When is One's Work One's Real Work?

Office Hours

Greetings from Los Angeles, a city that is most decidedly not on-fire and not under invasion or in rebellion but is, as far as I can tell, cheerful, beautiful, and more certain than ever of the importance of supporting one another and not giving into tyranny.

First, a few reading recommendations before we move on to our question of the week.

My beloved former student and fiction phenom Nana Kwame Adjei Brenyah recently started a Substack called “While I Still Love You.” Linking here to a lovely, honest, and helpful essay on writing and fear. Many of you will know his stunning first story collection, Friday Black, and his recent novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, which was a Finalist for the National Book Award. In addition to being a wildly original fiction writer, Nana is also one of the most open-hearted people I know, who courageously and frankly writes about process here in a way that’s humble, compassionate, and truly helpful.

Some of you may also remember a post I did a while back about children’s books with the talented writer and illustrator Corinna Luykens. Her new book, The Arguers, is out and here she writes with real insight and nuance about her process.

Had a really great time last week at The National Book Awards’ “5 Under Thirty-Five,” introducing my nominee, Alexander Sammartino, and meeting the other four awardees and their nominators. The event was hosted by the incomparable Justin Torres.

Me and Alexander Sammartino, NYC. Photo by Beowulf Sheehan.

Sammartino is an extraordinarily talented young writer, whose debut, Last Acts, was a highwire act of lyricism, humor, and heart, about which I said the following at the event:

Last Acts reminds us that a sentence can be a form of love; that a beautiful sentence is what happens when a writer looks past received truth, to the real (complex, contradictory) truth; of how lovely it is to see another human being manifesting courage as he tries to make sense of the world through language.

Alex’s voice is funny and muscular and lyrical; the voice of a friend driving us through his town, pointing out all the things he’s crazy about, shunning nothing, accepting everything. It’s rowdy but refined; it makes poetry out of real (sometimes shunned-by-literature) American places and turns-of-speech. It reminds me of DeLillo in its sweep and Grace Paley in its ability to indicate character through minute attention to the strange, telling bumps in our speech.

Watching Alex treat every character in his book with affection, no matter how loopy or wrong-headed that character might be, was inspiring…like watching someone confidently cross a wobbly bridge ahead of me. It made me think: I can love the world more, accept more, abide longer. I can. Nothing to be afraid of here. And so much to celebrate.

Congratulations, Alex, on Last Acts and on the award.

Also: on Sunday, behind the paywall, we’ll be starting a new story by an American master. Join us!

Now, on to our question of the week:

Q.

Dear Mr. Saunders,

I am a public health physician in early middle age who recently got some not-great news about my personal health. It's not yet a serious scare, only that shriek-adjacent, but it could easily be a cause for temporary catatonia if one or two more elements of the chart go wayward in the coming days. It's enough, anyway, to get me thinking about what I'd like to do with the rest of my writing life.

All my life, and especially since I made medicine my life, I've wanted to write stories. While I, ahem, Chekhov-ed the boxes I needed to check at work to learn my craft with people, I wrote reams of unfinished stories and poems and am now realizing to my great embarrassment that I would like to finish them before I die. And I'll say very strongly that they are... not Chekhovian. Not in content, not in technique, not in tone, nor in any other factor that would make them good stories. Basically, I am desperate to write all the stories in my head, moreso now that I feel my mortality encroaching, but they're bad and not really getting much better after taking MFA-like asynchronous classes and free-writing my ass off. I fantasize all the time about a worst-case scenario in which my health gets so bad that I can sensibily quit to write full-time and die with a ballpoint pen skittering along my handspan, but I recognize that that is pure fantasy. In reality, I'm not yet that sick, thank God. And I help people in my job every day, as much as I hate to admit it. The only rub is that I'd rather be writing my terrible stories in some comically vague self-fulfillment scheme that our greatest American bards would make fun of. And this is not just me hating my own work; multiple national award-winning writers have found my conversation about my life quite interesting and my attempts at ambitious stories quite risible. Would I be playing a joke on myself if I seriously re-evaluated my life and kept writing my stories seriously off the patient service clock, knowing they'll likely never be readable (let alone publishable)... or should I give up now while I still can and do what I'm really good at, which is mentoring other people to be scientists and writers? People say I can do healing work that approaches genius with everyone else's work but my own.

Thanks,

A.

Wow, what a question. First, let me say that I received this a month or so ago, and so I hope that all the news you’ve got since has been nothing but good.

I want to offer a few different ideas here, some of them likely contradictory.

Also, I want to state the obvious: without really knowing you and your work and your overall situation, I can’t really answer this with much precision.

Which won’t stop me from trying.

But…beware. 😊

First: whenever I get stressed about all the work there is yet to do, I try to remind myself that all of that work is only going to get done one sentence at a time. It’s a bit like looking across a deep ravine at some gorgeous kingdom: you want to be over there and have it all, right now. But there’s just a very thin bridge leading over there (hmm – second mention of a bridge in this post) – but that’s the path. Everything else is distraction.

Also: true artistic progress starts with doing something new and original in just one story. That is: the big accomplishment is to finish this story (the current one) in a way that is new for us. And that will change everything that comes after.

That is: we may think we have this vast trove of stories to finish but then, finishing one (truly finishing it, in some surprising new way) can sometimes invalidate those other stories, or render them unnecessary, or (best of all) show us new ways of completing them.

In any event, the key is to stay with the work immediately at hand, trusting that all answers will come from that and only from that.

The above may, in some ways, revisit an idea we brush up against a lot here, the idea of knowing what one intends to write, as opposed to finding out what one will write. The weight of all of those stories you want to finish might (might!) be making it harder for you to do the work at-hand (?).

I know, from my own experience, that sometimes I make these dilemmas or dichotomies in my mind as a way to delay the real moment of truth, i.e., the obstruction or arising difficulties in my current story. Essentially, I’m deferring the moment of getting down into the trenches, aesthetically. It’s somehow easier to “decide” something, abstractly, than it is to face the real music.

Sometimes I have this feeling: “If only I could get my ducks in a row, I could really, for sure, start.” But actually, once I start, the ducks will, then and only then, start lining up on their own.

So, I try to make a habit to say to myself, when my mind is trying hard to know too much in advance about my process, or my life plans, of a given story: “Well, we’ll see,” i.e., “Just be patient: we’ll see when we actually get there.”

In other words: don’t worry, work.

Second, your letter reminded me of a couple of others I got recently, each of which had, at its core, this idea: I want to be an artist, and I feel that, because I haven’t quit everything else, I am selling my art short.

It’s interesting – artistic questions in the form, “Should I A or B?” are sometimes best answered, simply: Both.

Meaning: resist the dichotomy/find a third way.

(Should I be funny or serious? Should I invent or write autobiographically? Should I place myself in the lineage of this writer or that one?)

If a person feels like asking this kind of question, it’s usually because they’ve mentally tried out both approaches and found neither one to be satisfactory.

So, in this case (in which I think you’re asking something like: Should I quit my job and be a real writer? Or keep my job and fail to be a real writer?) my answer would be: is there, maybe, a third way?

And by “third way” I mean a way of thinking about this that unmakes the opposing of those two positions…that tries to cut through the problem from another direction.

Is it possible, for example, that your work is actually the source of your writing, for example, and maybe the trick would just be to recognize and bless that, and thereby eliminate the oppositional push-and-pull implied in your question?

I also wonder if you might think about this in terms of scheduling. I remember when I was a tech writer and never had any designated writing time. I just gave up on that possibility and suddenly any few minutes I found during the day felt like a real gift. Whereas now (now that I’m a Professional Writer) I often find myself resenting interruptions and duties more than I used to. So, my hunch is that if you did some assertive thinking about the time you want to preserve for writing and the time you have to dedicate to your work, you might find yourself not feeling as much sense of being denied something when you are not writing.

I sometimes think of that old SNL sketch that ends in the line: “Hold it, hold it, you two! You’re both right! It’s a dessert topping AND a floor wax!”

If an A-vs-B-type opposition is making us unhappy….can we just decide that, in casting it as an opposition, we’re in error? In the spirit of lessening our anxiety, which may have the effect of channeling more energy to the actual work?

Finally, you raise a really beautiful question, one that I’m asking myself lately: what is the value of making art vs. the value of doing valuable work (work for others) in the real world? As you intimate, this question might get more difficult with diminishing time. When you’ve got, you know, sixty years of life ahead, to take three years to write a book is one thing. When you’ve got….well, fewer than sixty years, the choice becomes a little more difficult, I’d say.

I find that I approach this with an assumption that “intensity” is good, that I want to spend some hours a day doing something I’m really good at, so as to attain a certain level of focus and excellence. I feel that there’s just something intrinsically good about doing work at a high level like this.

You also raise a second (related) heavy issue, which is this idea of doing one thing (patient service) that you’re “really good at,” vs. writing your fiction which, according to you, is “bad and not really getting much better.”

I doubt, from the ease and quality of your writing, and the life and verve in it, that your fiction is bad, but….

The easy, first-order answer is: “It doesn’t matter if your fiction is good or bad, just do it, if it gives you pleasure.”

But that implies a real and difficult trade-off, giving up something at which you’re very good (“healing work that approaches genius”) in order to do something with which, it sounds like, you struggle.

I can only say that my inner (former) Catholic sometimes performs an inner monologue that goes like this: “George, your writing is all about your ego. What if you couldn’t do it/were disallowed it? Who would you be? Can you live without this fierce desire to accomplish? Are you going to keep grinding until the day of your death?”

But then my inner Buddhist goes: “Well, sure. But we all have to want to do something. It’s good to do things. The trick is to have an intelligent relationship with one’s egoism and yearning to accomplish. Don’t let it be everything, but don’t deny it either, which can also be a form of ego. And wouldn’t you be a dope, to turn away from the one thing that the universe seems to have equipped you to do with some power? And wouldn’t it be an extreme act of ego to ignore the many people who’ve told you they enjoy and even benefit from your work?”

Yes, well: welcome to my mind.

In my case, I can say that the thing my ego wants to do is also the thing I happen to be halfway good at – which sort of eases the difficulty for me.

But you seem to be saying that you’re in a different situation: what you’re best at isn’t quite giving you what you want.

So, I don’t know, and feel inclined to do the wisest thing of all, which is to defer to this wonderful community we have out there.

What do you think, Story Club?