Saïd Sayrafiezadeh on Debt, Cults, and Our Inner Algorithms
The narrator of your story “ Minimum Payment Due ” is mired in debt and, from the outset, trying to
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I have been, as mentioned, rather ill the last week and a half. I am out of the hospital, but the infection that sent me there this time, as opposed to the dehydration that sent me there before, has not entirely cleared up. Eating and speaking are difficult, and this is the first time I have had the energy for anything but family or work in days. It is a reminder, to get all sappy on people, that writing is hard. Writing is not, at this point, a remunerative profession. There are very few ways into the middle-class life as a writer and fewer jobs that serve as apprenticeships where people can live on their work as they learn. There may be junior programmer potions; there are almost no junior writer positions. Most writers eek out what working time they can as they can, squirreled away from time with friends and family. A lot has to go correct for that writing to take place, and almost anything — childcare emergency, extra time at work, a week and a half playing tag with a hospital — can steal those moments away. That is partly why I roll my eyes at people who give advice insisting that you have to write every day. No, man. I have to survive every day. Writing sometimes ain’t on that list. It is also why I don’t mind labeling myself as a failure, something some readers have objected to. Because I have failed, and that is okay. In the last four years, I have completed four novels, sent out two, written one terrible screenplay and a handful of short stories. None of them has come close to being published. That is failure. You can sugarcoat it all you want, but I have conspicuously failed to get other people to give me money for my writing. More importantly, I have conspicuously failed to write something compelling enough for another person to say “yes, I want to help that get seen in the world”. I have not, by my own goals, succeeded. I am not, in any […]
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The narrator of your story “ Minimum Payment Due ” is mired in debt and, from the outset, trying to
Hanif Kureishi You have been back in your London home for several months now, after a year in different hospitals,
