Writer and comedian Amy Silverberg on how to take the pressure off the process

What came first, writing or comedy? How do your two career paths compliment one another? Do they ever get in each other’s way?

Writing came first professionally. But they came simultaneously in my little kid brain. I just didn’t know that stand-up was a career until later. I was a class clown in high school. I was using all of the coping mechanisms one needs when one lives in a family that requires coping mechanisms to make everybody laugh, to soothe everyone. I was kind of the class clown of my family. But I was a reader long before I was a writer. I read voraciously as a kid, and I didn’t even know that I wanted to be a writer. I thought I wanted to be a reader for a living.

Sounds dreamy.

Yeah, exactly. I was like, all I want to do is read books. I was probably seeking a little escape.

I was an English Lit major at UC Santa Barbara. I was really depressed. There was lots of heavy drinking. I was in a sorority. I’m in my 30s, so unlike my students now in college, I didn’t even know [I was depressed]. They’re on TikTok, and they’re making short documentaries about how they can’t come on antidepressants and I didn’t even know that I was depressed. I thought everybody couldn’t get out of bed. I thought maybe I’m just hungover? That was confusing to me. And everyone was just drinking so much, and I couldn’t keep up, and I was just reading. All I was doing was reading. I couldn’t even really get it together to think about what I would do after college.

I took a class with this wonderful professor at UCSB. Professor Young was her name. I’m sure she wouldn’t remember me. But all we did was read Middlemarch. Now, I say it’s my favorite book, Middlemarch by George Eliot. We would read like a section, 30 pages every week, and then we would discuss it. The book is all about empathy, how to be alive. And I just thought, “oh, I want to be a writer. This is what I want to be.”

So then I went straight into an MFA, took out a loan I’m still paying off.

I’m going to be a writer.

But there’s something in me that wants to be on stage and make people laugh, as well. And it was almost difficult to admit, like a sort of coming out. It’s insane to think: I want people to come and pay money to watch me. So, while I was getting an MFA, I was slowly working up the courage to do stand-up. First, I was doing improv and storytelling. Stand-up always seems like the scariest, because you’re alone up there, but it’s also the most glory—you don’t share the stage with anyone. I realized I’m not an actress. I just wanted to write jokes and tell them on stage, write jokes about my own life and my own experience.

So, I really started doing them [writing and stand-up] pretty simultaneously. I think they complement each other. Writing is really delayed gratification and stand-up is really instant gratification.

Jokes will not work if you take out a word and the rhythm of the joke becomes different, same with sentences and writing. I’m a read-out-loud type of person. For my fiction, I read aloud to hear it in my ear to see if it’s going well or not. I want people to laugh at what I’m writing, even if it’s sad. The only thing I think it hurts is my own brain. I always feel like I’m not working hard enough on both things, because they’re cutting my time. I should be doing more stand-up, or I should be writing more. But in the end, I do think the actual writing and the actual telling jokes complement each other.

You’re not only a writer and a comedian but you’re also a professor with a PhD and a facilitator of book clubs. How do you make time to write?

It’s so embarrassing to talk about time to write, because I find time to do so many things that are stupid. I have watched every reality TV show. I play games on my phone. I’m on level 5,000 of Bubble Spinner. I like those games where you’re connecting blocks. I picked up a poker habit, a hobby. I think of it as my chess. When I don’t write, I’m like: “you have time, bitch. Like, what are you doing?” So, either I set a time limit, or I do a word count, but I don’t make it very high. Someone once told me 250 words is one page on Microsoft Word double-spaced. I always tell myself, write 250 words a day, which is one page, or set a timer for 25 minutes. Then you almost always end up going over.

I’m someone who likes to write in weird places. I wrote most of my debut novel in the Korean Spa, sitting in the jacuzzi with a pad of paper. The papers would start to steam and curl. I’m always trying to take the pressure off—the pressure of needing it to be good, or what’s this going to turn into. So my writing process is always finding a way to trick myself into thinking this is the fun thing, or this is casual. This forced casualness. So, I’m always trying to write in a notebook in a weird place, like the car wash and then rewrite it later on a computer. I do a lot of writing, first in a notebook and then rewriting on a computer.

I think tricking yourself is definitely it. You mentioned you’re a poker player. I hear you’re good. Is writing kind of like gambling?

Well, I think I have an obsessive personality. When I was young, I got obsessed with books, and then when I started stand-up, I got obsessed with stand-up. And it’s kind of like the chicken or the egg. Did I get obsessed with it because I had a little talent in it? Or did I get a little talent in it because I got obsessed with it? I certainly never got obsessed with math, so that’s interesting. I can’t add two numbers together. Poker is fun because there is a gamble to it, but there is also some strategy and some patience required. I’m trying to write something new about poker, a new novel. So I keep telling myself I’m doing research.

My students are always asking, “I want to be a writer, but how would I make a living?” And then I have to say, “well, look at me, you know, I’m teaching you.” And they’re like, “God, you have so many jobs.” But the truth is, if you don’t do the thing that you feel you’re put on earth to do, the thing that sort of sings to your heart…that is the worst gamble, because you will regret it. And so I would rather them try to be a writer and have to work a million stupid day jobs and be pursuing the thing that really makes them feel alive, than not.

Is it possible to make money as a writer today? Do you have any advice for those who want to try?

I guess the question is: “Is it possible to make a living as only a writer?”

Or, “is it possible to make a living in the arts in a way that feels really fun and pleasurable?”

Yes [to the latter], because I do it. Every day, every semester, looks different for me. Sometimes I teach a lot. Sometimes I only teach adults. I run these book clubs. I do stand-up. I make a lot more depending on how I’m touring. If I only wrote, I don’t know…Some people [survive on only their writing] when they become big, big writers, but what I always tell people is you will find a way to do it. You’ll find jobs that speak to your skills, but it’s difficult to find those jobs until you’re in the thick of writing. You can edit rich women’s crazy romance novels. I wouldn’t have found the book club job had I not gotten a PhD. I also want to say the PhD was the best decision I’ve ever made, because they’re paying you to read and write.

Your new novel (I won’t call it a debut because I know you don’t like that word) takes place in LA. It’s super funny and voice driven, narrated by a young writer named Allison who falls for an older infamous radio personality her father idolizes resembling Howard Stern. The novel is also about grief and the narrator’s relationship to her creativity. What made you want to tell this particular story?

I sold the book before it was done on 30 pages, which was really like a short story. I do feel a little bit that I’m a short story writer. In the end, I was under pressure, and I could only write what I could write, which I guess are my interests. I hated that [the protagonist] was a writer who also taught. I found that so embarrassing, because I was like, “I can’t believe you wrote about a character that does what you do, which is writes and teaches,” but I guess in writing that I learned things about how I think about writing and teaching.

I’m a Howard Stern fan, but more so I’m interested in difficult men and their legacy on their daughters and everybody around them. And I thought to myself, what would it be like to have a difficult father who was famous? Howard Stern has daughters, and I’ve always wondered about them and their relationship to their dad’s fame. I thought about my own relationship to my father, whom I love, but who casts a long shadow, and that’s where I entered. And then the twist in the novel…that was stuff I had no intention of writing at first. Every draft became different, and those characters kind of found their way towards each other in later drafts. I always think it’s so dopey when writers are like: the character speaks through me. I think: you’re so lucky that the characters speak through you. I’m working hard over here to make the character do anything. I’m sweating bullets trying to make a character speak.

I know you’re obsessive in a lot of ways—obsessive over your sentences. Why is it so important? Why is it worth obsessing over those sentences?

I’m a sentence level writer and a voice driven writer. I’ve taught a class called Writing Short Fiction where we talk about how other writers have entered short stories. Jennifer Egan talks about entering through setting. Danielle Evans talks about entering through a question. Some writers enter through a plot premise. I just can’t do any of them. I can only ever enter through voice and just write one sentence after one sentence after one sentence after one sentence. If I knew any other way to write, I would. But I simply can’t.

I do think the story is in the sentence. When people ask me, “what makes a book good?” It’s not the plot. It’s always the way the sentences are constructed. The way a sentence might defamiliarize something you thought you knew, like love. I always say that to myself: the story is in the sentence, because I think that’s what makes fiction worth reading, and what makes fiction not TV.

I know I’m reading something great when I’m savoring every sentence, when I actually want to go back and reread the sentences themselves to figure out how they were made.

A mentor I had, I think it was Janet Fitch, used to say, you want to write sentences so good that the reader wants to reread them, but also a plot so good that the reader can’t wait to turn the page.” So, it’s a double pleasure of wanting to reread the sentence, but also turn the page.

What did your book clubs think of your book? Do you even care what they think?

Unfortunately, I care a lot about what these women think. I unfortunately sometimes hear their voices in my head about books that I love. But they often surprise me and make me laugh. [After reading my novel] they kept being like, “that’s not really how you feel about your book clubs, right?” And I was like, “look at the acknowledgments! I wrote something nice about you.”

A few of them were like, “it was a fun read,” which seems like an insult, but I’ll take it, to each their own.

What do you love most about living a creative life?

Every day looks different. Even the stress of it still pleases me because it feels like my life is my own. I have a real fear of getting trapped. I think all my characters, in every short story I write have a certain level of: don’t trap me. I get into trouble because I have problems with self discipline and I need to structure my time better. The fact that my bosses have always changed also pleases me. I’m kind of my own boss. Every job I have is freelance. Not to be corny, even when I complain bitterly all semester about the classes I’m teaching, at the end of the semester, I feel like I could kiss them all. They are so sweet, all my students. I am doing the thing I felt I was put on earth to do, which is a combination of writing and talking and reading. So I really can’t complain too much.

What do you love least about living a creative life?

I do a lot of work for not enough money. I’m overworked and underpaid. Everything scares me about technology and people feeling like readers will enjoy AI books and AI scripts. But I do think, for all of the time that I’ve been alive, and probably all of history, people have been saying publishing is dead. And yet, it persists. So, I try to block out the noise of what people are telling me about the industry ending or the world ending. I don’t even like calling publishing an industry. I just like thinking about books as books. And I’m trying to think of my own writing more as a process as opposed to the result.

Any advice for aspiring writers and comedians who are just starting out?

I think patience is the number one thing. The hardest thing in the world. I remember someone telling me that when I was 23. And I thought to myself, “not for me, by 25 I’m gonna have like three books and 20 short stories.” By 27 I probably had like two good short stories.

Everything just takes a lot of time, and I think you just have to continue. There are more talented people than me who left to become a lawyer, and maybe that was the right decision for them, and they don’t regret it, but I wonder what would have happened if they would have just stayed around. And of course, that requires some innovative ways to make a living but I think you just have to continue.

It’s an endurance test.

There are so many things I do every day that feel like a waste of time, playing on my phone, watching reality TV. Then you lay down at night and you’re just like, where did that time go? But when I spend the time reading books, it feels like time is expanding. It doesn’t waste time. If I never wrote another book, and all I did was read, and I got to the end of my life, it would feel like a life well spent.

So beautiful and true.

Another piece of advice is to get one buddy, or a few buddies…maybe you take a class at UCLA Extension, and you find a few people that you really like, and let those friends carry you through the ups and downs. Send them writing. Do a little writers group where you meet once a month. Or if you’re far away, do a Zoom. I think writing can be a really lonely and solitary endeavor, and it’s really nice to have people to talk to along the way and to read your stuff.

What’s next?

I’m working on a novel about poker. I’m working on two novels at the same time. A historical novel about Vegas, and a contemporary novel about female poker players, and I’m just seeing which one wins. I also just pitched a movie that takes place in Vegas.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Diana Ruzova.