Writing Beyond the Masterpiece: Thomas Mar Wee On Embodying the Unromantic Writer
Thomas Mar Wee arrived in New York City the way so many of us do: young, idealistic, overwhelmed by the bold energy of artists building, creating, and owning their artistic identity. Raised in the near suburbs of Chicago, Thomas's work is inspired by their hometown and the stories of their family.
I sat down with Thomas, currently an MFA candidate at Hunter College, in my living room on one of the coldest days in January: gray and blustery, as barges floated up and down the Hudson below us. We’d brushed shoulders at Columbia, where we both were editors for the school’s literary magazine, and we got to know one another once again over a pot of tea.
“There is this false impression that the finished product comes out fully formed and perfect when, in reality, it’s more likely that the finished product is draft fifty, and the writer was living in their car before the book got published.”
ELIZABETH: In your own words, could you introduce yourself both to me and to the reader and share who you are and what your artistic practice is?
THOMAS: My name is Thomas. I'm from outside Chicago, and I’ve lived in New York since 2017, when I moved here for college. I have been writing since I was a kid, and I have slowly realized that I want to try and make that into a career. It’s been a really long process of convincing myself to actually try to follow through with that realization.
I am at Hunter College for their fiction program. It's my first year. I am also freelancing and doing a bunch of random stuff, but I have worked as a barista, I have worked in publishing, tutored, been an assistant for people, worked a bunch of part-time odd jobs. Ideally, I'd be writing and working as an editor and a critic—working with people focused on consuming art, talking about art, writing about art, and producing art.
Living here [in New York City] has been such a boon for all of that. I came here, and people were really serious about creating. They would be, you know, twenty or something and making a magazine or shooting a film. Meeting a bunch of people like that made me realize that I could actually take writing seriously. Something I love but that can also be annoying about living here is that people are very honest and often unashamed to be nakedly ambitious. I slowly picked up on some of that, and now I am less ashamed to be like “yeah, I’m a writer, even if you’ve never read my work.”
ELIZABETH: I totally get that, and, as someone who also grew up in Chicago, I do think Chicago is the city that pushed me into falling in love with writing. I think I would have fallen in love with writing no matter what, but for me, growing up within and around the Chicago DIY scene and seeing people create in a way that was fun, enjoyable, and feasible gave me the bug to do it myself. But, of course, Chicago is also a more affordable city than New York.
I would love to hear more about what parts of your growing up in Chicago instilled a desire to be a writer within you. How were you able to carry that with you in New York?
THOMAS: I think back really fondly on that experience of coming into myself in Chicago. I was very shy about wanting to be a writer. I had one friend who is still one of my closest friends—Ruby. She‘s a little bit older—we met in high school. She was the first person I knew who was like, “I am a writer.”
Ruby was really serious about writing in a way that was completely foreign to me. I went to a big public high school and there were a lot of people doing a lot of different things. I felt that I was in the middle of a divide–I was hanging out with people who were kind of considered burnouts and people who were extremely driven in a specific, academic way. There wasn’t much room for anything in between or just pursuing art very seriously.
Growing up, a lot of my friends were really serious about music, and that was the scene I found myself in. I was in band—I played clarinet and saxophone—and entered into a tiny DIY scene that was sort of spillover from Chicago. I met people who were more focused on school and people who weren’t but were still very dedicated and talented.
I definitely have the school bug. I still wanted to go to school, but I also always wished I could be the kind of person who was set on going to a conservatory or something. I had this one friend who dropped out of music school, and now they’re in this band that has gotten very big. They are touring the world. I’ll shout them out, the band is Friko. I bring them up because they are a Chicago success story. They were working very hard for a very long time, but they had a community in a scene that was small enough and really supportive, and they could get big in their hometown and then expand outward. There are plenty stories of that happening here [in New York], but I think it is harder.
For me, the point of origin when I realized I could be a writer was meeting my friend Ruby. She was like, “oh, you’re a writer? What do you write?”
At that point, I was writing fantasy and, honestly, fan fiction. Stuff that I did not take seriously. It was also so private. I was pretending to be this stoner music guy, but I was really going home and writing. Ruby was the first person who took that seriously. She was older and had a whole sensibility that I hadn’t been exposed to. It helped that she was older. She went to college ahead of me, and she came back and exposed me to all of this stuff that I was initially put off by. She would be like “here’s Kathy Acker, here’s Proust, you need to read this book, Thomas,” and the book was Swann’s Way.
I was like “why is this guy just writing about his mom for like fifty pages?” And then it became one of my favorite books by one of my favorite writers. Ruby was the first person I knew who took herself seriously.
I went to college, and I wanted to come to New York because I had swallowed up all these romantic notions of going to New York. I had seen movies, read books, and I thought I was going to live with the Beats or something.
ELIZABETH: Oh yeah, I thought I was going to go to CBGB every night.
Thomas: And then you realize that basically all of those places are gone, yeah? But you can kind of still do that, you can live in that spirit, but it looks really different. You’re living some degraded 21st-century version of it. I came here for college and honestly was really intimidated. Back home, in high school, I was a bigger fish in a smaller pond. Then, I came here, and I felt like everyone else already knew what they were doing.
I kind of retreated for a while, honestly. I was an English major, but I took some writing classes, and I think I had to slowly accept that writing was actually what I wanted to do. I had to accept that it wasn’t going to be easy, and I wasn’t expecting to be good enough to achieve anything–I knew what the odds were, and I had no illusions of selling my work early on. I knew that it was going to be years and years to even get a little bit of something in return from my writing.
I graduated, and I was really lost. It was Covid, and I didn’t know what to do. This is where publishing came in. I thought, “ok, I really love writing and editing and being an editor on [student-run literary magazine] The Columbia Review.” I loved the collaborative aspect of it, the ability to talk about writing all day. I was naive–I thought “this is a job, a career.”
Then, I realized it was a lot more complicated and harder to get into publishing than I thought. So I applied to MFA programs, and I got waitlisted and then did not get in. I was like, “what am I going to do now?”
I found my way into the small magazine world. I got really lucky. I got what is called an apprenticeship at this magazine, One Story. They were so supportive in such a tangible way. I think some of these magazines, their heart is in the right place, and they want to support young people in publishing, but then all they have is an unpaid internship, and they promise to write you a letter of recommendation after the internship.
I had graduated, and I needed to pay my rent. One Story gave me enough money so that I could at least pay my rent. And then, I was working as a barista on top of that. Now, I am in grad school for writing. I had a period where I was working a nine to five at a literary agency, but now I am returning to that life of having the writing thing and then working a totally unrelated job in the service industry. I feel I’ve experienced both worlds of stability in the nine to five and the perks that come with that and working part-time and non-salaried jobs.
ELIZABETH: So many of our peers at The Columbia Review went into publishing because the magazine was a publishing world feeder. I remember in college, I so badly wanted to be in publishing. I was like, “I’m a writer, I want to be a part of this world,” and then I realized the number of hoops you have to go through even to get your foot in the door, and you’re making $30,000 a year without the guarantee of progressing. It’s so cutthroat and, also, it felt very stagnant. In a way, that was very frightening to me.
You’ve managed to take the experience of not getting into grad school, and now you have gotten into a program. I would love to know what made you decide to give grad school another go and how you made it work this time–whether it was luck or something else–and why you chose the program you chose?
Thomas: The short answer is that I was getting burnt out at my job. I graduated in 2021, I applied to one program, I got waitlisted, and it was a drawn-out, anxiety-inducing process. It felt like my whole future hinged on one decision beyond my control. And then I didn’t get it, it was like “oh shit, I didn’t get the thing I wanted, it didn’t work out,” and I did not know what to do next.
The publishing industry, right now, it’s not like in the “old days.” That’s a romantic view, but you used to hear stories of people who would show up at Penguin and be like “I’m bright, I’m a 21-year-old English major,” and they’re like “oh come on in!” That just doesn’t happen anymore.
I did three unpaid internships. I was home for part of that. In my senior year, I won an award for my thesis, and that was a strangely large amount of money that came from the English department and allowed me to finance a summer in New York while working an unpaid internship. One thing led to another. I was very lucky, and it also took a long time to get an entry-level job in the publishing industry. I got a job that felt like it was my dream job. It was at an agency that represented so many writers I loved. I got there, and I was like “oh my God, this is the rest of my life,” you know? I was riding high for a long time. And then, suddenly it came crashing down.
I realized what the day-to-day looks like. It was intense. I don’t want to burn bridges here because I had an incredibly valuable experience. At the same time, I realized this place was kind of notorious for being extremely intense, and the people who succeeded were willing to sacrifice a lot and dedicate their entire lives to being an agent. I admire my colleagues who are these selfless servants, to the art of getting books made. I think part of that requires almost a lack of ego, a lack of urge to produce writing, you know what I mean? You purely see yourself as an instrument. I realized, “oh my God, this could be the rest of my life,” and it was terrifying.
I saw people working at the agency who started right out of college 20-30 years ago. The type of agency I was at is rare nowadays, you really can be there for your whole career, which doesn’t really happen anymore. You always hear about editors leaving because the pay is shit, and they are stuck in this giant corporate structure shoved around, pushed out, forced into retirement. It felt like we were kind of a tiny ship in a crazy sea of publishing, which in some ways was lucky. We were independent a little bit from the rise and fall of the market.
I also knew that if I put in my time and worked there for the next ten years, financially I would not be making a huge increase. I found out that my colleagues weren’t making what seemed like much more than I was making, and they had been there for years longer, and they were full agents. The financial incentive was not that strong—you really have to buy into it. You really have to believe you are helping books get out there. The cool thing was, I believed in the work. But the day-to-day demands were intense, and honestly I wasn’t the best at it. I was good, even really good, at certain parts, but I was not the best.
I had a lot of hand wringing thinking I wasn’t smart enough, or good enough. Through the support of my friends and my loved ones, I realized I was good at some things. Maybe not at this specific kind of extreme version of work, but I was good. I was writing as an escape from the job. It was hard because the work was intense, but I needed something else. I think my self-esteem needed me to create something that wasn’t tied to my job.
There were days I would go in, I would mess something up, and I would think I was worthless. Then I’d go home and write. I’d begun a novel before I started, and I was able to finish a draft while I was at the agency. I think that gave me confidence—I felt I had at least a solid first draft, and at least I had finished something. I realized I could continue working on something long enough to see it through, at least for a first draft.
I kept applying to MFA programs after graduating. The third time I applied, I got in. I applied to three programs that third time around because applications are expensive and time-consuming. There are plenty of programs that are happy to take your money, and in some ways, I am skeptical of them. I think they are asking you to pay for something that does not promise a guaranteed return. I think there is something predatory about that. Of course some are more like this than others. But it’s impossible for an MFA to ask for tens of thousands of dollars and promise to get you published afterwards. That’s not how it works.
So, I applied to programs that were fully funded. For my own financial situation, that was a necessity. It narrowed the pool down to maybe ten or twenty programs. I wanted to ideally stay in New York, which left it to NYU, Columbia, Hunter, Brooklyn College. I knew that NYU did not offer guaranteed funding, and Hunter was fully funded. The Hunter program also seemed designed to give attendees space and resources to write rather than being billed as a pre-professional incubator. I get why pre-professionalism is a draw for people, but because I’d worked in publishing, that was less of a priority for me. I focused on finding a program that would give me time, space, and guidance to write.
I joke that the Hunter alumni magazine should interview me. It’s only been a semester, but Hunter is amazing so far. I’m very rosy on the program. That might change, but so far, it has delivered. The program is structured like a workshop, a place to experiment. It also attracts a certain kind of person, a certain type of writer. I’ve benefited from being around people who are less focused on selling their book and more focused on the writing. It’s been really freeing.
There is a part of my brain that wants a concrete return on my time and my work. I know how long and grueling the process of bringing a book to print is from working in publishing. It is both demoralizing and motivating seeing writers who are struggling mid-career, or people who would come to my boss with a novel they’d spent ten years of their life working on. Their whole future is hinging on this novel. You have to be kind of delusional, I think. You have to believe that one day it will happen, that it will all be worth something. I think it’s been good being in a program that doesn’t pretend to give a prescription for success.
It feels like an oasis from the outside world, the commercial and corporate ideas of publishing, where writing is something that, if you check the right boxes, your book will do well.
ELIZABETH: I’m intrigued to hear more about you as a writer, but before we get there, you talk about the support you got from your loved ones and your friends. Community can make or break one’s ability to muster enough courage to do the thing they want to do. How have your communities in both Chicago and New York, your friends, your family, nourished this urge you have to create, and how has that support formed you as a writer?
THOMAS: No one has really asked me that before, and I really love that question because community is a huge part of creativity. Sometimes you encounter people who are truly just, I don’t know, it’s like they were touched by God, and they know they are going to be an artist. I think that is rare. I think, most of the time, becoming an artist is something that your environment encourages you to do or, at least, it pushes you in that direction.
Neither of my parents are artistic. I grew up with a single mom, and she has always been supportive, full stop. The difference is that her world has been pretty traditional–she was a social worker, a teacher, she went through her life checking the right boxes. At the same time, she was never like “you need to become a doctor to make money.” I appreciate her because she’s honest. She took jobs that did not pay a ton but were in a line of work she believes in. That also means she can’t be like “you have to sell out and make tons of money.” Of course, at the same time, she is worried about my long-term stability.
She has been very supportive, but she is also cautious. I think part of my growing up has been finding my relationship with that and choosing things that are riskier. It was scary to quit my job. I have had moments this year where I feel happier, but I am more worried about money. I gave up a job with healthcare and stable income. At moments I am like, “was it worth it?” And then I go to class, and I am like, “yeah, it was.”
I would sometimes envy my friends who grew up with artist parents. I grew up in a pretty traditional household. My dad, who passed away when I was a kid, grew up first-generation Chinese. His parents were immigrants, and he did the pretty classic first-gen immigrant thing of being an overachiever academically. He went to Stanford, tried to be a teacher and then switched to computer science. He was someone who, as far as I know, loved music and art. But he was a very practical person from what I know of him.
My friend Ruby also grew up with a single mom but lived a much more precarious life early on. She experienced real hardship but also grew up in a family of artists. Her mom is now a very successful graphic novelist. As a kid, she went to her mom’s art school classes, and I was so jealous of that. For Ruby, there was no other option, becoming an artist was the norm. She struggled with the opposite of what I struggled with—how someone gets a corporate job was way more abstract to her than becoming an artist.
For me, pursuing the arts was like how does one even do that? My grandmother would scoff at my family members who were artists and would take unglamorous jobs to pay the bills, but I always thought they seemed happy. I was lucky that I grew up with a grandfather who was the ultimate English major nerd. He went to college, and his dad wanted him to be a doctor, but my grandpa rejected that. He became a professor of library sciences and had an amazing library. I felt like I got to know him through borrowing his books. I wish I had grown up with him, we would have had great conversations about Joyce and the Modernists.
He had an impact on me–that combined with growing up in Chicago around people who deliberately decided to do the DIY thing and work a million jobs and play in twenty bands and hope something would happen of it.
And then I moved here, and I think the reason I stayed here is because I met people who were really pursuing that and I really got along with them. To say the cliché, I found my people. It took a really long time, but what keeps me here are my friends who are making a lot of sacrifices to pursue the thing they really love.
ELIZABETH: And now, I would love to hear more about you as a writer. What does being a writer mean to you?
THOMAS: It’s changed a lot. There is the capital W version of being a Writer and then there is the thing you do every day. Sometimes those are at odds. I think part of my experience has been the romantic view of the writer clashing against the reality of writing. When I was younger, I was taken with the romantic view of being a writer. I had this idea of being in New York, and it did get me to come here, so I’m not upset.
I write a lot about my family. Writing has been a way to process my life, how I grew up, and to unpack a lot of experiences. I am definitely one of those people who needs to write about something for it to make sense, that is the deep reason. Surface level, I was an only child. I was bored and lonely and writing was one of the activities you could do by yourself. I think I developed a really rich interior world because I had to entertain myself for a lot of my childhood. That’s when I really started.
I also love language. My mom instilled that in me. She’s an English teacher, and she studied linguistics. I read books where I was like, “how does someone write like that?” Virginia Woolf was one of the first writers I encountered whose writing was so beyond my abilities. It was like seeing someone doing an insane gymnastics feat, and I was wondering how on earth a human could do something like that.
I write a lot about my parents, but not exactly my parents, and not necessarily my relationship to my parents. I have to distance myself more. I’ll write a character who is my age but is actually my dad. A lot of the writing I have been doing has been trying to understand relationships with people I didn’t grow up directly with. I didn’t grow up with my dad, but I feel like writing about him has enabled me to get to know him.
Right before my dad died, he wrote me a bunch of letters. I came across them again when I was eighteen and read them. They were intense and moving. They made me really emotional. I felt like my life had been building to that moment of finding those letters again. I felt like they were this ultimate text of my life.
If I have to point to some true seed of me wanting to be a writer, it was those letters. I was so grateful my dad had taken the time to do this, when he was dying. And I decided I needed to do something with them for myself, for him. I love writing. It has gotten to the point where I can’t imagine not writing anymore, even if no one ever reads it. I think, at this point, I am kind of stuck with it.
ELIZABETH: I think you answered this with the stories of the letters, which is such a wonderful gift to give someone and to receive. In a time when it is increasingly difficult to create, how and why do you keep creating?
THOMAS: That is kind of the answer. That is the big picture answer. There are a lot of romantic ideas about the act of writing. In my dreams, I wake up at five am every morning, and I sit there with my beautiful leather notebook, and I write, and I attack —the Hemingway thing of attacking my typewriter, and I am writing as if it were a noble craft, like the idea of going home and working in a woodwork shop.
It can be motivating to have that idea of writing, but the less glamorous version of it is that I write on my phone. I write at work. I would write at my coffee shop job in Grand Central. That’s not ideally how I would be writing. It’s an actively unpleasant way to write on this cramped screen, and I hate being on my phone all the time for that reason. But it was working–you know? I think once I accepted not to knock the thing that was working, I was like “ok, I am going to do this.”
It’s been slow, steady little drips for years now. I have moments where I have great days, where I sit down, and I bang something out. I think that really keeps you going. But I kind of came to terms with the fact that as long as I keep coming back to writing, that’s more important than the number of pages I am writing each day.
I like to tell my friends who are struggling with a creative block that, “as long as you believe that eventually you will write again, it can be months or years, that’s what matters. It’s more important that you are sustaining the marathon.”
ELIZABETH: Is this the mindset you brought to working on your novel, which is, in many ways, like running a marathon?
THOMAS: Yeah. I am not a long distance runner, but if you start a marathon thinking “oh gosh, I have to run over 26 miles, and that is so far and so long,” you paralyze yourself. If I knew how long it would take–and this first draft ended up being 400 pages—I would not have started. But I was able to psychologically trick myself. I started it while I was working this coffee shop job in Grand Central, and the story started out really small. It was just little bits here and there. The form of that draft and the premise is that it is a book of letters from a father to a son.
ELIZABETH: Does it have a title yet?
THOMAS: The title right now is Paper Son, and that’s probably going to stay. I took a course in college about the beginning of the novel. We read all these books that were written as letters because people didn’t know how to write novels yet. I didn’t love all of them, but there was something sweet in watching writers figure out in real time how to write a novel. I was inspired by that because I was also figuring out how to write a novel. I thought writing a novel in letters was a little forgiving. I knew I wasn’t great at the geometry or moving the pieces around the board to create a story, but I could get from one letter to the other.
ELIZABETH: Do you have any next steps for the novel yet, or are you holding on to it right now?
THOMAS: I’m holding it. I am probably going to work on it a little at Hunter. I am at a crossroads. I’ve worked on it for a long time. I would like to do something with it. I also know a lot of examples of writers who show up with their beloved first novel they have been working on for years. It’s their pride and joy, their baby. And then they talk to an agent, and the agent is like “you are a great writer, but we can't sell this.”
That could easily be the situation. It’s hard to know when to move on, you know? But I honestly don’t know if this is—it feels worth pursuing, but I don't know if it is the thing I need to be doing right now.
I also don’t know, honestly, if I am old enough and experienced enough to do this project justice. I feel like I might have made the mistake of choosing a project that would be better served as an older person. I like reading first books by young novelists partly out of curiosity for myself. There are common subjects and themes and approaches that make sense. You are limited by the experiences you have.
But I picked a premise of an old man who is dying and is writing about his son and fatherhood. I haven’t had that experience. It’s hard, and I am not as confident in doing that. I can’t rely as much on my own experience. Maybe, I put this in a drawer and come back in my forties, but I have invested a lot into this novel.
I think when you are young, there is this pressure of knocking it out of the park the first time, otherwise you are a failure. I try to tell myself that the first attempt is often shit and it continues that way for a long time. I am trying to remind myself that it is not a race.
I know writers my age who have much more raw talent than I do that are just too much of perfectionists or too afraid of rejection or they are afraid to share their work. I am like if you could see what I see on the other side: all the shit out there, people who are so confident, I have been tempted to be like you should read some of these submissions I have read.
If I could give one piece of advice: if you are a writer, don’t just read really good stuff. People are always like “read the best,” and that is important. Also read the really bad stuff. It’s motivating. That definitely inspired me to submit more.
At the darkest moments, my worst nightmare is that I am that guy who is sixty and believes he is the next Charles Dickens and is totally delusional. That is my biggest fear—being out of touch with where you actually are as a writer in terms of your abilities. Part of the reason I wanted to do an MFA was to be held accountable. Some of the danger of being in your own world is that you can get really out of touch with the quality of what you are producing—both good or bad. You can be writing something, and it can be basically publishable, and someone discovers it twenty years later, and you’re dead and they’re like “oh this was this brilliant writer.” Or the opposite where you’re like “I am a genius, everyone else is stupid” and your writing is really, really bad. But you are so trapped in yourself that you reject any kind of criticism…
I think writing is an inherently lonely profession. Sometimes I wish I had picked something more social. I think about my friends who are musicians. It sucks for so many reasons, but at least if you are on a shitty tour, you are hopefully with your friends and going through it together.
With writing, the highs and lows, you are the only one who ultimately experiences them. I am an avid consumer of these career help resources for writers. It’s really helpful hearing other people’s experiences, especially people you really admire.
There is this false impression that the finished product comes out fully formed and perfect when, in reality, it’s more likely that the finished product is draft fifty, and the writer was living in their car before the book got published.
Some resources I love are The Creative Independent. I wish I had found that sooner. They have great interviews from all different disciplines. I also want to shout out my friends who do a podcast and reading series called Limousine. They are great, approachable, fun people and writers. They do a great job demystifying the process. Hearing from people who are around our age is really helpful, too. You get something from an NPR interview with Zadie Smith, but with someone who is a peer, you can almost see how a person does it when they talk about the road that led them to where they are.
Thomas Mar Wee is a writer, poet, and editor based in Brooklyn, New York.
You can visit Thomas’s website here.
You can follow Thomas on Instagram @tmarwee