John Hodgman ‘Wired’ Interview

via christmasgorilla

And it became only traumatic when I left college and went to New York City to get into book publishing and realized that apparently there were a lot of people who had studied literature and English who came to New York to follow a romantic dream of being a writer and/or editor and/or book publisher of some kind. Simple supply and demand, which I later learned about, dictated that those people did not get paid an awful lot. I ended up working as a receptionist at a literary agency in a beautiful old brownstone, primarily because it was in a beautiful old brownstone and it matched my mental image of what a publishing house should be. I found that to be a perfect intersection of my theoretical fondness for theoretical literature, and also my inherent laziness. Which is to say I like writing a lot, but I don’t like writing a lot.

Wired: That’s a real writer.

Hodgman: Sure. But I didn’t know that at the time. I just felt conflicted. But I enjoyed working with writers and bringing, you know, people who have the, I don’t know, the ability to actually string words into sentences that I found interesting and beautiful were very exciting to me. Because it sort of felt like they were doing it so I didn’t have to. And I realized pretty early on that as an editor or, as I learned what an agent did, as an agent, I could help other writers and gain a lot of satisfaction out of that without having to actually do any writing of my own. It just seemed to make sense to follow the agency path because, you know, you got a piece of the action. And I had become immediately and very nervously aware of the need for capital.

Wired: New York will do that to you.

Hodgman: New York and a rather undisciplined and fairly stupid understanding of how credit cards work. So, I became a literary agent’s assistant and then started representing authors who I really liked. The other thing I figured out was that I was not alone in the world in the desire to write books. Everyone wants to write a book. Very few people are able to do it.

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