Medallion Status by John Hodgman

Author:John Hodgman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

RECEPTIONIST

The job I got after college was at a literary agency. It fit a number of good-job criteria that I have already established. For one, it was in a beautiful building that I liked walking up to. Specifically, it was in an old brownstone on Twenty-Sixth Street in Manhattan that had once been a private bank. It was built to house part of the fortune of John Jacob Astor, and it had a walk-in safe with a comically huge and heavy door with a big dial on it. I enjoyed hauling that huge door open and standing in the silent weight of that thick-walled room. It used to safeguard stacks of cash, but now those steel cubbies guarded only unpublished novels, the most worthless paper in the world. It was fun to actually stand in the midst of literal literary irony.

My first job at the agency was to sit at the front desk. I would answer and route telephone calls and sort and distribute faxes. It was a different sort of traffic counting. But it was warm and sheltered (another good job criterion) and I got to sit in a beautiful tiled outer lobby with a gigantic fern that conveyed sophistication. I mentioned there were faxes, because I am old. There was also paper mail. Every day would bring submissions, book proposals, sometimes whole novels printed and boxed and bound and sent blindly by some aspiring author somewhere. Each was a desperate dream. If they weren’t addressed to a specific agent, it was my job to read and evaluate them.

It takes a lot to write a novel. You can’t just talk about what your job was when you were twenty-two or whatever. You have to make up a whole world from your head, and because first novels are only sold once they are fully written, that requires time and anxiety and the impossible faith that anyone cares. Notice how I have never done it: not even I am that narcissistic. It’s an extra cruelty to unpublished novelists that the result of all this labor would be put in my hands, a twenty-two-year-old receptionist, to count like so many turning cars and almost universally reject.

That said, most of these submissions were terrible. I realized from reading them that it takes the same amount of effort to write a good novel as a bad one, and you really don’t know which kind you’ve written until you’re done. Writing a novel is a terrible job, but if you absolutely have to do it, here is the only writing advice I ever give: It is not enough to write what you know. You have to know interesting things. You have to get out there and learn them. That’s where having had a bunch of jobs comes in handy.

I only ever passed along two books to actual agents for consideration. One was a business book called How to Load Good Trucks. It was about loading pallets into trucks efficiently, and how that could be a metaphor for executive management techniques.

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