You’re a writer. Or you know a writer. Or you think about writing. You hear about the sacrifices of writers who lead regular lives, which is all the writers today, and most of the writers throughout history. You hear how some of us get up at 4am, stay up until 1am, steal time from our jobs, steal time from our families, steal time from our friends, steal time from exercising. All these reckless, pseudo-disciplines are done in the name of writing.
But none of that is admirable. All of that is the exact same behavior you might expect from the addicted. The drunkards, the smack happy, the short-video starers who—okay, maybe they don’t get up early—but who certainly stay up too late, steal time from their jobs, steal time from their families, and often steal whatever they can in the most literal sense. That writers are often derailed by addictions is perhaps nothing special. A good engineer would have a hard time milking the flask all day long.
Except there are too many of us who are functional addicts. I listed “short videos” as a vice for a reason. If social media has made anything explicit, it’s that we are all slaves to something—sometimes it’s benign enough, or marginalized enough, we can continue paying our bills, kissing our kids, driving to work.
For the writer, addiction fights for the same territory as the writing. Children, which are not an addiction, are the other great competitors. If more writers had them, maybe they’d write less, but they’d at least be more entertained.
Early on, if you have a calling to write, you learn it isn’t a calling. Or that “calling” isn’t a clear road of the mind down which you walk, the sunlight of purpose at your feet. A calling is a compulsion. Try to shake it, if you can. I tell my wife all the time, “I hope our children love art. Even better if they’re not artists.”
Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not a burden. It’s not some great weight, and any writer who tells you it is has mistaken “anxiety” and possibly “existential crisis” for “urge to write.” It’s very easy to satisfy the compulsion of the keyboard, the pen, the pencil. Sit down and put some words together, one after the other. There. The urge releases.
Hobbyists don’t have this compulsion. Hobbies can be dropped. Careerists don’t have this compulsion. The urge to write only ever leads to the urge to make money because it’d be nice if all this time I spent writing gave me some relief from the time I devote to making money. Which isn’t to say I’d have more time to write or would use that time to write more—writers can be fiends in the margins of our lives, but most of us whither under any actual abundance of opportunity. Writers: we want to work less.
All of that is automatic or instinctual, and indeed a compulsion can be muted, dulled, or ignored under the right sort of numbing, therapeutic, or self-destructive conditions. Congratulations that you keep writing in lieu of climbing the walls. That is why a cat chases its tail. That is perhaps why so much of what we write is rubbish. The words must follow the words or the writer, that pathetic creature, will function even less.
A conscious decision toward discipline—a knowing response to the compulsion—must clothe the instinct, the itch, in reasons. The reasons matter. We have to keep choosing how we deal with the urge, which margins we’ll allow to service the need. Plenty of writers become careerists. No one can afford to care nothing for the career. Yadda yadda yadda. I’m not good at the entrepreneurial stuff. It’s hurt my career, but I don’t believe it’s hurt my writing. The inverse is not true for many others.
Whatever the case, the initial response to the call, to the urge, can be corrupted. “Thou has left thy first love,” as the author of Revelation puts it regarding something that has nothing to do with writing. You find yourself reading all these lesser writers, seeing even good writers get better deals, and you can decide that you will find the magic formula which lets you scratch the itch enough it might leave you alone, but the purpose of itching will now be material gain. Give me the goods.
I would love to write a mystery novel, a fantasy novel, a mainstream hit. I’d love that to be an accident of looking at the world and typing up as truly as possible what there was to enjoy, surprise, fear, worship, avoid. That happens best through fiction, which hits on the ever-present doubleness of life’s meaning (if there is meaning), the view from below and above.
What I’m getting to very slowly is a truth I took from my time at Syracuse University. I look like one of those careerists, I know. I got my MFA from Syracuse. I have a newsletter. I tweet things. I want the work to be read. I admit it. The urge is to write, and the hangover is our desire to be read. Maybe it’s part of the compulsion. I’m not sure. I have all the fuel of a good careerist, but that is not the ultimate heat under which one’s writing compulsion is meant to thrive.
Sometimes the obligations of a career provide proximate heat, sure. Deadlines are good. Practical concerns are provocative. Caveats are caveats. But inspiration is incommensurate with both greed and vanity. Maybe those re-appear the moment you’re not writing. But as the fingers tap, as the pen scrawls, a certain amount of dying to oneself is necessary.
What I learned at Syracuse is that this is practical advice, a practical reaction to the lived experience of writing, and especially to career success, and not simply a moral undertow. “Before my first book was published,” a professor told us at Syracuse University, “my agent sat me down. ‘The novel is going to come out,’ she said, ‘and nothing in your life will change.’” Our professor shrugged. “It was the best advice I ever got.”
To return to the empty page, to invite inspiration as a recurrent phenomenon, occurs in the light of this truth. For most of us, it’s a material truth. Publishing will not change your actual day-to-day reality. For the rare few, this is still a practical, as well as a spiritual, truth. You can now buy Scotland on the royalties of your Pynchon-esque time travel novella. Good. The kids are home from school in two hours. Your self-regard, which leads to imaginative myopia, is in danger of matching your income.
Writing is a compulsion, and can be a career, but the candle only stays lit in a satisfying, sustained glow under the auspices of the (worthwhile) writer’s first love. You steal time, you invent time, you blunt other edges in your life as a response to the urge. The lasting response, though, is romantic, is artistic in the most useless sense. You have to write, and you choose to write because of a naivete that supersedes your own discretion. “This matters,” you feel. “It’s a mystery. But it matters that I do this well.”
The career will die, if it ever starts. Even the urge qua urge won’t always be scratched. We’re mostly mediocre writers, all of us. Hence the revisions. The writer’s response to the compulsion, therefore, has to survive both its ignition and its gains.
We must remain romantics.
New Writing
Maybe I’m not that great at even benign career moves, but I am trying to share. Joyland Magazine published a new short story of mine today. I hope you’re taken with it.
“The Fountain of Youth,” by Joel Cuthbertson
I love you all.