writing in paris: what i've learned so far...

15 years and this is what I have to show for it.

As I embark on my fifteen years here in France, I find myself looking back on how much I’ve grown. I have this visual of Alice after she’s taken the big pill and her hands and legs push out of the house. The house in this scenario isn’t France but rather my perception of what I thought my life would be like, as a writer and as a person.

I’m still learning, but this is what I’ve got so far…(oh, but first 👇)

#1: There Eiffel Tower isn’t on every corner. So, weird, right? Okay, so I didn’t actually believe this but loved the idea of writing the sacred pages of my novel on a red wicker chair at a café while gazing at the Eiffel Tower.

These places do exist but you won’t be sitting next to some beautiful French stranger but a family from New Jersey speaking so loud that your dialogue begins to take on an East Coast accent. Look, I’m not too cool for tourists because I’m one too, we all are, but not while writing. I discovered that some of my best writing happened while I wasn’t actually writing but wandering the streets alone where The Iron Lady would pop up unexpectantly.

Like this.

#2. Mean Girls exist in writing. Maybe I should’ve known this one but I suffer from good intentions.

So, as so many of us do, I started my writing adventures with blogging. I was insecure, young and questioning if I even had anything to say. Through this daily practice though I got to build my writing muscles and meet other Americans who found themselves in France for one reason or another. I loved this exchange because we were bringing our own experiences to our writing and creating what felt like a real community. My inner teenage girl wearing her pink sparkly retainer smiled because this was cool.

A year into my blog, I filmed an episode of Househunter’s International. Kitsch and campy as fuck, I dorked out in stripes and a tulle skirt because why not? I was 30 and having fun.

Well.

How.

Dare.

I?

The night that it aired in the States, a blogger here in Paris who had access to live American television, and I guess triggered somehow, invited other bloggers to her house to watch the episode make fun of me I hadn’t even seen yet while some of them live Tweeted me. I never wrote about this because I was embarrassed for their unhealthy and inappropriate behavior coming from adult women and a part of me blamed myself thinking I had somehow asked for it.

Who knows though…who knows why people do the things they do. Maybe it was important to them at the time. Fuck if I know. It came to me only recently because I’m now in the position of teaching my own child how to treat other people and these tiny horror stories tend to resurface, making me go, oh right, that happened.

At the time I was reading a biography on Rimbaud, the French poet who loudly rebelled against cliquey bullshit by writing fearlessly and calling out pretention. He experimented with mild-altering drugs, lived in squalor and leaned into his homosexuality. And in a rather punk rock move to avoid pandering to Paris’s culture class, he self-published his revolutionary Season of Hell. The book now comes with a forward written by Patti Smith and has inspired countless icons from Kerouac to Cobain. It was his story as well as the works of Baudelaire, Mallarmé even crazy old Céline that fueled me to keep on keepin’ on as my former Los Angeles landlady would say…

#4: No one actually wants to pay you to write. Not at first at least, which, I know, isn’t unique to Paris.

When I did feel confident to write off my blog, I began pitching story ideas thinking my local insight into one of the most intriguing cities in the world would give me an edge in. And it did….until I wanted to get paid. Get paid? Was I fucking crazy? Apparently so. To supplement the itch, this need to write, I’ve been a nanny, I’ve taught English at Starbucks, I’ve proofread thesis papers, did temp work at an office that accused me of not knowing how to photocopy all while writing free articles for websites that no longer exist. The hustle is real.

# 5: There’s no Champagne all day. Well, not for your everyday writer because that shit’s expensive. Even here.

#6: But maybe rosé all day. Sure, if I wanted to wake up in some apartment in Saint-Germain-en-Laye wondering where my….shoes were. Yeah, my shoes. Then okay this one stays because rosé really is inexpensive here. (As a now proud and sober 12-stepper, I seriously cringe at some of these early Paris days. )

And #7: Having a published novel doesn’t guarantee literary fortune and fame. I’m good on the fame because there’s freedom in anonymity but fortune…I could use a few bucks for sure. Despite my debut novel’s literary reviews that made me feel like I really reached my ideal reader, dream-like blurbs from some of the coolest people on the planet that I couldn’t believe agreed to endorse my book and one bad-ass book cover, I learned the hustle will never truly end until the day I decide I’m good, and I’ve written everything I need to say.

That day hasn’t come yet and I’m as hungry for the written word now as I was fifteen years ago.

However, I have one question that lurks like an ex on social media: is this impulse to write a privilege or a curse?

I don’t know.

I may need another 15 years to figure it out but until then I’ll keep on keepin’ on…

What do you think?

LCM