I write in the margins of existence. Between shifts. During bus rides. In the quiet hours when my neighbors finally stop screaming or blaring out the trash they call music. My laptop’s held together with duct tape and stubborn hope, but the words still flow. They have to. They’re the only currency I have.
There’s something particularly cruel about invisibility in an economy of attention. I stare at my myriad unpublished works: a screenplay yearning for production, my Great American Novel manuscript, my poetry collection whose rhythmic icebergs have barely been uttered in public. Though general reactions to my work are mixed-to-good, it’s getting them off the cutting room floor that remains an elusive and mercurial pursuit.
My words lay scattered across digital garages and graveyards: Substack posts that rack up three likes and seventeen views, Letterboxd reviews seen by almost no one, long-tweets bookmarked a few times by names I’ll never know. I wonder what separates me from those who’ve made it. Not talent; at least that’s what I whisper to myself at three a.m. when the rent’s due and my bank account looks like a death sentence.
When French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu developed his theory of cultural capital in the 1970s, he couldn’t have anticipated how perfectly it would describe 2025’s literary landscape. His framework—economic capital (money), social capital (connections), and cultural capital (knowledge, education, and taste)—amounts to the three-headed gatekeeper guarding the kingdom of literary success.
I study Bourdieu at the public library where I stay warm in winter and cool in summer. I have no MFA degree. My education is borrowed books and shared Wi-Fi. My writing workshop was the comment section of literary magazines that never responded to my submissions.
This self-education began years ago when, after a rejection letter arrived on thick cream paper, an extravagance that struck me immediately. “While your work shows promise,” it read, “we feel it would benefit from further development.” The journal held my essay for eleven months before deciding it needed “further development.” In those eleven months, I worked as a warehouse stocker, a freelance copywriter, and briefly, a telemarketer. I had also couch-surfed for two months, which was honestly a better state of affairs than I’d been through prior. (Don’t ask how I survived my homeless youth).
Last night, I attended a reading at an independent bookstore downtown, an old factory converted into a multi-use space with exposed brick and industrial lighting. The featured writer was promoting his second essay collection about growing up working-class in Pennsylvania. He now teaches creative writing at Columbia.
During the Q&A, someone asked about “writing from margin to center,” and he spoke eloquently about the importance of working-class voices in literature. He used phrases like “authentic experience” and “representing the underrepresented.” The crowd nodded in solemn agreement.
I waited in the signing line afterward, not with his book (which I couldn’t afford) but with a question. When we faced each other across the signing table, I asked how he managed to write while working full-time before he “made it.” He smiled wistfully and told me about waking up at five a.m. to write before his machine shop shift . “Those were hard times,” he said, “but there’s something pure about creating art under those conditions.”
I didn’t tell him I currently work 50 hours a week between two jobs. I didn’t tell him that I write on my phone during my bus commute because I’m too exhausted to sit at a computer when I get home. I didn’t tell him that there’s nothing pure about it. That I resent how it’s the only option available to me.
What I wanted to say was: Your working-class identity has become part of your brand, but my working-class reality prevents me from having a brand at all. Instead, I thanked him and left.
In 1929, Virginia Woolf argued that a woman needs “money and a room of her own” to write fiction. Almost a century later, I think about this as I try to type while my roommate’s boyfriend plays Call of Duty in our shared living space. I think about it when I calculate whether I can afford to take a day off to focus on a submission deadline. I think about it when I read about writing retreats in upstate New York or rural Vermont that cost more than my monthly rent.
The idea that great art emerges from suffering has always struck me as a myth perpetuated by those who’ve never had to choose between buying groceries and paying the electric bill. Suffering doesn’t make my writing better; it makes it harder to produce at all.
A recent National Endowment for the Arts study found that artists from low-income backgrounds are five times less likely to persist in creative careers than those from middle- or upper-class backgrounds. The reason isn’t talent or drive, it’s the absence of what sociologists call “the financial runway” necessary for creative risk-taking. I’ve never had a runway. I’ve only had a cliff’s edge and the constant threat of falling.
My great-aunt Ginny was a storyteller who never wrote anything down—she couldn’t, really, beyond the basics—but she had an encyclopedic memory for family histories, neighborhood scandals, and folk remedies. Her stories weren’t structured like the essays I study in literary journals. They meandered, doubled back on themselves, and often ended without clear resolution.
“That’s how real life is,” she’d say when I complained about the lack of endings. “It never really ends until you do.” The writer-director Orson Welles once said, in an interview with Mark Estrin, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” Clearly, where we choose to focus, and to stop focusing, holds great power over the narratives we believe.Ginny cleaned houses for forty years. Her hands were perpetually red and cracked from cleaning chemicals. When I was ten, she took me with her to a job at a professor’s house because my mom was working a double shift. While Ginny scrubbed toilets, I wandered into the professor’s study and discovered floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I ran my fingers along the spines, pulling out volumes at random, smelling the pages.
When the professor came home early and found me reading Steinbeck’s The Pearl,, he seemed amused, even charmed. He asked what I thought and I told him it reminded me of my great-aunt’s stories. He nodded thoughtfully and said, “That’s because Steinbeck understood ordinary people.”
Later, as we walked to the bus stop, Ginny asked what I’d talked about with “the fancy man.” When I told her, she laughed. “Ordinary people,” she repeated. “As if there’s any other kind.”
I think about this exchange often. The professor saw my great-aunt as material for a Steinbeck novel. A noble, struggling worker whose life contained literary lessons. Ginny saw herself as a person living her life. And perhaps that’s the fundamental disconnect between those who write about working-class experiences from the outside and those who live them from within.
I’ve been told I need to “build a platform.” As if my words aren’t enough. As if what I have to say matters less than how many people I can convince to listen. The math of modern writing: your worth equals your following divided by how easily you can be categorized and sold.
My Twitter account, @edokwin, had around 1900 followers in fall 2025. I occasionally post about my work, including a rare excerpt from something in progress. I share observations about the literary world, and occasionally, desperate pleas to the void for freelance work.
Meanwhile, a writing workshop acquaintance—a trust fund kid with a graduate degree from Iowa—recently sold her debut essay collection for a six-figure advance. The collection explores “themes of identity and belonging.” Her platform? A well-curated Instagram account with 50,000 followers, carefully documenting her writing journey with photos of latte art and manuscript pages marked with simple, artful edits.
I don’t begrudge her success, but I can’t help noticing how financial freedom allowed her to craft not just her writing but her entire writerly persona. She built a following while I built furniture at a warehouse. She could afford to take unpaid literary magazine internships that generated valuable connections. She could attend conferences and workshops where editors scout new talent. The playing field isn’t just uneven; it’s like we’re competing in different sports altogether.
In The Hidden Injuries of Class, sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb describe how working-class individuals internalize their social position as a personal failing rather than a structural inequality. They develop what the authors call “a structure of self-blame.” that attributes their lack of success to individual shortcomings rather than systemic barriers.
I recognize this pattern in myself. Despite intellectually understanding the socioeconomic factors that shape literary success, I still wake up some mornings convinced that I simply haven’t worked hard enough. That if I just wrote better, if I just submitted more widely, if I just networked more effectively, then I would break through. This is, of course, the most insidious aspect of ideological meritocracy. It convinces those excluded from success that their exclusion is deserved.
I stay up late some nights reading the author bios of literary magazines—“So-and-so lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their rescue dog,” “Such-and-such is a graduate of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing at [insert university],” “This writer splits her time between Paris and New Orleans”—each bio, a map to a world I certainly can’t access.
Meanwhile, my bio would read: “Quinn Que writes between shifts at a warehouse and a coffee shop. They live with three roommates in an apartment of questionable structural integrity. They are perpetually one emergency away from financial ruin. Their work has appeared nowhere you would recognize.”
Last month, I published an essay piece in a small online journal. The payment was $0, but I did get “exposure”: that lovely thing many publications or corporations pride themselves on doling out. Elsewhere in the ‘zine was a feature that explored the concept of “literary citizenship,” the unspoken expectation that writers should support literary culture by buying books, attending readings, and subscribing to journals. I wonder if they think this holds true even when the writers can barely support themselves.
As for my essay? It generated some discussion, mainly in the comment section of the publication itself. I think I got a few Twitter follows as well. It was a brief, bright moment of visibility. An editor from a more prestigious journal followed me and liked several of my tweets. For a few days, I refreshed my notifications compulsively, hoping for a DM that never came. Then the algorithm shifted, attention moved elsewhere, and I returned to invisibility.
In Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters, the noted critic suggests literary culture has always been exclusionary by design. What has changed, she argues, is not the exclusion itself but the surrounding pretensions. Where once editors and publishing houses might have taken pride in exclusiveness, now they must present a carefully maintained illusion of inclusion. They insist that talent alone determines success, and highlight all their efforts to find “underrepresented writers.” I wonder where they’re looking, given how they keep finding bougie folks.
I think about this when I read interviews with successful authors who claim they succeeded simply by “persevering” or “believing in themselves.” These narratives strip away all context—the family support, the educational advantages, the social connections—to present literary success as the inevitable result of hard work meeting talent.
The reality is more complex and less comforting. A Data USA study from 2022 found that over 52% of published writers had advanced degrees, compared to 11% for the general population. More than half come from families where at least one parent had a college degree. These aren’t just interesting statistics; they’re the structural foundations of literary inequality.
I’ve begun to wonder if my writing itself—the content, style, and subjects I’m drawn to—is shaped by my class position in ways I don’t fully understand. Would I write differently if I’d attended an elite MFA program? Would my sentences be more polished, my references more erudite, my tone more assured? Or would something essential be lost?
In this industry, the hope is what keeps you going when logic says quit. The audacity of my writing is that it refuses to be anything but what it is: unpolished, uncompromising, and utterly mine.
I am not a difficult writer. I am a writer who exists in difficult circumstances. My protagonists aren’t unlikable; they’re surviving. My stories aren’t dark for effect; they’re dark because the light costs extra. And even in spite of all that, I still love happy endings, perhaps just because I learned where to stop the story.
Yet my own story must continue. Each morning, I open a blank document. Each night, I send another submission. Not because I’m a Pollyana or an indefatigable believer, but because I don’t know how to stop. Writing isn’t something I do, it’s who I am. Even if, or when, nobody’s reading.
Maybe that’s what separates me from those who’ve “made it.” Not the talent or the discipline or even the luck, but that others have the luxury of seeing writing as a career rather than a compulsion. For me, writing has never been about building a platform or developing a brand or constructing a career. It’s been about bearing witness to a life, several actually. Some imagined, many others all too real.
So I submit my writing again. And again. Each time believing the impossible: that someone will see the value in how I view the world. That my voice matters not because of who I know or where I studied, but because of what I have to say.
Perhaps this time. Perhaps this place. Perhaps one honorarium could change everything. Or perhaps nothing will change except that one more person will have read my words. Sometimes, I think that’s enough to tide me over.
In her essay “The Death of the Moth,” Virginia Woolf observes a common moth fighting against death, batting against a windowpane in a futile struggle for life. She writes, “the same energy which inspired the rooks, the ploughmen, the horses, and even, it seemed, the lean bare-backed downs, sent the moth fluttering from side to side of his square of the window-pane. One could not help watching him.”
I am that moth, perhaps. Beating my wings against the transparent barriers of class and connection and cultural capital. The struggle isn’t noble or pure or redeeming. It’s just necessary. And perhaps, to someone watching from the other side of the glass, it’s even worth witnessing.
