Charles Baxter’s essay “All the Dark Nights—A Letter” is a confessional about his early struggles as a writer: “The condition into which I fell seemed to have no bottom layer. I just kept falling. I believed that I knew what I wanted to do with my life. However, I would not be allowed to do it in the way that I had imagined. People seemed to dislike what I produced and could not be persuaded to like it.”
Who among us has not wondered, and struggled in that wonder, with a dream and an eye on the prize? I recall the feelings well, which, in looking back, can seem like the end of innocence. I would tell anyone in this situation to cherish it, because it means you are probably on the cusp of formidable growth.
I acknowledge this because I can't quite figure where I am now. Do I still love writing the way I used to, when I had a palpable urge for it and believed the next thing I wrote could really be something?
This work is so ego driven that sometimes I think I have driven the ego out of it. Maybe this is the result of not fully achieving my dream. (Or settling? Is not achieving the specificity of one’s dreams ultimately a failure? I don't know.) That which once excited, does not look so exciting anymore.
For a while, I have noticed the writing dream has been getting recalibrated. Is it necessary that I've often had to wrestle with these questions? I accept this as my lot. This is ego driven work, though it may also be a lot of other things. Rather than focus on my failings, I have to wonder if this is a natural progression in the life of writing.
There was a time when writing was everything, or I wanted it to be everything, and lately I get the feeling that for everyone I follow on Twitter, writing is their only thing. (And, right now, the possible demise of Twitter for them seems like the end of democracy.) Seeing so many people so effortlessly consumed by their writing has made me become a bit more distant to it. Why? I suppose I am seeing my younger self there and realizing how it didn't really serve me well. Or it no longer does. As I get older, I find I am interested in other things. (Writing songs, film, photography, architecture, my daughter, and soccer.) I still try to write every morning, reading and waiting for the spark of inspiration that will let me write long enough to not get too deep into the existential bog. Which is not always easy. I have, at the very least, an inveterate need to see what I have to say. To quote Joan Didion: “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” I have pages upon pages that have never become anything (either because I gave up on them, or I have sent them out to resounding crickets). It doesn't trouble me anymore. Do I hesitate to say “I love writing” anymore? Maybe. It's been so useful. But I don't know if I have anything to gain by the relationship I had to it in the past.
But I love to consider that inchoate moment when all was new, and surprising, and unknown. I do wonder if I might have had a better go of it, of how I ventured into the world with my manuscripts in hand. My most well-known writer (former?) friend used to say, in terms of landing the publications that could lead to bigger things, “You're getting close!” and this was fifteen years ago. I might have gotten close, but that didn’t mean I arrived. It certainly did not end up like I hoped. The dream, for some reason, can seem most out of reach for the writer. I am trying to justify to myself that I am OK with it. I think I am. For today.
In that Baxter essay, he writes about how for writers, “Feelings of inadequacy are the black lung disease of writing.” Maybe the feelings of inadequacy draw you to writing in the first place. Baxter describes what I think of as the closet attitude I have felt for so long about this vocation: “Psychologists […] call it imposter syndrome. Imposter Syndrome is endemic to the art of writing because gifts—the clear evidence of talent—are not so clearly associated with writing as they are with music and graphic art. Not everyone has perfect pitch, not everyone can carry a tune, not everyone can draw or create an interesting representation of something on canvas. But almost every goddamn moron can write prose.”
There is some truth to this. Most of those writers I follow on Twitter also act like they are fully formed. Maybe they are. Or maybe they are, like some of us, faking it until they make it. Certainly some of them have the credentials to at least be perceived in this way. But one thing I’ve recognized over the years of following other writers—or tracking their careers—there is a stalkerish quality to this online behavior—is that not everyone stays with it. People have to find their lives wherever they are. I just have never imagined that I was going to be one of them.
I tend to compartmentalize my life. I don’t necessarily tell everyone that I am a writer. I only tell those who I think would understand, or I avoid letting it be known because I don’t want it attached to me like a badge of shame. “How can you spend so much time at something so ultimately useless?” I don’t believe this about writing, it’s just in the back of mind when I quietly mumble, “I’m a writer,” when someone asks what I do. Though more usually, it is after I’ve told them all the other things I do that I add, “I’m also a writer.”
I have been getting my mind around the death of an old friend all week. I saw him only a week or so earlier. He did a lot of work on my house, and so I am reminded of him constantly. This has been a weird reckoning. It's hard to believe this person is gone in the sense of him being such a undeniable presence. I can still see him, imagine him, hear his voice. It makes me think how important it must be to enjoy this journey, to not let petty issues like money rule one’s life. On the other hand, money seems to bedevil us all. If you have it, if you don't. Maybe just be thankful for what you have and enjoy what you are doing.