’d say that he was overwhelmed, that he couldn’t speak about the things he’d seen. I’d never been with someone who was selfless enough to actually go and do something about the things we agreed were bad, who didn’t just talk about how sad it was to see people sleeping on the pavement. I found myself tripping up over what I wanted to tell him, realising how selfish and narcissistic it sounded in comparison. I began to lie awake at night thinking about all the terrible things I’d ever done, listing them quietly in my head, each selfish little thing, my body numb with guilt. I came to the conclusion that I’d never done anything that wasn’t ultimately for myself. James spent his weekends hauling flasks of soup and coffee up to London, giving his old clothes away to people that needed them. Everything he did began to take on a noble quality, as though reading in the evenings instead of going out to bars was a selfless thing to do. The more time I spent with him, the more I resolved to do better. When I wrote about this to him in a message he seemed pleased, told me that it was never too late to change, that I could still be a good person if I wanted to.
After the holidays I went back to Durham, and James arranged to visit me for our first official date. He said that he’d felt bad for not offering to take me anywhere while I was home, and I was flattered by how quickly he booked a hotel and a train ticket. I asked if he wouldn’t rather stay in my room at the college to save money, and he said that my single bed would probably be too uncomfortable for the both of us. I hadn’t envisioned us sleeping together, and learning that he had gave the trip a different meaning, an ambivalence I wasn’t quite ready to wade back into. I’d envisioned him staying at the college with me, meeting my friends and drinking with us in the bar, but when I asked him if he wanted to do this he said that he didn’t like drinking, and I felt bad for assuming that he did. I knew there was an underlying expectance for me to stay with him at the hotel, that he’d paid a lot of money to travel up to see me. But it’d still only been less than a month since I’d broken up with my boyfriend, and I couldn’t quite imagine the shape of someone else’s body lying next to mine. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t ready for that yet, but when he asked me to stay with him, I agreed without hesitation.
*
In the week leading up to our date, I began to worry about what I should wear. He’d told me that his ex-girlfriend had been very thin, painfully thin, and I’d started to imagine her when I sat down to eat, twiggy limbs and pale cheeks. I spent the evenings trying on clothes, watching myself in the mirror, sometimes staring at myself for so long I couldn’t tell if I looked good or bad. I even walked over to my reflection from the other side of the room to inspect the rattle of my thighs. I tried to look at myself the way James might look at me, which made me feel embarrassed, as though I could already sense his discomfort at my attempts to be pretty for him. He’d told me the crazy ex had walked towards him on campus once, waving her hands and calling his name, and he hadn’t recognised her because she was wearing so much fake tan. Honestly, he’d said, it looked terrible, I felt so bad for her. People were staring. I decided on a plain top and skirt that I hadn’t worn for so long the elastic had gone slack, and baggy cotton pants that I only wore when I was on my period.
On the day of James’ arrival I decided not to put any make-up on, and I didn’t pack any either. To some degree I felt liberated, as I would’ve normally spent at least an hour putting on foundation, concealer and powder until my face took on a texture like icing. This is better, I thought, though when I took a final glance in the mirror I saw a tired version of myself that did not equate with ‘better’. I left the college, lied to my friends, saying that we’d try and see them at some point over the weekend. At the train station, I tried to evoke the same excitement I’d felt when my old boyfriend would visit. Sometimes I’d feel so nervous I couldn’t eat all day, but it was a good kind of nervous, the flustered kind that made the muscles in my stomach clench over and over. As James’ train pulled in I was hit by how strange it was to be meeting him instead. It felt as though my life was happening to someone else, and I was another person watching it from the other side of the platform. I spotted him in the crowd, he was smiling, and I can’t remember if I was smiling too, but it didn’t feel like the moment it was supposed to be. He held out his arms to embrace me, and I pressed myself to him briefly. We started walking, he reached for my hand and I let him carry it along with him, my fingers limp. He started complaining about his journey, how cramped the seats were, how a wheezy man had sat next to him for the last two hours. I couldn’t seem to locate the feelings that I’d thought were developing between us. The urgency in which I had replied to his messages, the way my voice started to speed up when I talked about him to my friends. But now I couldn’t look at him. I didn’t like the way he carried his umbrella, and I was becoming acutely aware of how little I cared about his comments. The wheezy man was disgusting, his cough absolutely foul. I thought of the night ahead and felt my body grow heavy, as though I was wading through water with all my clothes on. We were walking down the hill towards town, and he stopped to look up at the sky. It’s such nice night, he said. Truthfully, it was an okay night, a couple of stars just about visible beneath the cloud, a sliver of moon. It wasn’t warm enough to be out without a jacket. Then he said, I’m so happy to be here and squeezed my hand. His palm felt clammy, but he carried on staring up at the sky with a serene expression, as though everything in his life had slotted into place.
*
The bed in the hotel room was larger than expected, and there wasn’t much space around it. James started unpacking his bag as soon as we closed the door, lining up his miniature bottles of shampoo and shower gel in a row on the sink in the bathroom. I kicked my bag into the corner where it looked imposing and out of place. We didn’t say much. He folded his T-shirts, too many for a weekend trip, while I picked at the sachets of tea and instant coffee. Then he started telling me a story about a kid he’d been teaching at work and I pretended to listen, laughed when he finished talking, even though it turned out he’d asked me a question. I was uncomfortable, and it was obvious. I stood awkwardly by the bed, worried that it might look too assuming if I sat down. But he remained casual, folding his T-shirts like nothing was out of the ordinary. Then he filled up the little kettle with water and made us each a coffee, and we sat on the huge bed with a gaping distance between us that I did not want to fill. He took a loud sip and said we should get into our pyjamas, to get super comfy. I hadn’t taken my shoes off yet, but I said, sure, why not, and made a clumsy fuss about changing in the bathroom, grabbing my bag and shutting the door without making any eye contact with him.
The light inside was harsh and made my skin look oddly green, and as I inspected my cheeks for blemishes I could hear James taking his clothes off, the hurried clink of his belt unbuckling, a spray of deodorant. I counted to one hundred and took in deep breaths before putting on the old T-shirt and jogging bottoms I’d brought with me. When I came out he was already back on the bed wearing the kind of shorts and T-shirt set teenage boys wear. He seemed jerky, removing his hands from behind his head and folding them in his lap. As I walked to my side of the bed, I started to become very aware of my body and the weight of it, the space it took up when I sat down. I could feel him assessing me, and I started apologising for my pyjamas, they’re hideous, and I laughed even though I’d chosen them specifically for that reason. I asked him some more questions about the school, what it was like now, and as we talked the strangeness of the situation started to fade to a dull noise heard faintly in the background. When we got tired he suggested turning out the light, then we got under the covers and he didn’t huddle up to me or touch me, and I held myself in a rigid ball until he fell asleep. I could hear rain falling outside, and I lay awake listening to the sounds of doors opening and closing elsewhere in the building, counting up all the things I might’ve done wrong.
*
It was still raining when we woke up in the morning. I asked if he wanted to go and explore the city, but he told me that he’d been to Durham before and had already seen most of it, which surprised me as he hadn’t previously mentioned this. How about a film? I asked. There was a showing of a Russian war film that he’d quite wanted to see, and though I thought it looked pretty bad, I said that it sounded great, and he booked the tickets on his phone and we went out into the rain hunched under his umbrella. We bought food from the supermarket, orange juice and a cold, wet-looking wrap that I pulled apart into little pieces. All I’d eaten was a bowl of cereal the day before. I was hungry, had been hungry all night, but I didn’t want to eat in front of him. I thought that now I’d told him about my problems with food, I would have to somewhat live up to them in case he thought I’d been lying.
My stomach began to cramp in the film. It started with a sharp ache that felt like trapped wind, and I had to keep shifting in my seat to ease the discomfort. I thought about going to the bathroom, but it was too awful to imagine myself squeezing past him. I decided to wait until the end. The film was long and boring and I didn’t think it was very good, but whenever he looked at me with an amazed expression after something mildly interesting happened I nodded back in wild agreement, like it was the best film I’d ever seen. After two and a half hours, the credits began to roll and people started to get up out of their seats. I breathed out, though it had started to hurt to breathe. There was sweat on my back and my legs shook as I stood up. I was wearing a turtleneck and the room was stuffy. My stomach felt bloated, and I began to rub it, unable to concentrate on all the things James was saying as we picked our way through the crowd. He asked me something and I nodded without registering what he’d actually said. It was the opening weekend for a new superhero film, and the lobby was crowded with teenagers and families and big cut-out figures of the characters. We had to push through the people queuing up for the next showing and he walked ahead of me, reaching out his hand for me to take, but it was loud and the pain in my stomach had accelerated so much that I was doubled over and the room began to take on a fuzzy quality. I grabbed his arm to steady myself, and said something like, hey, wait, I’m going to faint, I’m going to faint, but my mouth was very dry, and I remember thinking it was like eating cotton wool. People talk about it but no one really knows. Then I looked up and saw white from the overhead lights and a heaviness descended on me like a big thick blanket, and I felt calm, like I’d been enjoying the best sleep of my life.
I came around to his face hanging above mine, and my immediate reaction was to laugh because it was like I was in a film, and hey, we’re at the cinema! But he looked very scared, and then other people’s faces were hanging over me too and I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t realise that I was on the floor until someone was handing me a plastic cup of water and I sat up and someone said okay, okay, easy now, and there were hands on my shoulders and I could feel the carpet under my fingers, sticky beads of dirt. I remembered that I was wearing a skirt and I didn’t want anyone to see my underwear so I started scrabbling to get up and they all leapt away like I was an animal. James put his arm around me and asked if I was okay, lots of people were asking if I was okay, and I nodded a lot and waved my hands as if this happened to me on a weekly basis. Oh no, I’m fine, I said, and I laughed, my face burning hot. I asked if we could leave, and he started to lead me away through the crowd that had formed. I looked at the floor as we slowly made our way up the stairs and hoped no one I knew had been there to see it.
Outside, we sat on a bench that was wet from all the rain. He said that I needed food, and I agreed. I’d never fainted before. It was scary, but kind of like an achievement. I bit my nails as he stared out at the square. We didn’t say anything for a while, just sat and watched people walking through the high street. When we got up to go to the supermarket, I tried to make light of the situation. I laughed at myself, said something along the lines of, what a great first date, but he didn’t laugh. He shook his head and looked at me with a hard, serious expression. If you don’t mind, he said, I’d rather not talk about it. It was quite a traumatising thing for me to go through, a sharpness that I hadn’t heard him use before. Sorry, I said, I didn’t realise, of course it must’ve been pretty bad for you. We walked in silence for a few moments, and I wondered if we were arguing now. It was, he said, it was really bad for me, and I nodded and looked down at the chewing gum ground into the pavement because I didn’t know where else to look.
At the supermarket we bought a big bag of crisps and a pack of shortbread biscuits. My favourite, he said, and once we were back in the hotel room I tried to be nicer to him, asked him more questions about himself and his life. I told him that he was a good person, and he seemed pleased with this. Thanks, he said, looking up at the ceiling with a contented look on his face, as though it were something that, deep down, he already knew to be true. I held my breath and waited, but he didn’t say anything else.
Fact-checking has always been an essential part of the reporting, writing and publishing process, but with so much misinformation floating around, it’s more important now than ever to submit and publish accurate information.
Unfortunately, many of us full-time and freelance writers and bloggers don’t have the luxury of hiring a personal fact-checker. Even newsrooms, magazines and digital publications have been forced to cut budgets, squeezing out dedicated fact-checkers and researchers.
That leaves us, the writers, to fact-check our own work. This can be tricky — stepping away from your own work and scrutinizing every detail from a new perspective — but it’s not impossible.
How to fact-check an article you wrote: a 5-step guide
When I was in grad school studying journalism, I spent a good portion of my life fact-checking. Back then, it felt taxing and tedious.
But now I understand the importance of fact-checking, and possessing the skill has pushed me to become a better reporter and writer in not only my full-time role, but also my freelance assignments and side blogging project.
Now, do I do an in-depth fact-check of every single thing I post to the internet? Not necessarily. If I’m writing a listicle for my blog about things I do to sleep better, I won’t go through this entire process. However, if I’m submitting an article for a well-known publication on a fairly divisive or complicated topic, I’ll definitely sink time into fact-checking.
So, in an effort to eliminate misinformation, angry commenters and embarrassing correction notes, here are some steps you can take to fact-check your own work before submitting it to an editor or clicking “publish.”
1. Step away from the keyboard
Fact-checking is a lot like self-editing. When you’re so engrossed in a piece of content, it’s often difficult to step back and spot errors and inconsistencies. You’re too close to the work.
That’s why, if you aren’t working under a tight deadline, it’s ideal to put some time between writing and fact-checking. I’m talking about physically stepping away from your computer.
Go eat lunch, watch an episode of your favorite TV show or, even better, get a good night of sleep. Putting that space between you and your content will help you approach it through the lens of a fact-checker — not a writer.
2. Ctrl+P your article and grab your most colorful pens
If you have access to a printer, print your article before tugging on your fact-checking hat.
This might sound a little old-school (it’s definitely something I learned from newspaper and magazine veterans), but viewing your work through a different medium — AKA not your screen — will help you look at it from a different perspective.
Once you’ve got a hard copy in hand, grab some highlighters and colorful pens because it’s time to get busy. Here’s what I do:
Highlight each proper noun.
Underline each fact. If I have facts from multiple sources, I like to use different colors of pens for each. For instance, I’ll use a red pen to underline facts from Source 1, a green pen to underline facts from Source 2 and a blue pen to underline facts from Source 3.
Circle every number. (Numbers always trip me up, so I like to triple-check these!)
Chances are, your article will quickly become covered in colorful highlights, underlines and circles. That’s perfect. Now it’s time to really dive in.
P.S. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t have a printer. You can still underline and highlight text in a Word or Google doc — you just might have to slightly modify. This is all about finding your own system, so do what works best for you!
3. Verify facts and claims
When fact-checking, it might feel most natural to just start at the top and work your way down. That works just fine. However, if I’ve interviewed or cited multiple sources for an article, sometimes I will fact-check by source. Again, as you do this more and more, you’ll find what works best for you.
To start, I check each proper noun. For a source’s name, I’ll ask them to spell it for me. For other proper nouns I’ll confirm the spelling through reputable online sources. As I confirm the spellings, I put tiny check marks over each letter. This forces me to pay close attention.
Then, I’ll dive into the facts and numbers.
Just a quick sidebar: In the reporting and writing process, you’ll want to make sure you’re citing information from legitimate expert sources. For instance, Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a useful tool, but you might not always find the most qualified or unbiased sources. Really research your sources and cited materials upfront, so you can make sure you don’t have to go back to the drawing board during the fact-checking process.
If you’re fact-checking information from someone you’ve interviewed, follow up with an email or a phone call. To verify their statements, ask them open-ended questions like, “How do you know that?” or “How did you come to that conclusion?” You can also ask them questions to confirm particular details like, “Can you describe the car again?” or “Do you mind explaining the process one more time?” You can also refer back to the interview recording or transcript, if you have it.
If you’re fact-checking information you got online, double-check those sources to ensure what you write is accurate and that the site is reputable. Remember: it’s important to get as close to the original source as possible. If a website cited The New York Times, that’s great, but it’s best to find the original article.
4. Keep a close eye on…
As you fact-check your work, here are a few things you’ll want to pay close attention to:
Ages: If you’re including someone’s age, ask if they have a birthday coming up. It could be they’re 32 now, but in two weeks, before your article is published, they’ll turn 33.
Numbers: Pay close attention to any numbers you cite. Triple-check your math, the database or your sources.
Superlatives: If someone says something is the “first,” “only” or “top,” that should set off your fact-checking alarm bells. Unless you can absolutely verify this claim, use softer language (e.g. “a well-known restaurant”) or attribute the claim to its source (e.g. “The owner, Earl, says this is the first restaurant of its kind.”).
Conclusions: If you’re making any sort of conclusion ask yourself: How did I get there? Make sure you didn’t make any jumps. As a writer, when you’re deep in a story, it’s easy to make assumptions, but as a fact-checker, it’s your job to connect all the pieces and ensure they’re accurate.
5. Do a gut check
At the end of the day, if you’re struggling to verify a claim, do a gut check. Does something feel off?
I usually play by the rule, “When in doubt, throw it out.” If you absolutely can’t verify something, it’s better to get rid of it — no matter how enthralling or “clicky” it is — than to risk publishing inaccurate information.
You can also always go back to the drawing board. It’s not ideal, but you can ask your sources who else you should speak with and get second and third opinions. Sure, it’ll take time, but fact-checking your own work will make you a better, more credible writer, freelancer and blogger — and your editors will love you.
Got your own fact-checking strategies? Share them in the comments below!
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