after reading through the comments, I feel compelled to add this (kind of depressing, sorry) thought: being published (for MOST of us--perhaps not for those who end up with true fame and very good contracts) doesn't change anything. Sure, for a few moments, you feel great. Validated. It's something you've worked hard for and now--here it is! A real, live book! A few people actually buy it (or the journal you were published in or whatever). They congratulate you. You feel like you've entered a club--those who have made it. Look how smart you are! Look how others acknowledge your intellect, your humor, your ability to write! And then.....crickets. Honest to god. It ends. And you are just you again. And no one cares about your book. i can't tell you how many people have asked me what I do and I say, well, I'm mostly a writer, I wrote a couple of novels. And that's.....end of conversation. If i didn't get personal satisfaction from putting pen to paper, I wouldn't do it. Because no one cares if I write or not. My "job" is to enjoy my life. And if that enjoyment comes from writing, then fantastic! But i know that it really doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world if I write or if i don't write. I'm not all that important and no one is waiting for my next book. It's a blast to get published, just like it's a blast to have any sort of success in life. But you are still you. And if you want a career, you have to manage to do it all over again, this time with expectations from others. I'm gonna post this even though maybe i should not. I know how lucky i am to ever have had a book published in the first place. I really do. But like anything, the thrill comes and goes and you are left with yourself again. My personal takeaway is that doing what you love is a great way to live a satisfying life. But it's all in the doing and not in the having done. What was the question again? Sorry, i'm rambling.
Sigh. Heavy sigh. This is my life struggle. I write this now from my desk at work. Just this morning I sent a message to a friend saying that I hoped this summer I might find my way back to some writing. The absence has been long. I hope it will prove to have been a fruitful sabbatical, but it could just be time away where I grow more and more rusty and feel less and less a writer. Breadwinner. Not sure what I am winning except keeping the ship afloat. It's a ship without a lot of art on the walls. On your recommendation I ordered Tillie Olsen's "Silences". Like her, I have long been a mother who is solely responsible for running the household. It has been about 4 years since I published anything, and over a year since I submitted anything. I take photographs these days as it is art I can make as I go about my day. I dream of retirement. I dream about days when my worry is only that I have the time to write and I am not using it! I yearn for days when I can mark my writing time in hours, not minutes. I want my imagination to dwell in a house as big as the sky. I want to run away with my obsessions and not come home until after the supper dishes are done. This work-life makes all the best bits of me smaller, and I miss them so.
"Writing is a lovely, life-affirming thing to do, even if the world never rewards us for it, or never rewards us enough to allow us to make it the main thing in our lives. It's a vocation, after all, not a job – and even if we’re lucky enough to have it as our job, it’s still not a job, not really."
What a lovely pair of sentences to read on a Thursday in June. Thank you.
This quote is everything: "...what makes us a writer in the moment is the state of our mind. Are we interested, curious, noticing, changing our view, always changing our view, loving the world, compelled by the beauty of language?"
When everything else in life demands our attention, maybe there's some value to surrendering to it. Life is kind of writing lived out loud and it's all fodder in the end? Even my 14-year-old niece's incessant texts, asking if I can please like her latest TikTok.
Where I struggle most is in that tension-filled space between: "put your pen down and live this moment" and "if you can't carve out time, you'll never make it." Which is where, I suppose, the few-lines-of-prose-as-you're-able work their magic.
As a side note: sometimes the location in which you offer your creativity matters to its perception/reception. My illustrations were often rejected as "too sophisticated" for the children's book market in the USA. But I so enjoyed creating quirky detailed illustrations that I self-published and contented myself with a small but dedicated audience. Then, luckily, my work got picked up by someone in Australia where it now has a larger readership *and* I am able to continue to do my detailed artist bookwork. My work is still rejected in the US as "too sophisticated" - oh well! They love my work in Australia. Sometimes it can be helpful to look for publication/distribution outside the country you live in.
I'm intimidated by the idea of publishing, because unlike writing, the publishing world is unknown territory involving things I may not be good at--public speaking, schmoozing, learning the secret language of publishers, knowing who is who among agents and editors, and negotiating deals. It's a steep learning curve.
I still resent the fact I have to do other stuff than write. When I started out, I made a good living out of my novels. Then, around ten years ago, I realised I was spending more time selling myself than writing. Or doing other work to fill the gaps. And the situation hasn't changed. My last advance, after ten novels, was less than my first advance. But hey, I'm still getting published and I am truly grateful for that. Also it has surprising benefits. Like starting my Substack thread, which I wouldn't have done if I was making money like back in the day. And now I really enjoy it. So there's always an upside. And the main upside is, as George says, writing is a lovely life-affirming thing to do. It gives you a voice. Even if very few people get to hear it.
As soon as I escorted my literary heroes out of my writing room, politely of course, my writing improved. I can write. I know that, have known it since childhood (as I suspect most of us have), and have been fortunate enough to make part of my living by writing. But what has been so restrictive, what has held me back (or anyway did), was the constant & deliberate focus on the other, on where to land on that "rainbow arc". Who, finally, cares? I think George has it right when he writes of taking responsibility for where, or if, you land. I don't think you can help if & where you land. You're airborne. That's all that matters. I've had the great good fortune to meet some of my heroes & to spend some time last summer with one of them. He & I had an exchange similar to today's post. His response to this whole issue of art v commerce was: "I don't care." In other words, his prose lands where it lands. I know it sounds glib, but glib this guy isn't. A little silly maybe, but not glib. "Just write," he said to me, most sincerely, meaning that the power of true sincerity & the willingness to connect will carry the prose. I've known this all along, of course. We probably all have known this! It's acknowledging this that is so freeing. Somewhere Kurt Vonnegut mentions having written everything to his sister Jane, that she was the other to whom he connected, the power the drove that heart-stopping, funny, wicked prose.
The image of rich Midas at his writing desk reminds me of a scene in a TV show in which an independently wealthy young man says to a homicide detective, "I've always wondered about having a job. Is it nice?"
Loved this part:
"Are we interested, curious, noticing, changing our view, always changing our view, loving the world, compelled by the beauty of language? Nothing can take those things away from us and, the truth is, nothing external can give them to us either."
It's tempting, to me at least, to want to keep the world at arm's length. I hate to admit it, but perhaps I'm better off not being wealthy enough to do so. The need to make a living compels closeness with the world. Even when I don't like how things are going, in here and out there, being curious about and loving the world is always available. There's freedom in that.
Lovely and gorgeously articulated, as always. I've nothing else to add other than to say I try to write the types of things I like to read. As I don't read commercial best-sellers, I don't expect to write a commercial best-seller. Nor deep, complicated, literary fiction. I'm hoping to write a novel roughly two-thirds of the way to the R, and then see what happens.
Another home run post by our resident Bodhisattva. Good antidote to a, perhaps fallacious, angst point. Often we invisible writers are more tortured by our “heroes” than reality - our own or actual, out there reality. So say, like me, your a DF Wallace fan. Well, talk about pyrotechnics!! So maybe I try to write, even in my own way, pyrotechnically and, because I ain’t a genius and Wallace most certainly was, the result is UGH. Or, say, you’re a John Irving acolyte and - voila - you find yourself trying to be Charles Dickens. So maybe along with “kill your darlings” we should add “kill your heroes”.
I think of those writers who are “one-hit wonders.” I won’t name any of them because I don’t mean to be cruel or insulting. But I think of how a book (usually the author’s first) goes epic—how it’s often an book that arcs more toward the “writer” but still manages to sell like a book arcing toward the “reader.” And then comes the aftermath. What happens to the soul of those writers whose books never again sell like that? I have writer friends and acquaintances who’ve experienced this but I’ve never asked them how they feel about it. It feels like a question that one writer would never ask another.
The first short story I ever got published had the lines: “My stories are me talking to myself, hoping somebody will overhear. I’ve always felt like I spy on life rather than being a part of it. It’s odd. My work can’t be meaningful all on its own; other people have to find it meaningful. I have to know what other people find meaningful to make meaning for them. But if I were good with people, I wouldn’t be turning inward to entertain myself. I probably wouldn’t be a writer.”
This was right at the start of the pandemic. And it was another year before I had another short story published. I credit it entirely to deciding to make an effort to talk directly to people rather than wait to be overheard. Until I realized that writing what I liked AND conveying it in an vivid, intelligent, fun, and most importantly, understandable ways was what readers wanted, I was only ever accidentally good. When I learned what readers like to read, how they read, I learned to put names to things that I liked when I read, but didn’t know was a thing. I could then consciously work those things into my writing. It’s fun to understand, “Oh, that’s how Great Writer did that.” It’s amazing when a reader responded to my work. I learned what mattered to me by writing for other people, and I began to enjoy my own work a lot more.
Thank you for this. It speaks to issues that have been at the forefront of my mind for a while now, and you're saying things that I think I needed to hear.
"Are we interested, curious, noticing, changing our view, always changing our view, loving the world, compelled by the beauty of language? Nothing can take those things away from us and, the truth is, nothing external can give them to us either." This is just wonderful. Writing is a way of being...or better, a way of giving. I think one of the traps in the art vs. commerce dichotomy, one that I myself frequently fall into, is thinking that writing has to exist in some kind of pure form, separate from human messiness and corruption, so that everything can be redeemed within it. But if we think of art as a rejection of commerce, it can become something reactionary that simply sets up its own form of "currency". Does writing redeem, transmute? I think, in a way, it does...but it doesn't take from the world, doesn't use up resources...it gives to the world, revealing what was always already redeemed. (And nothing is separate.)
I agree that the best writing occurs when there is some sort of audience in mind. (The world is made of relations, and there's a kind of falsity in separating ourselves from that.) And I agree that every writer has their own ideal audience, and part of the journey of writing is figuring out what that audience is. Maybe we're writing for mass appeal, maybe we're writing for a much smaller audience...maybe we're writing to only one person, maybe even God. But the critical part is that the "audience-mirror" that we use to refine our work must be incorporated into our own being, in the sense that it doesn't provide us with something we don't have already. We should write not to get something out of our audience (approval, respect, whatever), but rather to share, to give.
"There is less interest in concealment in the name of not being corny; more interest in giving the reader the simple facts she needs in order for the stakes to rise; the writer becomes committed to taking the reader on a wild-but-meaningful ride; I note a movement toward simplicity and real human feeling." That's the thing. For me the difference between something that happened and a story I want to write is just that. The event lies on the page with much of its import concealed. The import is in there. But buried more or less. I have a long fight with getting the import clear enough to be a wild and meaningful ride. Even when I see it, is it clear enough for the reader? Thanks, thanks, thanks! This essay is a ray of light.
after reading through the comments, I feel compelled to add this (kind of depressing, sorry) thought: being published (for MOST of us--perhaps not for those who end up with true fame and very good contracts) doesn't change anything. Sure, for a few moments, you feel great. Validated. It's something you've worked hard for and now--here it is! A real, live book! A few people actually buy it (or the journal you were published in or whatever). They congratulate you. You feel like you've entered a club--those who have made it. Look how smart you are! Look how others acknowledge your intellect, your humor, your ability to write! And then.....crickets. Honest to god. It ends. And you are just you again. And no one cares about your book. i can't tell you how many people have asked me what I do and I say, well, I'm mostly a writer, I wrote a couple of novels. And that's.....end of conversation. If i didn't get personal satisfaction from putting pen to paper, I wouldn't do it. Because no one cares if I write or not. My "job" is to enjoy my life. And if that enjoyment comes from writing, then fantastic! But i know that it really doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world if I write or if i don't write. I'm not all that important and no one is waiting for my next book. It's a blast to get published, just like it's a blast to have any sort of success in life. But you are still you. And if you want a career, you have to manage to do it all over again, this time with expectations from others. I'm gonna post this even though maybe i should not. I know how lucky i am to ever have had a book published in the first place. I really do. But like anything, the thrill comes and goes and you are left with yourself again. My personal takeaway is that doing what you love is a great way to live a satisfying life. But it's all in the doing and not in the having done. What was the question again? Sorry, i'm rambling.
Sigh. Heavy sigh. This is my life struggle. I write this now from my desk at work. Just this morning I sent a message to a friend saying that I hoped this summer I might find my way back to some writing. The absence has been long. I hope it will prove to have been a fruitful sabbatical, but it could just be time away where I grow more and more rusty and feel less and less a writer. Breadwinner. Not sure what I am winning except keeping the ship afloat. It's a ship without a lot of art on the walls. On your recommendation I ordered Tillie Olsen's "Silences". Like her, I have long been a mother who is solely responsible for running the household. It has been about 4 years since I published anything, and over a year since I submitted anything. I take photographs these days as it is art I can make as I go about my day. I dream of retirement. I dream about days when my worry is only that I have the time to write and I am not using it! I yearn for days when I can mark my writing time in hours, not minutes. I want my imagination to dwell in a house as big as the sky. I want to run away with my obsessions and not come home until after the supper dishes are done. This work-life makes all the best bits of me smaller, and I miss them so.
"Writing is a lovely, life-affirming thing to do, even if the world never rewards us for it, or never rewards us enough to allow us to make it the main thing in our lives. It's a vocation, after all, not a job – and even if we’re lucky enough to have it as our job, it’s still not a job, not really."
What a lovely pair of sentences to read on a Thursday in June. Thank you.
Just subscribed and I’m blown away with all the affirming and helpful advice in just this single post. Thanks, George.
Something I try to keep at the forefront of my mind: writing finishes with the reader, not the writer.
This quote is everything: "...what makes us a writer in the moment is the state of our mind. Are we interested, curious, noticing, changing our view, always changing our view, loving the world, compelled by the beauty of language?"
When everything else in life demands our attention, maybe there's some value to surrendering to it. Life is kind of writing lived out loud and it's all fodder in the end? Even my 14-year-old niece's incessant texts, asking if I can please like her latest TikTok.
Where I struggle most is in that tension-filled space between: "put your pen down and live this moment" and "if you can't carve out time, you'll never make it." Which is where, I suppose, the few-lines-of-prose-as-you're-able work their magic.
Baby steps.
As a side note: sometimes the location in which you offer your creativity matters to its perception/reception. My illustrations were often rejected as "too sophisticated" for the children's book market in the USA. But I so enjoyed creating quirky detailed illustrations that I self-published and contented myself with a small but dedicated audience. Then, luckily, my work got picked up by someone in Australia where it now has a larger readership *and* I am able to continue to do my detailed artist bookwork. My work is still rejected in the US as "too sophisticated" - oh well! They love my work in Australia. Sometimes it can be helpful to look for publication/distribution outside the country you live in.
I'm intimidated by the idea of publishing, because unlike writing, the publishing world is unknown territory involving things I may not be good at--public speaking, schmoozing, learning the secret language of publishers, knowing who is who among agents and editors, and negotiating deals. It's a steep learning curve.
I still resent the fact I have to do other stuff than write. When I started out, I made a good living out of my novels. Then, around ten years ago, I realised I was spending more time selling myself than writing. Or doing other work to fill the gaps. And the situation hasn't changed. My last advance, after ten novels, was less than my first advance. But hey, I'm still getting published and I am truly grateful for that. Also it has surprising benefits. Like starting my Substack thread, which I wouldn't have done if I was making money like back in the day. And now I really enjoy it. So there's always an upside. And the main upside is, as George says, writing is a lovely life-affirming thing to do. It gives you a voice. Even if very few people get to hear it.
As soon as I escorted my literary heroes out of my writing room, politely of course, my writing improved. I can write. I know that, have known it since childhood (as I suspect most of us have), and have been fortunate enough to make part of my living by writing. But what has been so restrictive, what has held me back (or anyway did), was the constant & deliberate focus on the other, on where to land on that "rainbow arc". Who, finally, cares? I think George has it right when he writes of taking responsibility for where, or if, you land. I don't think you can help if & where you land. You're airborne. That's all that matters. I've had the great good fortune to meet some of my heroes & to spend some time last summer with one of them. He & I had an exchange similar to today's post. His response to this whole issue of art v commerce was: "I don't care." In other words, his prose lands where it lands. I know it sounds glib, but glib this guy isn't. A little silly maybe, but not glib. "Just write," he said to me, most sincerely, meaning that the power of true sincerity & the willingness to connect will carry the prose. I've known this all along, of course. We probably all have known this! It's acknowledging this that is so freeing. Somewhere Kurt Vonnegut mentions having written everything to his sister Jane, that she was the other to whom he connected, the power the drove that heart-stopping, funny, wicked prose.
The image of rich Midas at his writing desk reminds me of a scene in a TV show in which an independently wealthy young man says to a homicide detective, "I've always wondered about having a job. Is it nice?"
Loved this part:
"Are we interested, curious, noticing, changing our view, always changing our view, loving the world, compelled by the beauty of language? Nothing can take those things away from us and, the truth is, nothing external can give them to us either."
It's tempting, to me at least, to want to keep the world at arm's length. I hate to admit it, but perhaps I'm better off not being wealthy enough to do so. The need to make a living compels closeness with the world. Even when I don't like how things are going, in here and out there, being curious about and loving the world is always available. There's freedom in that.
Lovely and gorgeously articulated, as always. I've nothing else to add other than to say I try to write the types of things I like to read. As I don't read commercial best-sellers, I don't expect to write a commercial best-seller. Nor deep, complicated, literary fiction. I'm hoping to write a novel roughly two-thirds of the way to the R, and then see what happens.
Another home run post by our resident Bodhisattva. Good antidote to a, perhaps fallacious, angst point. Often we invisible writers are more tortured by our “heroes” than reality - our own or actual, out there reality. So say, like me, your a DF Wallace fan. Well, talk about pyrotechnics!! So maybe I try to write, even in my own way, pyrotechnically and, because I ain’t a genius and Wallace most certainly was, the result is UGH. Or, say, you’re a John Irving acolyte and - voila - you find yourself trying to be Charles Dickens. So maybe along with “kill your darlings” we should add “kill your heroes”.
I think of those writers who are “one-hit wonders.” I won’t name any of them because I don’t mean to be cruel or insulting. But I think of how a book (usually the author’s first) goes epic—how it’s often an book that arcs more toward the “writer” but still manages to sell like a book arcing toward the “reader.” And then comes the aftermath. What happens to the soul of those writers whose books never again sell like that? I have writer friends and acquaintances who’ve experienced this but I’ve never asked them how they feel about it. It feels like a question that one writer would never ask another.
The first short story I ever got published had the lines: “My stories are me talking to myself, hoping somebody will overhear. I’ve always felt like I spy on life rather than being a part of it. It’s odd. My work can’t be meaningful all on its own; other people have to find it meaningful. I have to know what other people find meaningful to make meaning for them. But if I were good with people, I wouldn’t be turning inward to entertain myself. I probably wouldn’t be a writer.”
This was right at the start of the pandemic. And it was another year before I had another short story published. I credit it entirely to deciding to make an effort to talk directly to people rather than wait to be overheard. Until I realized that writing what I liked AND conveying it in an vivid, intelligent, fun, and most importantly, understandable ways was what readers wanted, I was only ever accidentally good. When I learned what readers like to read, how they read, I learned to put names to things that I liked when I read, but didn’t know was a thing. I could then consciously work those things into my writing. It’s fun to understand, “Oh, that’s how Great Writer did that.” It’s amazing when a reader responded to my work. I learned what mattered to me by writing for other people, and I began to enjoy my own work a lot more.
Thank you for this. It speaks to issues that have been at the forefront of my mind for a while now, and you're saying things that I think I needed to hear.
"Are we interested, curious, noticing, changing our view, always changing our view, loving the world, compelled by the beauty of language? Nothing can take those things away from us and, the truth is, nothing external can give them to us either." This is just wonderful. Writing is a way of being...or better, a way of giving. I think one of the traps in the art vs. commerce dichotomy, one that I myself frequently fall into, is thinking that writing has to exist in some kind of pure form, separate from human messiness and corruption, so that everything can be redeemed within it. But if we think of art as a rejection of commerce, it can become something reactionary that simply sets up its own form of "currency". Does writing redeem, transmute? I think, in a way, it does...but it doesn't take from the world, doesn't use up resources...it gives to the world, revealing what was always already redeemed. (And nothing is separate.)
I agree that the best writing occurs when there is some sort of audience in mind. (The world is made of relations, and there's a kind of falsity in separating ourselves from that.) And I agree that every writer has their own ideal audience, and part of the journey of writing is figuring out what that audience is. Maybe we're writing for mass appeal, maybe we're writing for a much smaller audience...maybe we're writing to only one person, maybe even God. But the critical part is that the "audience-mirror" that we use to refine our work must be incorporated into our own being, in the sense that it doesn't provide us with something we don't have already. We should write not to get something out of our audience (approval, respect, whatever), but rather to share, to give.
"There is less interest in concealment in the name of not being corny; more interest in giving the reader the simple facts she needs in order for the stakes to rise; the writer becomes committed to taking the reader on a wild-but-meaningful ride; I note a movement toward simplicity and real human feeling." That's the thing. For me the difference between something that happened and a story I want to write is just that. The event lies on the page with much of its import concealed. The import is in there. But buried more or less. I have a long fight with getting the import clear enough to be a wild and meaningful ride. Even when I see it, is it clear enough for the reader? Thanks, thanks, thanks! This essay is a ray of light.