Eureka

Since yesterday's post I've been scouring my New Yorker archive, not quite sure of what I'm looking for, but feverish in my pursuit of it nonetheless. One of the first writers I was drawn to was Susan Orlean. I didn't know much about her, but I'd seen Meryl Streep portray her on screen, so I was intrigued.

She and her writing were the subject of a Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufmann movie a couple of years ago, "Adaptation." In a roundabout way, that film was about the writing of her book, "The Orchid Thief," which was developed from a New Yorker article that she had written. At some point in the movie, one character describes Orlean's style as "that flowery New Yorker shit." That phrase stuck with me and it was constantly in the back of my mind as I began reading the magazine this past summer. It sounded like the kind of writing that I would like to do.

Before I started sifting through Orlean's pieces in the archive, I Googled her. The first link was one to her own website (www.susanorlean.com). I went to the site, and I noticed a link on the main page to a section entitled "About Me." Here was her biography, which was precisely what I was looking for. What illustrious path had this esteemed writer taken on her way to literary greatness?

Excerpts from her first-person account:

"I am the product of a happy and relatively uneventful childhood in Cleveland, Ohio...This was followed by a happy and relatively squandered college career at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor...I studied literature and history and always dreamed of being a writer, but had no idea of how you went about being a writer--or at least the kind of writer I wanted to be: someone who wrote long stories about interesting things, rather than news stories about short-lived events. There is no guidebook to becoming that kind of writer, so I assumed I'd end up doing something practical like going to law school, much as the thought of it made me cringe. After college I moved to Portland, Oregon to kill some time before the inevitable trek to law school--and amazingly enough I lucked into a writing job at a tiny, now-defunct monthly magazine. That led to a job at an alternative newsweekly in Portland where I wrote music reviews and feature pieces...I started writing for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice...I moved to Boston in 1982...I wrote for the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Globe, and started work on my first book...Four years later I moved to New York. After moving to New York, I learned how to snowboard; wrote The Orchid Thief; became a staff writer at The New Yorker; got married; got a Welsh springer spaniel; learned how to order take-out food. These days I do some lecturing and some teaching, but most of the time I'm writing pieces for The New Yorker and occasionally for other magazines, and working on books."

Was this it? Had I found what I was looking for? A step-by-step guide (the kind of guide that Orlean claims doesn't exist) to becoming a writer? I'm already a quarter of the way there, but what's the next step? Buying a ticket to Portland? Dumb luck? To be continued...

Sidebar: I just received an email from an editor at The G* P* P* (the part-time publishing job I interviewed for last month). She makes it sound like the main reason I didn't get the job was because it was part-time and they didn't want to hire someone who might leave as soon as they found a full-time job. Frustrating (since I should have done more to assure them that I wasn't looking for a full-time gig (even though I was)), but not altogether surprising.