[Essay] In Defense of Doggo

Or why I keep writing

Someone once said to me, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” 

Maybe it was a guidance counselor, or one of those inspirational posters with kittens on them, or my grandmother. I can’t remember exactly who it was, and the origins of the platitude are unknown, but I can see why no one, dead or alive, wants to attribute their name to that pack of lies.

Here's the thing: I love writing.

I love crafting stories.

I love sharing them with people.

By all accounts, I do what I love.

But sometimes, when the house is quiet and my blood is pounding in my brain and my anxiety is through the roof, I miss the days when it was just my story and me.

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I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to write.

My entire life has spun itself around three things: books, writing, and children’s card games (joking!). I found my favorite books through forums on fanfic websites, back when they were hosted on Geocities and Angelfire. I found my love for writing in the dusty annals of fanfiction.net. I haunted bookstores for the newest volume of my favorite manga, for the woodsy dead-tree-and-ink scent of a brand-new hardback fresh off the printer.

I braided myself into books, I filled my veins with words, I … collected one too many super special awesome rare cards. (Or am I joking?)

I found love in a paperback, and isn’t that just the best way to fall?

I’ve always wanted to write, but when I tell you that I never — not once — considered any other career in my life, I want you to know that it’s a lie.

I’m a liar.

And I wasn’t joking about the children’s trading card game, by the way.

The truth is, I’ve considered plenty of other careers in my short 30-something years of being alive.

When I was 7, I wanted to be a marine biologist.

When I was 10, I wanted to be a vet tech.

When I was 14, I wanted to be a screenwriter.

Seventeen, a film critic.

Twenty-one, a manga production editor.

Twenty-five, a graphic designer.

Twenty-six, a marketing designer for novels.

Twenty-eight, I toyed with the idea of abandoning it all and taking a community manager role at a now well-known anime streaming service.

And in the background, all the while, I wrote stories and fanfic and tried not to think about what I really wanted to do, who I really wanted to be, because I think I knew it’d be hard. Both heart-hard and brain-hard.

I’ve been a writer my entire life, but to be an author?

That was something I wasn’t sure I’d ever be good at.

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Okay, I’m going to back up a moment and define what I consider a writer versus what I consider an author.

A writer is anyone who takes pen to paper, who crafts something with words — even if they never finish it. You’re a writer by simply trying, because that’s more than most people will ever do, and that is something to celebrate and be proud of. Being a writer is crafting stories for yourself. It’s telling a tale even when no one’s listening (except you, and you’re the only one who matters here).

An author is someone who has decided to share their craft. You don’t have to get paid for it, but you share your craft with strangers, who are then invited to partake in your craft and critique your craft.

So, for instance, if you write fanfic for yourself and you don’t post it on AO3, you’re a writer. If you do post it on AO3 — congratulations, you’re a fanfic author.

The definitions of these terms might differ from person to person, but this is how I define them, so that’s how I’ll be using them throughout this post. Essay. Thing.

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For me, writing was always a way to connect with people, to understand them and myself. I’m not very good at reflecting on my own feelings, so when I take myself out of the equation and put a character through my problems, I can see my own thoughts more clearly.

I’ve always been this way.

I don’t trust my emotions most of the time, so writing has always been a way for me to measure out my responses. If something upsets me, I write about it. I put a character in a scene, and I have them work through it, and from my vantage point I can see it all. I can understand it.

Things always look clearer when I take a step back, anyway.

My anxiety is this weird twisting thing that doesn’t really play by any rules. Some days I’m perfectly fine. My brain does its thing, and I go through my day and reply to emails and get groceries and read a fanfic or two, and everything is copacetic.

But other days, the high anxiety days, I pace and I write two words and I think about all of the people who will read those two words that I wrote and then I delete 10, and I walk in circles, and I wonder what right I have to put any idea to paper. What sort of hubris must I have to think that my stories are worth telling.

On those days, my brain tells me that there’s a certain slant of vanity to this life I chose. I’m sure Lord Byron never looked in the mirror and told himself never to write “She Walks in Beauty.” I’m sure he would be positively unsurprised to learn that we have a whole word dedicated to his iteration of vain, broody men. And then I wonder, what sort of creature was Lord George Gordon Byron, and when my anxiety steps out of the way for just, like, two seconds, I know the answer to that —

He was a dude in a time when it was a dude’s God-given right to comment on pretty women.

But even when I realize that, I still feel some sort of way when I think about sharing my stories with the world. What right do I have, when any number of people could slip into my shoes and do it just as well — if not better — than me?

The thing is, there is a bit of vanity to the whole publishing part of it.

My books don’t really say anything that other books haven’t already said before. I’m not tearing away a layer of humanity to show you its raw underbelly. I haven’t found the meaning to life (obviously Douglas Adams already told us it’s 42). I can’t give you the answer to the universe. I haven’t studied balms for heartbreak, I don’t know enough about the War of 1812 to tell you much about it.

I write fiction. Stories to tide you over between one Monday and the next.

There is so much pressure to move someone with my work, to influence them, to change them — to make the act of reading my work an experience and not just a moment in your life that is made up of many moments all strung together — that I get lost in the anxiety of it all.

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Most of the time, I worry that someone will think my dialogue is cringe-y.

I accidentally ran across quite a few readers commenting on how silly and stupid the word “doggo” was in The Dead Romantics. And I understand why. But that word filled me with a buoyancy I needed for that book, for that moment, for that chapter in my life when the pandemic was roaring outside, and it was just me and my computer, and I would’ve given anything to have gone back to the first time I’d ever heard that word.

“Doggo.”

I was on a train from London to Manchester — it was my first time in Europe. First time abroad anywhere, really, outside of North America.

I was on my first and so far only book tour in the U.K., and I was so incredibly anxious, but I had a lovely publicist, and that lovely publicist had a small little dog that she could and did fit in her purse.

“What a cute doggo you are,” she would say, and whenever I close my eyes and think about that word, I think of flashes of sunlight in a cozy corner pub, sitting in rickety wrought-iron chairs. I think of watching the countryside pass by out a train window. I think of meeting so many wonderful readers.

And when I was sitting at my lonely desk in 2020, I wanted nothing more than to travel back to then, to be in that corner pub, to ride that train, to soak in a time when the present wasn’t, well, here.

So I put the word in my book, because it made me happy. It still does.

For a while, though, I was deeply ashamed that I’d let a little mote of personal happiness leak into my novel. That I’d peeled back a layer of my skin to reveal something of myself underneath.

And some people laughed. Or cringed. Or both.

I know those readers didn’t mean their reactions the way I took them, and they certainly didn’t have the context, and even if they did I’m sure it wouldn’t have made a difference, but it felt a little like I was back in grade school again, being made fun of for something I’d said.

And that’s what happens sometimes when you create something and put a bit of yourself in it.

Sometimes people just point and laugh.

It’s a risk, and it’s always why I try to remind new authors that readers’ reviews — their experiences, their opinions, their community — are always for other readers. Don’t go on Goodreads. Don’t read that Instagram post you were tagged in.

Trust me, you won’t find the validation you’re looking for there.

That validation has to come from the spot right between your ribs where your bloody organ beats.

In this industry, it can come from nowhere else.

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Once I became an author, my relationship with my writing changed.

It went from being something that I escaped through, to something that I had to charge into day after day, writing two words and deleting 10, wondering if this sentence is a good one, if this dialogue is organic, if this prose is too purple … you get the idea.

From the beginning, I knew that being an author would be hard. I cut my teeth on fanfiction.net and fictionpress.com. I sowed my wild oats on LiveJournal and yalped into the abyss of the Absolute Write Water Cooler. I survived the great flame wars of the early aughts.

I understood this wasn’t going to be easy.

I would burn out, but I also would find ways to replenish the well. I would feel alone and forgotten, and sometimes I’d feel jealousy and that knife-sharp sting of why not me?

I just didn’t realize I would have to completely redefine what I love: the parts of writing that make me, well, happy.

I think I’m still learning how to do that, bit by bit.

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Let’s go ahead and address the elephant in the room: I don’t have to get paid to do what I love. I could write a book just for me, and go to a nine-to-five job, and I could be perfectly content. Hell, I might even have a retirement plan if I did. Health care! Oh, I could just imagine.

Yes, I could be perfectly content with an office job, writing ideas on sticky notes and hiding them under my keyboard when my boss comes around to check on my progress. I know I could be a perfectly suitable employee, answering phones, sending emails, and existing day to day with an imaginary world whirling in my head.

But there is a difference between being content and being happy.

It was something that I had to wrestle with when I was 28, living the dream in New York City, working at probably my favorite job I will ever have in my lifetime. But even though my job was perfect, I missed my parents and my cat, who were all back in South Carolina.

I loved my friends in the city, and I loved all the small coffee shops, the museums, the experience.

I loved it all, and I was content.

But I wasn’t happy.

I spent nights sitting in my cubicle writing Geekerella, so long that the motion-activated light sensors forgot I was there and left me in the dark. I would get home at 9 or 10 and crash, and then I’d go to work again in the morning and do it all over. Rinse and repeat. I was burning out at both ends, and I knew it.

If I really wanted to do this author thing, I needed to decide.

So, I asked my agent if maybe, maybe, I could try this author thing full time. And she told me that I would do my best work when I was happy.

The next month I packed up my cubicle, and I went home.

I’ve worked every day since, through holidays and birthdays and vacations. I’ve had to learn the kind of self-control that people who think they’re never doing enough have to learn, or else I’d work myself into oblivion.

Some nights, I think I still might.

I don’t regret a single moment, though.

Because I am happiest not only when I am writing a book, but when I know someone else will read that silly little word—doggo—and find a little bit of sunlight there, too.

I’ve already lived so much of my life from the vantage points of fictional characters, looking down and inspecting emotions — grief, love, heartache — and finding someone else there beside me, looking down at those same characters, searching for the same answers.

I feel something akin to the opposite of loneliness. It’s not quite community. It’s more like meeting someone’s gaze from across a busy crosswalk, waiting for the light to change. Strangers crossing paths, in the same spot for a moment, a story encapsulated in a single glance, and then you’re both off on your way again.

That’s how I feel when I write and share my stories.

It’s the kind of love you fall into again and again and again, as if you’re rereading your favorite part of your favorite book, knowing you aren’t alone.

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I wish I could say that it gets easier, this author business. That with every book, my heart grows a little harder, that I learn to peel a little less of myself back every time, that when I got to my fifth or sixth or tenth book, writing became as easy as breathing.

But it doesn’t.

I don’t think it ever will.

I’ve recently seen an influx of blog posts similar to this one, talking about burnout and creating when the world feels like it’s on fire. Constantly on fire. And all you can do to stave off the flames is to call your representative, whom you have on speed dial at this point, and calmly try to explain your frustrations without your voice cracking.

Being a person is exhausting. Writing is exhausting. Pretending is exhausting.

You turn in a book on deadline, and you refill the well, and then you go right into the next story. You stick to a schedule, you conjure up words like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a top hat, you hope doggo comes back around to being cool.

(It never will. I know. I know. I’m dying on this hill.)

I love writing.

I also work so intensely hard to keep writing. I burn out. I fantasize about nine-to-five jobs. I wonder if anyone would miss me if I just wandered off into the woods and never returned.

And I keep writing.

The ineffable Taylor Swift once said, “I want to still have a sharp pen and a thin skin and an open heart.”

Because I do my best introspection when I'm on the outside looking in, weaving stories about imaginary people just to figure out how to navigate the nonfictional world I find myself in, my next novel is about getting lost in a book and finding your way back to real life. And whether, in the end, you ever really leave that fictional world behind.

Or if you carry it with you.

To me, writing is an act of love. Love to my past self, my present, and the selves I will grow into being, and maybe that’s the answer to the age-old platitude of work and love. It’s something you have to face, again and again, with sharper pens and thin skins and hearts cracked wide open and full of love.

Essay edited by Stephanie Appell. Special thanks to Nicole Brinkley.