Carol Mithers
/How did you become a writer? I’ve always been a writer, even when I didn’t know that was the name to give it. As a kid, what I saw and felt seemed incomplete until I described it to myself. I narrated my walk to school in my head. (“Above her, the sky was a deep blue...”) As I got older, I wrote short stories and a lot of poetry. I thought I wanted a career as an actress, though, probably because being someone else on stage was the only time I didn’t feel acutely self-conscious. But I wasn’t that good or successful at it, and by 21 I’d sold poems to Seventeen magazine and a couple of op-eds to the Los Angeles Times. Clearly, it was what I was meant to do, but how? I was an LA girl, knew no writers and had taken exactly two poetry courses in college. Grad school seemed one path, which I absolutely did not want to take. Instead, I got a job at the LA Free Press, which was devolving into a porn rag, and through a colleague there started writing for a B-level rock & roll magazine. At 24, I took those clips and a few from the LA Times and moved to New York City. One contact – a friend of the girlfriend of a friend of a friend – led to an editorial job at a woman’s magazine. I met actual writers, actual agents, learned about the business, which eventually enabled me to write full-time as a freelancer. Going to New York changed everything for me.
Who were your writing influences? My high school creative writing teacher was the first person to tell me that I had it as a writer, something that I soon discovered came with creepy lechery. Not an unusual experience for a young woman, but it was very confusing at 16. Most of my influences were in print. I used to spend a lot of time at the Culver City Public Library and went through 20 or 30 years of the O. Henry Prize story collections. During my poetry days, I read a lot of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Later, Adrienne Rich. It’s become a cliché to mention Joan Didion, but for nonfiction, her work was revelatory. It remains a contradiction that the vast majority of what I read is fiction but the vast majority of what I write is not.
When and where do you write? I have a home office at the very back of my house; it faces trees and my neighbors’ yards, which is nice except for the afternoons when the gardeners come with leaf blowers. I mostly work standard hours. During the many years I made a living writing articles for commercial magazines, I had regular assignments with word counts and deadlines I had to meet. It had nothing to do with inspiration. Six or seven days a week, I got up, exercised (which gets my brain going), showered and produced what I had to produce until dinner time. The schedule varied some while my daughter was young but it’s still my habit. (Sometimes I think about work while walking the dog or right before bed and make notes on my phone.) A schedule makes it easier to be focused and get things done.
What are you working on now? I spent the last three years writing a book about a heroic LA woman working with people and pets in poverty, and in a larger sense about the successes and failures of the current animal welfare movement. Rethinking Rescue: Dog Lady and the Story of America’s Forgotten People and Petscomes out in August, and my job now is to make sure it gets read. But I also think about what might come next.
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Not really. Because for years, writing was how I paid the bills, I had to do it. Even if I had an assignment I thought was really stupid. I had plenty of crappy days, but I discovered that if I kept at it, something would emerge. Terrible, maybe, but a start. I’ve struggled with finding the right way to structure all three of my books, but I’d call that a professional weakness, not a block.
What was the best writing advice you ever received? The college professor who taught one of my two poetry classes read a bunch of my stuff and told me that I needed to make a list of words I wouldn’t use again until I’d used the alternatives 100 times. I wrote pretty confessionally and although I didn’t understand his comment for a long time, he was saying that I needed to treat my work more seriously, as work, not as an emotional release. Maybe most people who write are driven to do so out of some personal need. But your need is the start, not the end. You have to step back and judge what you’ve done dispassionately, maybe even coldly.
What is your advice to new writers? Besides “read everything”? And network and seek mentors as much as you can bear? And consciously work to shape the arc of your career? I think it’s a good idea to leave anything you think is “finished” for a day or three or a week, then read it again. It’s usually not quite done at all. I’m a believer in reading all work out loud, which reveals awkwardness of phrasing, unnecessary repetition, funky dialogue. Good writing has a rhythm that you can feel.
Find out what way of getting into a story works best for you. Once I more or less know the first and last lines, I don’t feel lost. My upcoming book took longer than it should have to write because I couldn’t find the first line, and so couldn’t find my way in.
Most practically, understand the gap between wanting to write and making a living. If you make this your vocation, do it with eyes open. The economics have grown incredibly brutal. Colleges have eliminated the tenured positions that made it possible to be a fiction writer or poet. Magazines and newspapers constantly fold and staffs shrink. Free-lance rates are a joke. If you don’t have a trust fund, high-income spouse or access to affordable care, you need a strategy for long-term survival. That might include having very different paid employment. (The other advantage of that, which I see in retrospect, is you can write what you want, not just what someone is willing to pay for. It’s possible to lose sight of your own vision that way.) It’s one thing to struggle when you’re 22, but you will not want to be living on the edge of financial disaster when you’re 40 or 50.
Carol Mithers is a Los Angeles-based journalist and author of the forthcoming Rethinking Rescue: Dog Lady and the Story of America’s Forgotten People and Pets. Her previous book, Mighty Be Our Powers, written with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Leymah Gbowee, has been translated into fourteen languages. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Village Voice, LA Weekly, O the Oprah Magazine, Capital & Main, Talk Poverty, and many other publications.
