Why the #AmtrakResidency isn’t for me. (But thanks for sharing it with me, everyone on the whole internet.)

Confession: I don’t get the Amtrak writer’s residency thing. I know I’m supposed to be losing my mind over it, as I can clearly see the rest of the internet has. Numerous people have shared the link with me, excitedly pointing to this as possibly the best thing the internet has ever produced for me. And I’m just not interested.

Sorry! It’s totally cool that everyone else is, but here’s why I, a full-time, professional writer, won’t be applying:

• It feeds the There’s No Time to Write myth. I’ve thoroughly explored my anti-#AmtrakResidency feelings, and I believe this is the nerve it most strikes with me: it feeds the myth that the only reason some writers don’t write is that there is just no time. No excuse. No break from reality to cultivate the magical environment in which the miracle of writing breaks forth from the writer’s intellectual womb.

Oh my gosh. Writing isn’t that romantic. It’s a thing you make time to do when you want to do it badly enough. Carlos Eire write Waiting for Snow in Havana in the middle of the night. Some writers wake up at 5am. Some writers use all of their sick days on writing days. Writers make time for writing, they don’t wait around for a free train ride to do it.

• 

  It’s not really travel. Travel can be an inspiration for writing, yes. But to me, the inspiring part about travel is, you know, the place you’re traveling to. Being there. Not passing it by. As I understand it, the first person to pilot this program took a train to New York City, got off the train and immediately got back on another for the return trip. Is that travel? Or is that being locked in a tiny room with interesting windows for several days? As if writers don’t spend enough time forgetting to stretch our legs.

• The cost/benefit analysis doesn’t work in my favor. If I wanted to take a train from Ann Arbor to New Orleans and back, it could cost me between $300 and $1,000 depending on the accommodations. Now, Amtrak appears to be offering writers the $1,000 option, but giving me something with a market value of $1,000 doesn’t make up for the week of lost work were I actually setting aside my day-to-day assignments to stare dreamily out the window and work on my creative pursuits. I could very easily ignore all paying work for a week at home where I have a shower and walking around outside is an option.

• There are cooler ways it could work If Amtrak was taking applications for writers to hop on and make money writing engaging stories along the way, that would be cool. Maybe they could have partnered with publishers who need stories that would work well with that kind of travel. Without that kind of incentive, a working writer is likely too busy, you know, being paid to write things to take time off and write things for free.

• Writing isn’t a romantic getaway. It’s a job. Okay, maybe I’m just laying bare one of my insecurities as a writer here. I know there are plenty of accountants and nurses and engineers who have a novel inside of them, and this would be the perfect thing for them to jumpstart it. That’s not the kind of writer that typically includes the term on their taxes. I wouldn’t be able to file 100% of my income under NAICS code 711510 if riding around on a train for free played any role in what I do for a living. Maybe we just don’t have enough words for “writer,” and this Amtrak residency is a better fit for the accountant/writer than the tax filing writer. I suppose some sort of writer person should make up some new words to better describe herself or something.

It took me a long time to cobble this post together, because while the Amtrak residency might no be my thing, being a killjoy isn’t either. I do, however, feel the writers of the world who make time every single day to write, in their own unromantic homes and offices, and manage to make a living doing so, deserve to have someone point out that we’re not truly so hard up that getting a free trip to nowhere makes us salivate.

There is nothing nefarious about what Amtrak is doing, and it’s making a lot of people very giddy, so good for them. It was a response to a suggestion from writers, so you can hardly blame the train people for making the most of a real time marketing opportunity.

If Amtrak wanted to give me a free ride somewhere, I’m not saying I wouldn’t take it. But I would definitely insist that I would get to go somewhere though, at least for a few days. That would be a real perk for a working writer with no vacation days. I’d even write on the train on the way there, just like I wrote in the car yesterday as my husband drove us back from a weekend in North Carolina. Because that’s what I do. Every day. From anywhere. No free ticket needed.