Through Hell & Helvetica: A Writer's Wail

In writing about writing, Max Favetti excavates his own creative process – inadvertently offering scraps of solace to the other ‘head-banging-against-wall’ creatives out there.

Illustration by Steve Bachmayer @steve_bachmayer

“The thing is Max, you probably won’t make it.”

I wasn’t going to argue with him. For one, he was the skipper of the ship, two, he and his wife had just loaned me four thousand dollars and, three, (given the odds) he was right. It was the summer I decided to pursue writing as a career and by the second week of June, drunk at the stern of a sailboat bobbing in the Mediterannean, I’d encountered my first hurdle. It wasn’t disparagement coming from the captain’s mouth, nor reverse psychology, but a sober characterisation of the path before me. I was riding high on the fumes of my first published short story, a submission the editor described as “Victorian flash porn”, set in the Devonian countryside. That’s not to say I didn’t consider the skipper’s words, it’s just that it’s hard to be clear-eyed about your life choices, drunk at the stern of a sailboat bobbing in the Mediterranean. Had I known of the years that lay ahead in this idealistic undertaking, I might’ve googled “tattoo removal Corfu’’, and prepared for a life of short back and sides. 

My newfound venture began not long after a failed visa attempt had ejected me from the literary epicentre of London and plonked me in the second-best city for an aspiring English-language novelist: Amsterdam. And so, it was there I went, sunburnt and full of pluck, impatient to prove a certain sailor wrong. I donned my version of employable attire (galaxy tights, pastel Docs, a purple silk Commes des Garcons shirt) and went knocking on the door of every production company and publication office in the city. A pattern soon emerged wherein an employee would open the door slightly, revealing half an apathetic face. “Hi! How are you?!” I’d squeal, transmitting a gaiety I’d hoped was infectious. After suffering my succinct Girl Scout pitch, they’d take my CV with a limp hand and shut the door before I could finish a “thank you.” It wasn’t long before the overt eye roll of a dejected Dutch receptionist held the same affection as a French kiss. 

When my phone never rang, I decided to turn to emails which, upon review, went a bit too far in their attempt to stick out of the pile. One application was sent in the format of a scripted monologue that included the line “when unemployed, instant noodle induced diarrhea is a constant state of being.” I followed up another with “... should my candidacy have been considered and decided against, Kathy, let slip the dogs of war to have their way with me and I shall repack my entrails and continue on.” Eventually, I gave up. But the diarrhea line was genuine, so I took a job at a vintage shop, chipping away at my writing in between fits of self-righteous indignation at having to fold corduroy flares for €9.25 an hour. 

Dilma Rousseff endured weeks of torture in a Sao Paolo prison by telling herself she could take it in morsels of time, for two minutes, then five more minutes, because: “you can’t fathom enduring a whole day, that’s an eternity, so you trick yourself.” Look, my feet weren’t being electrocuted, but I was living my life by fragments of the clock, assured that this was temporary, because to fathom that it wasn’t meant I wasn’t good enough. As months turned into a year, the slow trickle of “no, thanks” from editors and literary agents to my manuscript became my Chinese water torture, the droplets ringing in my head, wringing out my sense of self. I’ve read Naked Lunch and Just Kids, so I knew going into this there’d be a bit of smack and despair, but it’s hard to remind yourself how cool missing rent will read in Helvetica when you’re defecating blood.  

“I’d been under the smug impression that since I’ve decided what I want to be, I was owed a kind of affirmation from the Universe. I was confident that by uncovering my true passion, I’d done the heavy lifting and my id would take it from there. I’d autopilot through the onerous odyssey of failure and refinement then take control in time for book signings and royalty cheques.”

Another fruitless year passed and the swell of failure that once churned on the horizon of my ego was now cresting close to shore. It was the depths of winter and my partner and I had €18 between us with weeks to find a flat (having broken the lease early on the one we could no longer afford). We were doing the tight-lipped, twitchy-cheeked pantomime of placidity couples do for each other mid-crisis. While on another feckless job hunt, I broke the pedals of the rickety bike she relied on to get to work and pushed it creaking to the nearest shop. The pleasant pot-bellied mechanic quoted the perfectly reasonable repair cost of €20, then gave a quizzical smile as I excused myself, turned on a dime and dashed for the cold air in an effort to stem the tide. My face felt hot when I pressed the phone to my ear, only becoming aware of whom I was calling once I heard my father’s voice. And the wave broke. I went to speak, but the air was thumped from my chest, causing me to suck in desperately, my diaphragm contracting a primal staccato. “I don’t ... know ... what to ... do, Dad” came out in the spurts my lungs allowed. It’s a dyspneic state I’d been in only once before, two decades previous, gasping beneath a mosquito net in Mengwi, after learning of my parents’ divorce. As I sobbed on the snowy streets of Amsterdam, my father did what my mother had done then: soothed in the tone only those two can coo. I had hit rock bottom, and it was only February 2020. 

It’s uniquely difficult to stave off insanity under lockdown when your art-student girlfriend is hand-tufting a carpet the size of The Night Watch by Rembrandt in your living room. It’s not that getting to watch the woman I love fulfil her creative promise to this world one thread at a time isn’t majestic, it just means I must enter a polyarmorous relationship with her and the carpet. I must be there to commiserate with her when the carpet’s slackening canvas rebuffs her yarn advances. We must dissect the meaning of her carpet dreams over morning coffee. I must stroke the carpet when it becomes embittered by all the poking and prodding. This union between man, woman and rug has been a welcome distraction from what I should be doing. After two years, I’ve been rounding the final bend on this manuscript for a bit too long now – a delay made all the more indefensible given the world itself stood still for me to finish it. To endure a period of such personal anguish that I liken it to torture, then be nursed back to health by the salvational bosum of the Dutch welfare state and not have completed the next Normal People, feels like a transgression against ... well … everyone. 

And God no! I don’t mean the literary world is suffering unawares for not publishing my take on heartbreak, bulimia and soft boi doctrine – I mean everyone that props me up in my pursuance of it. I mean the sister that covers my bond, the brother that flies me home, the mother that answers me from within, the father that shields me from without. I mean the best friend that burst into tears at a dinner party just envisioning the paperback sitting on a shelf. I mean the girlfriend that puts up with something infinitely worse than the temperament of a starved struggling artist: an entitled aspiring writer. And I think more than anyone, I mean that bloody skipper.  

I’d been under the smug impression that since I’ve decided what I want to be, I was owed a kind of affirmation from the Universe. I was confident that by uncovering my true passion, I’d done the heavy lifting and my id would take it from there. I’d autopilot through the onerous odyssey of failure and refinement then take control in time for book signings and royalty cheques. But after a while of waiting for intergalactic ordination I began to panic – and as I’m approaching my thirties I purchased the requisite Masterclass subscription.

As snowstorm ‘Darcy’ (who the fuck’s in charge?), pummels my bedroom window, a lisped essayist lectures from my laptop screen, cautioning against pop culture references or building an article around a laugh. The course is full of comical, teaching anecdotes, but when you’re scouring the internet for answers, it’s hard to chuckle through gritted teeth. Like any artist, there is within me a crushing, sadomasochistic self-doubt. So when he gives me permission to be harder on myself than anyone else in my writing, I conveniently misplace the safeword for my psyche. It’s quite something to be left in the silence of this endless downtime, only to learn what fills that quiet is inaction, anger and the voice of David Sedaris. 

That anger has dulled in recent times, as the Universe doesn’t have a PR guy to spit it at and any catharsis to be had in beating my effigy is lost to the uncanny valley. What now takes prominence are not the guttural yelps of insecurity, but the mature baritone of cynicism, reciting the life where things don’t quite get there. Where I learn it takes 36 months to put a pipe dream to bed. Where I consider Sally Rooney a peer in my head alone. 

Where all I have to cheer is the return to a fibrous diet and reclamation of a healthy stool. 

Forging onward down this path has troughs that sink deeper with the slow-rolling treacle of time. My exasperation has been compounded to the point of desperation, leading to manic attempts at breaking the banal subsistence of paycheck to meagre paycheck. In one such episode, I entered my own microcosm as the Wolf of Me Street, with less suppository cocaine and more sedentary sweating. I tried to ride a rising cryptocurrency with my three digit savings, only to see it obliterated in a crash 48 hours later. 

“You’re so privileged to be a writer,” Sedaris says to me from the boujie backstage set, “because normal people, something bad happens to them and there’s nothing they can do with it except feel bad, or complain, or press charges.” 

After a consummate mope over my bank balance, I inspected the wreckage wrought by my gamble in the hope of unearthing one redeemable lesson. I ended up finding two. I did it because I was petrified of another nervous breakdown triggered by a bargain bike bill. And I did it because I was looking for a shortcut through life. Don’t get me wrong, shortcuts can be superb – take dry shampoo or Valium – but we know deep down when we’re taking the shoddy kind, like alleviating loneliness with chronic masturbation. Instead of realising my potential, I expected the Universe to affirm it for me. How grateful I am now for the mute indifference that I have been met with instead, and the pain I know in its place.  

Now if you’ll excuse me, I still have to prove a certain sailor wrong (and should you be a literary agent interested in my manuscript, you can reach me at max.favetti@gmail.com).