A week or so ago, eating a late breakfast with The Raven at Canters’ on Fairfax, she said she couldn’t imagine me not writing. It took me by surprise. She sees me not writing most of the time we’re together. I spend most of my waking hours not writing, and every one of my non-waking hours.
It put me in mind of Richard Dawkins’ retort to a Christian, a little. Dawkins pointed out that the Christian didn’t believe in Zeus, Ahura-Mazda, Odin, Shiva, Quetzalcoatl, in fact of all the many hundreds of gods referred to in the literature, the Christian disbelieved in all but one. As an atheist, Dawkins said, he merely disbelieved in one more god than the Christian did. I spend almost all of my time not writing: all I’d have to do is change what I did with a fraction of my day to not write at all.
It’s actually pretty damned easy for me to imagine not writing. I spent my twenties not writing. I think I wrote three or four little things during that decade, all of them prompted out of sheer unemployed boredom during a summer in which I was - literally - staying in my father’s basement. Maybe a thousand words during the entire decade, which works out to a consonant and half a vowel a day on average.
I have heard it said that the defining characteristic of a writer is that writers absolutely must write. They can’t help it. It’s a compulsion. By that metric, I am not a writer. By that metric, I am pretty much the opposite of what a writer is. Most of the time, I have to be forced to write. This post, for instance, is prompted by my desperately needing to work on something else with a looming deadline. Yes, it’s still writing, but my only alternative is doing the dishes. There have been days this week where I chose a sinkful of dishes instead.
I like writing. I’m good at it. I’ve come to realize that my writing has made a few incremental changes for good in this world: swaying people’s opinions, helping people better appreciate some neglected things.
But do I need to write? No. I have been happy with my life without writing being a part of it.
I think about this as more and more of the Old Order of writing collapses around us. There’s a lot of talk lately about the future of the book, and almost none of that talk concerns the person who creates the book. Who will triumph in the race to determine the industry standard for the piece of electronic machinery that people use to carry the book around? That’s the important question.
In the meantime, discussion of the digital rights management issue over past years has focused on music, and to a lesser extent video and the visual arts. It’s only recently that the topic of electronic duplication and dissemination of written works has become an issue deemed worthy of discussion. This despite the fact that people had been mass-copying and distributing written works electronically for many years before the mp3 was developed.
Ten years ago I made a phonecall to a local newspaper editor and landed myself a gig writing feature stories and a biweekly column. Doing so brought me a few hundred dollars in a good month. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to justify the time spent. That’s pretty much impossible these days. The bottom’s dropped out of the newspaper freelance market. There are still papers buying things from freelancers, some of them online. I’ve sold a few pieces that way. Whether I’d be able to if I was just breaking into this thing, I don’t know. It seems most people who get that kind of gig do so from the launching point of a successful blog, which it becomes increasingly hard to start. That land rush is over, and the ecological niches are full.
The mid-list publishing house is assumed to be on its way out, and the corollary of that assumption is that non-best-selling authors will have to assume responsibility for promoting their work if they want their books to sell. I don’t wish to stereotype here: there are certainly talented, artistic writers who have a knack for promotion. The Eggerses and the Lamonts will do well. But what of the Pynchons, the Salingers, the D.F. Wallaces? I think it’s safe to say, without insult to the few percent of non-hack writers who possess bullet-proof self-promotion chops, that a system in which those most adept at self-promotion are most likely to succeed will elevate hackery to the detriment of art.
Yeah, I know: what else is new? It’s been like that for decades. But the editors and publicists in the mid-list houses have made a difference, pushing books so that the writers didn’t have to as much, scheduling book tours so that the writers could complain about being on book tours. What happens when there are no more mid-list editors and publicists?
This Joshua tree book is going to be good, I think. It’ll be a miracle if sales bring me a tenth of what I’ve spent writing it. I wouldn’t complain if it made a fortune, of course. It started out as a deliberate attempt to fill a vacant spot on National Park Visitor Center Bookstore shelves, after all, a calculated bit of market research. It’s turned into a mission. I’ve had friends in my writers’ group tell me that the few chapters I’ve brought in have started them caring about the Joshua tree, prompted an interest in desert wildlife. That’s worth the time and money I’ve spent. I suspect those of my readers who donated to the progress of the book might feel the same way.
But once the Joshua tree book is done, I have to say I doubt I will have it in me to do another project of that magnitude unless it creates income instead of outgo.
I’m not a self-promoter. (Buy my Zeke book anyway, please.) That fact may consign me to penury if I keep writing as a primary avocation. I’m not claiming to be unique in that regard. Writing is notoriously an underpaid gig. Current industry trends making it harder for writers to support themselves by writing just make an already unpleasant situation worse.
The one consistent answer I’ve seen to all this, the doom and gloom forecasts about writing’s financial future, has been that trope about writers having to write. The usual application of this trope can be pretty much summed up as “yeah, but it’s not like you’ll stop writing, so it doesn’t really matter to me whether you get paid or not.”
It may be that I’m an aberration among writers in my only doing so because I want to. It may be that not all writers could, as I conceivably could, put away the keyboard for a trowel and shovel. Maybe all writers other than me couldn’t stop writing to save their lives.
But if you’re one of those people who assumes that means it doesn’t matter whether we get paid and that you’ll still have plenty to read, I have a question for you.
What makes you think that once we write that text we “simply have to write because we’re writers,” that we’ll be compelled to put it somewhere where you can read it?
We could all write compulsively in our paper diaries, like I do!
Thank you for saying so many things that have been bouncing around in my head for the last year or so, so well!
The “writers must write” canard is right up there with “writers must live in remote shacks in the woods or cramped garrets” and “writers must be impoverished anti-social drunks” among the “writers must…” statements that I dislike.
Absent the carrots and sticks of academia, I have found that, despite ample “free” time, the urge to write is not overwhelming. Indeed, most days it’s pretty quiet and low key, and easily ignored. Some of it is that I don’t feel I have anything of particular value to share, and sometimes it’s because it feels like an awful lot of work for… what, exactly? I suppose some writers feel enriched and rewarded by the very act of setting words down, which I do, somewhat, but it’s not enough on its own to keep me going through the rough spots. Money certainly isn’t the motivation, as none of my writing to date has netted me even one red cent, unless you count things like receiving books in exchange for reviews.
Yet, somehow, I keep doing it, not continuously, but like a scab I find myself picking at every now and then, just when it’s about to heal. And other people tell me that what I write is compelling and at times even inspiring. (Ironically, that more often comes in response to something I just hacked out, rather than something I carefully crafted.)
Maybe that’s what makes me “a writer.” It certainly doesn’t pay the bills, though.
Writing too often or not writing enough—even if in meaningless gibberish when written—does feel like a scab I have to pick at from time to time. Rachel’s comment hits me at home in that sense. And your expression, Chris, is a blatant truth.
I’ve yet to pay a single bill with it. It fights my desire to be out and about in nature, to be with friends and family, to read, to do a great many things. But you know what? That doesn’t stop me—but neither does it control me. There are times I set it aside like so much refuse swept from the floor, then there are times I can’t leave it be. Sometimes the better part of me wants to do it because I find myself in it even after I’ve written it, like a rediscovery of experiences that are first known in memory and afterward in whatever linguistic spilling comes from me. The two don’t always match.
And the truth is that most of my writing—95% or more—is never seen by anyone else. So your ending query rings true. I’ve kept a personal journal for 35 years or so; it will always be personal. In that sense, so much of “what has to be written” actually goes unread. Unseen in point of fact. So it will remain, too.
But it’s such a small part of me, at least in toto. I once thought it meant everything. But then I found it could be as much a distraction as it was a passion. I get tied up in the manuscripts I’m working on and find I can’t focus on anything else. Five minutes later a bird flits by the wind and I ignore the writing for weeks—even months—at a time.
Do I passionately want to do it? Sure. Do I desperately need to do it? Not so much.
I found this a rather thought-provoking post. Why do I write? And who am I writing for?
I definitely notice a difference in my motivation to write depending on what I’m writing. My blog exists for my readers; without them, I would save myself the several hours a week I spend on it and put them into something else. I don’t write my blog for myself so much, though it would take a while to gently break the habit of the “that would make a good blog post!” reaction regarding nature observations. When it comes to nature and non-fiction, I write to share knowledge, and the writing is simply the means to an end. Often I feel it a chore, and I could happily go stretches without updating if I didn’t feel horrible guilt about leaving my readers hanging.
Last summer I decided, on a whim, to try my hand at writing a novel. I’d read something somewhere that suggested if you just write a page a day - which, at about 350 words, would take relatively little time out of your day, no more than walking the dog would, or going for a jog - in a year you could have a whole book written. Growing up, and through university, I was a voracious reader, I devoured books. After graduating I got busy, and my boyfriend didn’t read, and I fell out of the habit, though I missed it; I’ve only recently started to pick it up again now that we’re in a house where I have my own quiet space I can retire to with my book. I discovered that everything I loved about reading fiction applied to writing it - I get attached to the characters, I want to find out how the plot develops, how the story ends, what happens to everyone along the way. Just planning the story out in my mind isn’t enough, I feel the need to actually write it. Perhaps part of this is that writing non-fiction means carefully planning out your content and knowing exactly what’s going to be said; but I’ve discovered fiction is very alive, things happen without you expecting them to, and you the author, the person putting the words on the page, are probably every bit as surprised as the reader may be about the sudden appearance of a person, or turn of events. You’re driven to keep writing just so you know what comes next.
For fiction, I’ve found writing to be a compulsion in a way that non-fiction never has been - though it’s not the act of writing itself, but rather the need to tell the story, completely. I finished that first novel sometime around Christmas, wrapping up at 118,000 words. For a first attempt I was happy with how it turned out. I liked the way it ended. Oh, sure, it would need some work before I was ever likely to show it to anyone, character development especially, so it’ll probably be one of those ones that gets tucked away in the back of a drawer for a decade or two. But I had a great time writing it. So much fun, in fact, that a couple of weeks after I finished it, I started another. I’m 80,000 words into the second. This one I think is progressing better (drawing on my experience learned from the first one) and, once it’s tidied up, I might actually try to find an agent for it. But that would just be the icing on the cake; I’m primarily writing it for myself, the same reason one reads books to oneself. And just as it’s really hard to stay away from that page-turner you’re halfway through, I’m finding with the novel it’s hard for me to not write it; it becomes my reward at the end of the day for getting through my other work.
So I might say that perhaps some writers must write, but it probably depends on the writer, the genre, and their motivation. I think the only writers who are driven to write are the ones who are doing it simply for their own enjoyment and would bum about aimlessly if they couldn’t (consider an avid birder who was prevented from going out birding, the sort of birder who picks out birdsong from tv commercials because they can’t turn it off), or writers with big egos who do it just to hear themselves “speak”.
In my humble opinion writing is not about money, fame, or marketing but rather about art, truth, and expression. My writer friends, many of them excellent writers, use writing as more than a creative outlet. They write because of passion and a love for the written word. Is it fulfilling to share your writing with others? For most writers the answer is yes. Would it be wonderful to make a living from writing? Perhaps, but not if it destroyed creativity or lessened the fulfillment that it brings some of us.
I spend a lot of time thinking about writing. No doubt more time than I actually spend writing. I construct ideas in my head, sometimes editing them a dozen times, before I ever put my fingers to the keyboard. That is part of the process I love.
For me, there is always one more thing out there to write about, one more sentence that could use restructuring, and one more word substitute that might make a piece just right.
Thanks for the stimulating article, Chris.
Bill;www.wildramblings.com
Will be linking to this very soon, Chris. Another excellent piece - I’m so glad you’re thinking (and writing) about these questions. I don’t “have to write” either, and if there comes a time when the sense of value and exchange diminishes to nothing, I too will go back to my personal journal. The real question here, for me, is not whether we writers “must write” but whether society is going to continue to devalue what we do. Artists have always been asked to give away their work for free, especially by rich people who see artists as a sort of pet to be shown off, but there have never been as few opportunities for the artist to at least make peripheral income from the work of their life and heart.
Writing shows me who I am, what I think, and how I feel. It connects me with my vital Self and gives that Self a voice. This voice needs to speak, and doesn’t care who’s listening as long I am. It’s a voice that needs me to know her—as much as a kid longs to be seen and acknowledged by a parent. But my inner voice is no child. It’s ageless, and much wiser than me. I use it to navigate life’s daggers and spitballs. If I didn’t have a relationship with this voice I wouldn’t fare as well on my journey. Sure I’d love to get paid—and twice I was paid well, thanks to Sy Safransky at The Sun Magazine, and I’ve got income I never had before from my poetry collection, SECRETS OF MY SEX. It’s great finally having readers, especially when they make the effort to tell you your work resonates deeply, that they find it healing or they are inspired by your courage (even when you feel like a coward—or are convinced not only your work, but YOU are worthless). I know I can’t touch or heal anybody else,until or unless I’ve done it first for myself. So it all comes down to me! The simple truth is I’m happier, healthier, wiser, and more deeply connected as a human being when I’m writing than when I’m not. The BUSINESS of writing is another matter. Can’t stand that—especially when it takes me away from my real work, which can, when I’m doing it right, resemble play—and sometimes, if I’m lucky, prayer! What writing requires from me, more than anything else, is faith.
I am glad to see an essay tackling the myth of the writer who has to write. A couple of weeks ago, a well-known poet asked me why I write. I gave my response, which was fairly long and multifaceted. Then I asked him why he writes, and he replied, simply: “to live.” That answer is so overdone and, in my opinion, so inauthentic, that it leaves me thinking, “Oh, please.”
That response also shuts the conversation down about writing. Once someone reduces writing to that kind of sentiment, there’s nothing left to say about the many, many other reasons a person might write. Reasons such as “to connect with others” simply pale in comparison with the grand assertion that writing is not only related to one’s survival, it *is* one’s survival.
Rethinking—in my comment above I wrote: “The real question here, for me, is not whether we writers “must write” but whether society is going to continue to devalue what we do.” - I think “devalue” is the wrong word, “take for granted” is what I really mean, and “devalue” is an inevitable result of that. Of course art and artists are going to be taken for granted to some extent, especially when most of us believe art should, on some level anyway, be free. The thing that’s unprecedented is what you point out, Chris—how effectively the digital age has undercut the vast majority of possibilities for artists getting paid - whole ranks of professions are being eliminated, from professional photography to freelance writing for magazines and newspapers.
I started writing (and being read) when I was 11 years old. I had my first article published in the local newspaper when I was 14. I’m 67 now. I’ve been a small press book designer, alternative newspaper publisher/editor, small press magazine editor, writer, journalist, poet and graphic artist. Writing has been weaving and twisting it’s way through my life as I’ve supported myself, brought up my four kids and spent the best years of my life with a wild and crazy painter. We were never wealthy but I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.
There were times when I had to work part time straight jobs on the side or do freelance work for money to pay the bills but that was always secondary and temporary. I was lucky to live in the years when that was possible.
I live on social security now and I have a lot more time to write even though I’m really poor now. I keep on writing because I am a story teller and I don’t want the stories of my age to be lost - and because I care so much about what happens to the earth which is in such peril, I want to do everything I can to help.
All I have to offer is my writing. So I get up every morning and write for my grandchildren, for everyone’s grandchildren.
As far as the electronic media . . . sigh. I love books. Physically. I love the touch, weight, visual paper, colors of them. Video display terminals leave me cold. But - no trees were chopped down to print my blog and I have more readers in one week of my blog than I did on the best week of my weekly newspaper 35 years ago. I don’t have to pay the printer or sell ads either. There’s something to say for that.
But I hope and I believe that real books will continue to be produced. I would love to see letterpress, hand bound books come back.
Thanks for this good post, Chris . . . swan . . . .
Rebecca, Your post is lovely. Very inspiring. I’ll be checking our your blog.
Rebecca, Your post is lovely. Very inspiring. I’ll be checking our your blog.
Q:
What makes you think that once we write that text we “simply have to write because we’re writers,” that we’ll be compelled to put it somewhere where you can read it?
A:
http://faultline.org
And before that, Creek Running North.
The contribution of the editor to the write-publish-read cycle is profoundly under appreciated, especially by readers. Want to read something that rewards your attention, that doesn’t waste those precious moments when distraction is off bugging someone else? Pick up a professionally edited text. A nameless professional has waded through the submissions pile picking and choosing (and perhaps cajoling). And not for free, either.
I come here because the writing rewards my attention. There’s an excellent editor lurking behind the curtain.
Yes! So true, black dog, let’s hear it for the editors!!
Thank you for this post. I found it from someone’s Google Reader. In my Twit-stream, I often hear the meme “writers write” as if it’s some absolute truth. People often consider “writers have to write everyday” to be a truism as well. As someone who’s getting better at this craft, I’m finding that writing takes on so many different forms, it’s hard to define, but there are certainly characteristics of writing that make it potent. To that end, writers don’t simply write, but hopefully write well.
I actually prefer unedited texts. Once I’ve found someone I think is worth reading, I’d rather have their text raw.
If someone is so careless that they need an editor to be intelligible or interesting, I probably don’t want to read them in the first place.
There are certainly exceptions to that, Thomas Wolfes and T.S. Eliots and so forth. People who don’t know when to shut up, or when they’re being hopelessly obscure. And most writing is better if it has readers who push back. But if I can just ping the writer and say, hey, what the hell did you mean by that? and get an answer, I don’t feel the need for an editor at all: in fact, after reading mostly raw text for several years now, I’m a little uncomfortable with edited text: I often wonder what the editor decided that I shouldn’t see. Both the most egregious and the most interesting bits tend to end up on the cutting room floor. I’d rather see both.
Well, Dale, I’m an editor. I find most writers need an editor. It’s not about making a writer’s work intelligible or interesting where it would not have been without editing. An editor can do only so much to make unintelligible work intelligible, and nothing to make uninteresting work interesting.
What an editor does, aside from cutting written work to fit the available column inches, is to work with writers to make them better writers. Not just in terms of craft, but also as regards tautness of logic, music and rhythm, large-scale clarity and avoidance of both too-easy answers and cliche.
There are a lot of crappy editors out there. Usually, what makes them crappy is that they get in the way of the writer. I’ve gotten in the way of a lot of writers as an editor, but I try only to do so when that writer *should* be gotten in the way of, and in such cases I get in their way by tossing their work in the trash. That’s a rarity. More properly, an editor’s job is keeping a writer from getting in his or her own way.
A writer who has worked with good editors will need them less over time, as that writer learns more about his or her quirks and habits, bad and good. One gains mastery over them. But no writer ever gets past needing an editor. I’m saying that as a writer, not as an editor.
I find that ninety nine percent of the writing I see online, the immediate and democratic and decentralized and unedited stuff, is unreadable, insipid crap; triteness born of rage or delusions of great insight, elevated to importance by the writer’s ego at having written it. I include a staggering percentage of my own writing in that assessment. Almost without fail I find the thoughtful, well-expressed, and creative pieces that I feel are well-executed are written by authors who have been editors, or who have taught writing and composition, or who have worked with editors for a long time, who get to feel instinctively when a sentence is awkward or inartful, who spot special pleading and hackery in their own work and cut it out impatiently.
Well said, Chris! I couldn’t agree more.
Oh, writers need teachers and editors, certainly. I’ve spent a lot of time editing myself, as a teacher, and I hope I did some good. And I wish I had editors now.
But still, as a reader, I often prefer the immediacy of unedited text. Just do. I’d rather read the manuscript than the book.
(Though it’s also true that the manuscripts I would like to read will be those written by people who have had a lot of careful, rigorous editing in the past.)
Chris—what a post!
I hadn’t thought about writing in a long time. In my mind, writing has always been this lofty thing, reserved only for deep, solitary people. The kind of people who write because they have to.
Growing up in the age of Facebook and Twitter, the most writing that I can usually muster is the 140-word status update.
Newspapers became irrelevant ages ago, and personally, I prefer the unedited writing that appears on blogs over the well-edited, corporatized crap propagated by “established” media sources.
As for making a living on writing—I guess I’m trying to do that in some form now? And for sure, it’s not easy. I’m moving from a $600 / month place to an even cheaper place four blocks away to make it work. Can’t imagine what it’s like for “real” writers in this economy.
Anyway, as always, thanks for the provocative post.