The New York City Acid Test
Jessica Goldberg
What does it take to make a professional writer? Does it take New York City? Countless women writers have believed so. Have they been right? Is there a correct answer?
Writers need experience: experience writing, and experiences to write about. For many writers and aspiring writers the place to get that experience is New York. Writers could go somewhere else, of course, or stay where they are, and write about what they learn there. Certainly, the Internet has made it easier for a writer to seek publication, even if she is unable to locate herself in an international publishing center like New York. Still, writers who are on the scene benefit from a more sophisticated and detailed comprehension of her potential publishers and other customers. She will also be able to identify and even to create many opportunities before they may have a chance to be posted on the Internet. The difference between the tangible and the perceived may make a difference in the number of opportunities she can identify. There are many more staff writer positions in a city with such a concentration of serial publications. The New York Times and the Conde' Naste magazine publishing company, are only two examples.
For many writers, simply the opportunity to write journal entries about their experience in one of the most sophisticated and truly international cities is enough to make New York an irresistible experience.
However, Manhattan apartments are so fiercely competed for and so expensive to maintain that women, who move to the city to write, are likely to lay their primary goals aside or forge compromises regarding their time, attention and imagination so they can establish a location from which to pursue their original ambitions. Women who come to New York to succeed in a writing career find that they must first succeed in locating a place to live and a way to pay for that place. Such compromises often interrupt or postpone creative evolution. Suddenly, a hungry young scenarist�s number one goal must become her number three goal, because pursuing the perfect work situation cannot come before living somewhere, or for paying for where she lives.
The opinion cannot be discounted that these interruptions are likely to become permanent, or lead to some series of further compromises. All the while a writer is applying for an immediately available clerical job, is she calculating the amount of time until she can receive an answer about the staff position at the Village Voice? Or is she evaluating the earliest amount of time before People Magazine may respond positively to her article query, so that she can afford another month here without answering phones at an office? Or does she begin to perceive promotion to head clerk as a more likely opportunity worth striving for? Do the answers depend more on how good a writer is? Rather, her likeliness for successfully completed and published writing depends on how determined she is.
The female writer who has arrived in New York City to develop her craft finds herself necessarily sidetracked to pursue unexpectedly scarce basic necessities. The apartment market has been so thoroughly studied for advantage, that an apartment seeker needs experience more than she needs creativity to identify a workable original angle.
Distractions, from a writer�s concentration on the production and completion of her writing, can become habitual. Certainly, something as simply explained as a lengthy apartment search could be enough to finish a talented woman�s potential. It is her focus that will develop an even marginally talented woman�s possibility of achieving her ambition, not the measure of her talent against others�.
What a successful apartment hunter finds out is that she must stay alert and on the lookout as completely as she can. What a potentially successful writer finds out is that distractions from her work are gateway drugs to an addiction of excuses for not writing. Even the most universally beautiful prose can only be approved of if it is written down.
Women writers may also find themselves in creatively crippling compromises incurred with their acquisition of living spaces near their desired locations. When a newcomer's place to live is settled upon, it has usually been chosen out of necessity, rather than satisfaction. Living space compromises (such as long hours of non-writing work to afford rent, roommates to split rent with, and husbands or lovers to pay rent) can and do interfere with creative output. But, again, perseverance increases her odds.
For instance, it may be argued that a writer who suffers and experiences conflict has something interesting to write about. Certainly the phrase "suffering inspires art" is prevalent as it is because it is empirically apparent.
The first lines in Edna St. Vincent Millay�s poem "Recuerdo," "We were very tired, we were very merry -- We had gone back and forth all night upon the ferry," suggest nowhere to go, and certainly nowhere to write, and therefore a wasted night. However, the eighteen original lines that developed out of the experience of that night persuasively argue that Millay�s night was well spent both for the content produced, and for the enjoyment she obviously had from it. Evidently a woman does not need "a room of one's own," or even just a place to go, to gather inspiration (Woolf 3).
Millay could arguably have been waiting the night out, until the public libraries opened in the morning, when she may have gone in, borrowed a pencil and sat at a public desk. We must ask whether female creativity is more likely to be lost or to be invigorated by an uncomfortable or non-private home.
As a further challenge, although much of the joy of her poem is about enjoyment of her company, Millay could never have ridden the ferry all night without her unnamed companion, and gone unmolested.
In New York, privacy is for resourceful, careful woman. Doubtless, many exquisite creative works have miscarried for delicate young writers. Certainly, New York City is a professional writer�s acid test. Talent, tenacity and luck, as always, form publishing opportunities' holy triad. While only inducting herself into the labyrinth of the Manhattan real estate market, a woman new to the city suffers a disadvantage beside the bright, distracting new metropolis that competes for her attention with the convoluted, unfair housing market. A novelist or poetess, upon arriving in the city, must observe more urgent, essential safety measures than a man will. A woman in this city has more instances of harassment and deterrence, and less safety in being alone than a man does. Her need for solitude is equally important to her writing as a man�s need is for his, but additional obstacles are thrown up against her attaining it.
Additional challenges, above the challenges of poets, that poetesses face in New York may promote the argument that balance should be created and imposed, before an equal amount of talented women writers can be produced from this city. This statement, however, is naively dependent on the assumption that any balancing forces could exist to be made available, and on the supposition that New York would still be New York if these forces were applied.
When a writer comes to live in New York City, she asks for the truth, whether or not she realizes that is what she does. The truth about her ability to survive by writing is the single request the city is certain to grant her. Statistically, that survival rate is probably not as favorable as a male writer�s is, but we must ask ourselves if a provable unfair advantage, between writers of different genders, really exist. Even if we watch the project-completion rate of an aspiring writer of each sex, provide each with equal advantages, and balance their time restrictions with scientific precision, we cannot achieve a fair trial, because talent has never been measurable, and therefor is always arguable. Again, we must realize the one prescription that may be exercised for truly increasing a woman�s chances of publication and of sale is that of perseverance.
A writer coming to live in New York City comes to learn the truth about the competitiveness of her talent. Even if equalizing forces could be found and implemented over such an intangible imbalance in the genders, of course we cannot determine whether they should be: Picture an adulthood rite of passage that almost everyone flunks. Interference is still an uncomfortable idea. Each professional writing candidate must be judged on his or her own success capabilities. Their disadvantages cannot be mathematically calculated out of the equation.
As tempting as it would be to maintain that New York City is unfairly damaging to its female writing newcomers, it is an erroneous assumption, because New York City is equally unfair on anyone it can be. A determined woman who even puts aside her writing work, may with deliberate self-discipline, stick to her plan to eventually return to writing full time. Determination may be the only, but fortunately, the key factor to her professional writing success that she can impose any control over. Brooklyn native Tarp Mills modeled, instead of writing, to pay her way through Pratt, before writing and drawing the cartoon strip Ms. Fury for years (Robbins, 68).
It may be may be more accurate, if more abstract, to state that the woman writer can regard New York City as a trial of her determination: the most expensive self analysis she ever bought.
References
1. Millay, Edna St. Vincent. "Recuerdo." Night Poems. Online. Internet Explorer. 25 November 1999.
2. Robbins, Trina. A Century of Women Cartoonists. North Hampton: Kitchen Sink Press, Inc. 1993.
3. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One�s Own. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Tenth printing, 1940.