Dear Sugar,
I write like a girl. I write about my lady life experiences, and that usually comes out as unfiltered emotion, unrequited love, and eventual discussion of my vagina as metaphor.
And that’s when I can write, which doesn’t happen to be true anymore.
Right now, I am a pathetic and confused young woman of twenty-six, a writer who can’t write. I am up late asking you a question, really questioning myself. I’ve sat here, at my desk, for hours, mentally immobile. I look up people I used to love and wonder why they never loved me. I lie facedown on my bed and feel scared. I get up, go to the computer, feel worse.
David Foster Wallace called himself a failed writer at twenty-eight. Several months ago, when depression hooked its teeth into me, I complained to my then-boyfriend about how I’ll never be as good as Wallace; he screamed at me on Guerrero Street in San Francisco, “STOP IT. HE KILLED HIMSELF, ELISSA. I HOPE TO GOD YOU ARE NEVER LIKE HIM.”
I understand women like me are hurting and dealing with self-trivialization, contempt for other more successful people, and misplaced compassion, addiction, and depression, whether they are writers or not. Think of the canon of women writers: a unifying theme is many of their careers ended in suicide. I often explain to my mother my phobia that to be a writer/a woman/a woman writer means to suffer mercilessly and eventually collapse in a heap of “I could have been better than this.” She pleads with me: can’t it be different?
Can it? I want to jump out the window for what I’ve boiled down to is one reason: I can’t write a book. But it’s not that I want to die so much as have an entirely different life. I start to think that I should choose another profession—as Lorrie Moore suggests, “movie star/astronaut, a movie star missionary, a movie star/kindergarten teacher.” I want to throw off everything I’ve accumulated and begin as someone new, someone better.
I don’t have a bad life. I didn’t have a painful childhood. I know I’m not the first depressed writer. “Depressed writer”—because the latter is less accurate, the former is more acute. I’ve been clinically diagnosed with major depressive disorder and have an off-and-on relationship with prescription medication, which I confide so it doesn’t seem I throw around the term “depression.”
That said, I’m high-functioning—a high-functioning head-case, one who jokes enough that most people don’t know the truth. The truth: I am sick with panic that I cannot—will not—override my limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude, to write well, with intelligence and heart and lengthiness. And I fear that even if I do manage to write, that the stories I write—about my vagina, etc.—will be disregarded and mocked.
How do I reach the page when I can’t lift my face off the bed? How does one go on, Sugar, when you realize you might not have it in you? How does a woman get up and become the writer she wishes she’d be?
Sincerely,
Elissa Bassist
Dear Elissa Bassist,
When I was twenty-nine I had a chalkboard in my living room. It was one of those two-sided wooden A-frames that stand on their own and fold flat. On one side of the chalkboard I wrote, “The first product of self-knowledge is humility,” Flannery O’Connor and on the other side I wrote, “She sat and thought of only one thing, of her mother holding and holding onto their hands,” Eudora Welty.
The quote by Eudora Welty is from her novel The Optimist’s Daughter, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972. It was a book I read again and again and that line about the woman who sat thinking of only one thing was at the heart of the reason why. I sat like that too. Thinking of only one thing. One thing that was actually two things pressed together, like the back-to-back quotes on my chalkboard: how much I missed my mother and how the only way I could bear to live without her was to write a book. My book. The one that I’d known was in me since way before I knew people like me could have books inside of them. The one I felt pulsing in my chest like a second heart, formless and unimaginable until my mother died, and there it was, the plot revealed, the story I couldn’t live without telling. My debut.
That I hadn’t written the book by the time I was twenty-nine was a sad shock to me. Of myself, I’d expected greater things. I was a bit like you then, Elissa Bassist. Without a book, but not entirely without literary acclaim. I’d won a few grants and awards, published a couple of stories and essays. These minor successes stoked the grandiose ideas I had about what I would achieve and by what age I would achieve it. I read voraciously. I practically memorized the work of writers I loved. I recorded my life copiously and artfully in my journals. I wrote stories in feverish, intermittent bursts, believing they’d miraculously form a novel without my having to suffer too much over it.
But I was wrong. The second heart inside me beat ever stronger, but nothing miraculously became a book. As my thirtieth birthday approached, I realized that if I truly wanted to write the story I had to tell, I would have to gather everything within me to make it happen. I would have to sit and think of only one thing longer and harder than I thought possible. I would have to suffer. By which I mean work.
At the time, I believed that I’d wasted my twenties by not having come out of them with a finished book and I bitterly lambasted myself for that. I thought a lot of the same things about myself that you do, Elissa Bassist. That I was lazy and lame. That even though I had the story in me, I didn’t have it in me to see it to fruition, to actually get it out of my body and onto the page, to write, as you say, with “intelligence and heart and lengthiness.” But I’d finally reached a point where the prospect of not writing a book was more awful than the one of writing a book that sucked. And so at last, I got to serious work on the book.
When I was done writing it, I understood that things happened just as they were meant to. That I couldn’t have written my book before I did. I simply wasn’t capable of doing so, either as a writer or a person. To get to the point I had to get to write my first book, I had to do everything I did in my twenties. I had to write a lot of sentences that never turned into anything and stories that never miraculously formed a novel. I had to read voraciously and compose exhaustive entries in my journals. I had to waste time and grieve my mother and come to terms with my childhood and have stupid and sweet and scandalous sexual relationships and grow up. In short, I had to gain the self-knowledge that Flannery O’Connor mentions in that quote I wrote on my chalkboard. And once I got there I had to make a hard stop at self-knowledge’s first product: humility.
Do you know what that is, sweet pea? To be humble? The word comes from the Latin words humilis and humus. To be down low. To be of the earth. To be on the ground. That’s where I went when I wrote the last word of my first book. Straight onto the cool tile floor to weep. I sobbed and I wailed and I laughed through my tears. I didn’t get up for half an hour. I was too happy and grateful to stand. I had turned thirty-five a few weeks before. I was two months pregnant with my first child. I didn’t know if people would think my book was good or bad or horrible or beautiful and I didn’t care. I only knew I no longer had two hearts beating in my chest. I’d pulled one out with my own bare hands. I’d suffered. I’d given it everything I had.
I’d finally been able to give it because I’d let go of all the grandiose ideas I’d once had about myself and my writing—so talented! so young! I’d stopped being grandiose. I’d lowered myself to the notion that the absolute only thing that mattered was getting that extra beating heart out of my chest. Which meant I had to write my book. My very possibly mediocre book. My very possibly never-going-to-be-published book. My absolutely no-where-in-league-with-the-writers-I’d-admired-so-much-that-I-practically-memorized-their-sentences book. It was only then, when I humbly surrendered, that I was able to do the work I needed to do.
I hope you’ll think hard about that, honey bun. If you had a two-sided chalkboard in your living room I’d write humility on one side and surrender on the other for you. That’s what I think you need to find and do to get yourself out of the funk you’re in. The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there’s arrogance at its core. It presumes you should be successful at twenty-six, when really it takes most writers so much longer to get there. It laments that you’ll never be as good as David Foster Wallace—a genius, a master of the craft—while at the same time describing how little you write. You loathe yourself, and yet you’re consumed by the grandiose ideas you have about your own importance. You’re up too high and down too low. Neither is the place where we get any work done.
We get the work done on the ground level. And the kindest thing I can do for you is to tell you to get your ass on the floor. I know it’s hard to write, darling. But it’s harder not to. The only way you’ll find out if you “have it in you” is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your “limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude” is to produce. You have limitations. You are in some ways inept. This is true of every writer, and it’s especially true of writers who are twenty-six. You will feel insecure and jealous. How much power you give those feelings is entirely up to you.
That you struggle with major depressive disorder certainly adds a layer to your difficulties. I’ve not focused on it in my answer because I believe—and it seems you believe—that it’s only a layer. It goes without saying that your life is more important than your writing and that you should consult your doctor about how your depression may contribute to the despair you’re feeling about your work. I’m not a doctor, so I cannot advise you about that. But I can tell you that you’re not alone in your insecurities and fears; they’re typical of writers, even those who don’t have depression. Artists of all stripes reading this will understand your struggles. Including me.
Another layer of your anxiety seems rooted in your concern that as a woman your writing, which features “unfiltered emotion, unrequited love,” and discussion of your “vagina as metaphor” will be taken less seriously than that of men. Yes, sweet pea, it probably will. Our culture has made significant progress when it comes to sexism and racism and homophobia, but we’re not all the way there. It’s still true that literary works by women, gays, and writers of color are often framed as specific rather than universal, small rather than big, personal or particular rather than socially significant. There are things you can do to shed light on and challenge those biases and bullshit moves. Organizations like VIDA: Women in Literary Arts exist in order to connect women writers to do just that.
But the best possible thing you can do is get your ass down onto the floor. Write so blazingly good that you can’t be framed. Nobody is going to give you permission to write about your vagina, hon. Nobody is going to give you a thing. You have to give it yourself. You have to tell us what you have to say.
That’s what women writers throughout time have done and it’s what we’ll continue to do. It’s not true that to be “a woman writer means to suffer mercilessly and eventually collapse in a heap of ‘I could have been better than this,’” nor is it true that a “unifying theme is many of their careers ended in suicide” and I strongly encourage you to let go of these beliefs. They are inaccurate and melodramatic and they do not serve you. People of all professions suffer and kill themselves. In spite of various mythologies regarding artists and how psychologically fragile we are, the fact is that occupation is not a top predictor for suicide. Yes, we can rattle off a list of women writers who’ve killed themselves and yes, we may conjecture that their status as women in the societies in which they lived contributed to the depressive and desperate state that caused them to do so. But it isn’t the unifying theme.
You know what is?
How many women wrote beautiful novels and stories and poems and essays and plays and scripts and songs in spite of all the crap they endured. How many of them didn’t collapse in a heap of “I could have been better than this” and instead went right ahead and became better than anyone would have predicted or allowed them to be. The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It’s strength. It’s nerve. And “if your Nerve, deny you –,” as Emily Dickinson wrote, “go above your Nerve.” Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.
You need to do the same, dear sweet arrogant beautiful crazy talented tortured rising star glowbug. That you’re so bound up about writing tells me that writing is what you’re here to do. And when people are here to do that they almost always tell us something we need to hear. I want to know what you have inside you. I want to see the contours of your second beating heart.
So write, Elissa Bassist. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker.
Yours,
Sugar
***
The Rumpus is proud to announce that today’s Sugar’s column will be included in a compilation of essays by women to be published as the November Rumpus Book Club selection: Rumpus Women, Volume 1, edited by Julie Greicius and Elissa Bassist. More details coming soon!
97 responses
Ah, yes. A woman. A woman who writes. A woman writer. It took me a long time to get here. A teacher once told me that I should look into a mirror every day and say these words, “I am a writer.” And mean it.
So the other day someone asked me what I did. I looked the man in the eyes and said, “I’m a writer.” And meant it. He then said, “Are you someone I would have read?” (rather rude question but he does have more testosterone than estrogen)
I faltered a moment. Then said, “Not yet. But you will.”
Writing IS hard. But I have found that not writing is harder.
And yes, I will take your advice in that empowering last sentence, Sugar! 🙂
I explicitly wished that you would address the quarter-life crisis. And you did. But I also secretly wished that you would address self-doubt as a writer and how the notion of lost time gets tied up in it. And you did that too. Thank you. Much love.
Step 1 – write (like a motherfucker). Confront the blank page. If you want to be a painter, you have to paint. If you want to be a distance runner, you have to -wait for it- run.
Step 2 – edit. “The instinct to discard is ultimately a kind of faith.” – Don DeLillo [that just came up in my tweetstream, I shit you not]
Repeat.
Easy for me to say but really, if there’s a story trying to get out, Marisa is right, “not writing is harder.”
“Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.”
Words for a writer to live by. Something I try to remind myself all the time, though said much, much more eloquently by you. Amen, Sugar.
Virgina Woolf, 1928: “Write as a woman who has forgotten she is a woman.”
Helene Cixous, 1975: “Woman must write herself.”
Sugar, 2010: “Write… Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Like a motherfucker.”
Awesome.
This is beautiful advice, Sugar, and I’m so glad you were asked this important question. The moment of recognition in that Dickinson quote almost snapped me like a twig.
Go, Elissa Bassist, go!
It is so easy to get caught up in the shoulds. It is much harder to do. Ultimately I think this is good advice for people of nearly any age an profession. There will always be someone better to compare yourself to, internalize that now, get moving, live your life.
The best advice I ever got about writing was “Write the one thing that you are most afraid to write.”
Once I finally took that to heart and stopped writing “the thing nearly-sort of-almost close to the thing I was afraid to write,” but really truly let it go- that’s when everything changed for me. We’re all so much stronger than we give ourselves credit for. Sugar is so right, go write like a motherfucker.
“So write, Elissa Bassist. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Like a motherfucker.”
Thank you, thank you, thank you. As a queer woman writer of color, I suppose this is all I can do.
All of this = perfect.
this column is such an inspiring & motivating read. thanks for it!
Each writer is unhappy in her own way. Me, I’m happy. I never thought I’d tackle a novel. Teaching English and playing piano was enough for me. And then I started a book five years ago. After three years I started over in first person. And this summer the book finally picked up steam and will be
finished soon, Insha’Allah. I’m 58. Life is unpredictable.
If only I could’ve found the coast between arrogance and self-loathing much earlier. Humility is liberating–but I wasn’t ready for it in my twenties, that’s for damn sure.
Now at 40, I am humble. The world has never been thinking about me as much as I was, and it never will.
But there is one hard reality just for the ladies. There aren’t groupies for women the way there are for men (writers, musicians, comedians, athletes). So often, the woman has to be more warrior–not because we are so emotional and fragile, but because we don’t have that string of three or four wives, each willing to put up with some aspect of our bullshit (alcoholism in twenties, cheating in thirties, strange weeping in forties) and do our laundry while longing to give us oral sex a few times a week.
Rob Reiner recently said in an interview, paraphrased, “My wife made me a full human being. Men are a mess, we are unformed. Then we find the right woman and she makes us whole.” I don’t think I can imagine a woman in a creative field ever saying anything like that. I take that back. Angela Lansbury had a husband like that. Husbands 1 / Wives 3,234,348,823,978.
Dear Sugar, thank you, thank you, thank you for this. xo
Aw, sugar. Now you gone and made me cry again.
Sugar’s best yet. Truly moving and inspiring stuff – I think a lot of people are going to be able to take a lot from this.
Wonderfully clear-eyed advice, Sugar.
I’d only like to note that I do believe a touch of arrogance (okay, sometimes more than a touch) is a self-preservative trait in a writer. For most writers, for a long time, probably nobody but your mom will care what you have to say. Believing — beyond common sense, beyond reason, beyond evidence — that people SHOULD care about what you have to say can be the energy that drives you to the work.
Meanwhile, I’d like the bumpersticker, please: Write like a motherfucker.
Everytime I’m reading a great article on The Rumpus, I scroll down to the comments and I am pleasantly surprised. Then I get to Gladiator’s comments, and every time I read them, I want to scream. How does one fail so amazingly at grasping the ghost of passion in anything? How does one manage to be so nauseatingly cocksure? Even this latest comment is just insulting and misses the point during its (possibly) good intentions. Gladiator must be a perfect sample of Human – I’ve never met anyone with such confidence, anyone that knows so many people exactly like themselves, cocksure and arrogant, passionless, and unaffected by things most people consider aspects of humanity. I want to throw a tomato.
My writing professor said that you cannot wait for inspiration to strike because, like lightning, it won’t strike when you want it to. You have to work to make it strike. You have to grab the flagpole, hike to the tallest, most barren hill in sight, plant the pole, chain yourself to it and stand in a basin of water. You have to work for it. Throw yourself into the path of inspiration. You have to draw the lightning to you. And the only way to do that is to write. Even if you think it will be bad.
Oh man, Sugar, but you frickin’ rock. You are all kinds of awesome. Thank you for writing this column.
Sugar:
Thanks for another dose of love, challenge and inspiration.
With all due respect to Sugar, especially since she probably knows Elissa personally, I propose an addendum:
If Sugar’s response seems overwhelmingly harsh and impossible to you, Elissa, you are probably in the midst of a depressive episode, so feel free to shelve it until the sun starts shining on you again. And you WILL feel better, better enough to re-read this and finally see the love in it, even though it doesn’t feel like it right now.
(I’ve been through a few episodes, and I wasn’t able to take any advice without wanting to off myself in response, that’s why I’m chiming in.)
Carry on, Sugar! Your columns are top-notch, and I love you. In other words, you are the O.G. motherfucker (referring to your last sentence, of course).
“Right now, I am a pathetic and confused young woman of 26, a writer who can’t write.”
Hey Elissa,
Do you see what happened when you wrote a letter? Not only did you invoke a thoughtful response from your intended recipient, but also! there are conversations occurring as to the attitudes towards writing and women and arrogance…some of them are not humble, some of them are encouraging, many have opinions.
What do you think of all this? All these folks, tapping out strings of words in response to your strings of words. Is this what you hope for, this result of affecting others through writing? Many of these responses are self-reflections. Would you like your writing to be a mirror to the world, a microscope, a telescope, open-heart surgery?
Some might say writing is no big deal, others will say that the practice consumes their life. It seems to be consuming yours without result. I’m sorry that you must battle with depression. My heart goes out to you. No wonder you want to throw off the mantle of yourself-thus-far and start anew, for what is it that you might hold in your own two hands and tell the world I made this?
Rebirth is often viewed as a single, cataclysmic event of ultimate epiphany. But then what? How much must change to be new and shiny and free of all that you want to be rid of? And what kind of writer would you be then? Babies are beautiful and I want to hold every single one of them. But frankly, they don’t tell good stories.
I have been told that seven years from now that all the cells in our bodies will have died and been replaced. Haruki Murakami wrote about this:
“If I die,” she told me, “burn these notebooks. Douse them in kerosene and let them burn till ash, then bury them. I’d never forgive you if one word remained.”
“But I’m the one who’s been sleeping with you. I pretty much know every inch of your body. What’s there to be ashamed of at this late date?”
“Body cells replace themselves every month. Even at this very moment,” she said, thrusting a skinny back of her hand before my eyes. “Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.”
You are who you are Right Fucking Now. This is where you write from, this is where you start. Of all the things you will agonize over in your life, there is absolutely no choice but to exist as you are in any given moment. As you already know, there is regret and recrimination and revelation. All of this cycling back, an attempt to recapture. You can do this, and you can also take a bit of advice from a previous Sugar column. Reach. A little bit further every time. I know you can.
my best to you,
Ariel
“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
Sugar, wow. I’m sending this to all the writers, musicians and other artists I call friend and then I’m getting myself a 2 sided blackboard.
One side will say, “Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not.”
The other side will say, “The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker.”
Then I’m going to get back to writing.
hi –
sugar, i just discovered you and am kind of in love. following you on twitter etc. thanks.
elissa et al.,keep writing your books so i can read them. i have MDD too and am secretly terrified that i’m super arrogant (which may well be the case). also underemployed and in the middle of a relapse right now. but i can’t lie to you. life is still so $^&(*ing good. i have freedom and capacity to write – mediocre stuff about morrissey and tree-dwelling monsters and girls with multiple insecurities, but, still. it is nice to remember that i can do something other than wake up, take things for granted and go back to bed.
great column – xo
love
amy
What Gladiator said.
Having a little bit of a rabbit-hole moment on this one. Read Elissa Bassist’s story at http://www.ifnotforeverythingelse.com/ recently, and impressed by both the story, its honesty, art, and completeness, and the beauty of the presentation. I felt and feel admiration, and even a little jealousy. So am wondering too if the depression shouldn’t be taken more seriously? Because she IS a writer already? Is this anxiety the norm, or a red flag or herring? And then think, who am I to say anything? Online community out-of-body experience. I know the art is long, and life short. But there is the skewed thinking that all artists experience, and there is the skewed thinking of major depression which can, frankly, kill you, if not treated in whatever way most suits you. Please be careful and please take care; we need you to be here, to be around, and writing. Forgive me if I have overstepped the digital social bounds or trampled the norms.
Also – “draw the lightning to you” — I love it.
In “The War of Art” Steven Pressman discusses our resistance to writing, to pursuing the things we most need to do. He cites the case of Hitler, of all historical characters, who failed as an artist, who caved in to his resistance. Pressman admits this is an extreme case, then writes: “It was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.”
Since everyone else is handing out pointers…
I say if you have any doubt about being a writer, STOP WRITING and see what happens. If life proceeds without difficulty, question answered. If you still find yourself compelled to write, question answered.
“I write like a girl. I write about my lady life experiences, and that usually comes out as unfiltered emotion, unrequited love . . .”
What the hell else would you want to write like? Girls write like girls. Boys write like boys. What separates the good writers from the rest isn’t gender, it’s authenticity.
Be WHO you are. Write that way. The world is in such short supply of people who aren’t afraid of themselves. It’s rare when we stumble across someone who says what she means. Do it. We need you.
Nicely put, Sugar. Reminded me of Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet.”
And this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFyWS9WaqT0
unbelievable.
Wow. That was a beautiful essay.
Lovely lovely and so good to take to heart. I am a writer, but a different kind with a different audience. Still, I struggle with the day to day blank page and feelings of “I suck.” There are days when I delete more than I write and I have pages and pages of “parking lot ideas” or “unused work” that was a good start but not exactly what I wanted at the moment. Maybe I’ll use it one day…
I will share the most practical advice and you may take it or leave it. Find others (you trust) who write with your passion and similar style. Form a writer’s group and review each others work. The group should be compassionate, gentle, encouraging, talented, and honestly able to say when something doesn’t work. I have found that my writing has improved immensely over the past year that I have participated in the group. So have my editing skills. So that is what worked for me and I hope that this, or something, works for you.
Also please, please do something to deal with the depression. It takes some work, and a really good doctor, and sometimes therapy; but you can often find a way out and learn to love your life and yourself.
P.S. I’m not sure which I enjoy more, the column or the comments. Wow.
It’s also important to have something to write about. It’s easy to become seduced by the mechanics of writing and the infrastructure that brings timid, bureaucratic glory to a pool of professionals, but there is something deeper and more beautiful, and that is understood by fewer people, which can only be achieved by confronting enormous trials that may have nothing in the world to do with filling a blank page.
There are things that happen and occur to people who, for lack of a dedicated writer’s training and practice, aren’t able to share what has happened with the rest of the world. It transcends purple passages and the domestic tragedies of faltering careers and slow burnouts.
You must do selfless things against impossible odds in the name of honor and responsibility without an aim toward collateral gain. In other words, you must drag yourself through deadly forests on behalf of something bigger than yourself without thinking at the back of your mind, “This will make a great novel!â€
Writing a novel only makes sense if what you’re burning up to say takes an entire novel to say. But so much of what drives us as human beings, no matter how literate, can be boiled down to at most a handful of simple principles, and the closer you come to those simple principles, the harder it is to take seriously the verbose dressing that surrounds them. A fundamental truth can make the reams of filler padding either side of it hard to sit through.
You won’t believe this, because at your age I didn’t either, but there are savage things roiling in the earth of our souls which, when confronted, bring far more satisfaction than the hollow reverberation of seeing your name on a shortlist.
Do not think of writing as the point. Living is the point. If you can unearth one fundamental principle larger than yourself but never find a way of padding it into a novel, you will still be richer than the majority of writers, and for that matter the majority of things that creepeth on the earth.
love you elissa.
xo
Another one out of the park, Sugar. I love the reminder of humility — so often one thinks one is lacking the opposite. I wrote an essay for Slate that bumped up against this one, called “What Took You So Long?: The quiet hell of 10 years of novel writing.” http://www.slate.com/id/2260395/ The feedback has been tremendous. Who knew there were so many crises of confidence/humility out there?
What a great piece, Susanna. Read it, everyone! It hits on some of the same issues I wrote about in my column. Congrats on the publication of your novel.
As always, I deeply appreciate your comments, sweet peas. Thank you.
Oh, and you should all click on that YouTube link that Flinkin posted. It’s hilarious and perfect.
I don’t know you Elissa, but I love your voice. I’m always thrilled to see something posted by you here, and If Not For Everything Else was such a great read that I immediately shared it with everyone I could think of, well, everyone I could think of whom enjoys great writing.
There’s only ever going to be one DFW, just as there will only ever be one Elissa Bassist. That’s worth embracing, you have a voice that’s just as important and just as worth being heard.
Sugar, I deem thee perfect.
Thank you, Elissa, for articulating what so many of us feel. And thank you, Sugar, for the (as usual) incredible response. This was exactly what I needed to read today.
Thank you Elissa and Sugar. Elissa for having the balls to write this letter. Sugar, for once again, ripping me open and giving me hope with this:
“It is not fragility. It’s strength. It’s nerve. And “if your Nerve, deny you –,†as Emily Dickinson wrote, “go above your Nerve.â€
Someone told me that talent is important, but mostly, It takes balls, girls. Balls and tenacity to have the self worth to pursue your calling, no matter what your circumstances. And life is fucking hard. So what. I want to hear about your life, Elissa.
I feel enormous Sugarlove today. Thanks for this brilliant post.
On thing here: the part about arrogance.
I think that it’s actually quite possible to think that “every good writer” started in their twenties, not out of arrogance, but out of ignorance. What I mean is, I don’t know that I have a good indication of how age tracks to a writing career, except that almost everyone seems to think that whatever age they are, “by now I should have done more.”
I’m 32 and just now taking writing seriously. I feel like I waited too long. Not because I’m arrogant, but because I am disappointed in myself. Because I’ve known I should write for a long time, but again, I don’t really have any models for how to get there, and when I do, the models are people who are enormously popular (whether in a mainstream or an indie way, they are still popular) and so they tend to seem like they have a background and a story that’s unrealistic to reach–because it IS unrealistic to be popular in the landscape of writing.
I hope that makes some resemblance of sense. Put another way, if anyone had an answer for “how to make a career at writing” that wasn’t overly simplistic (“JUST KEEP WRITING”) or tied in to the academy, I think it would really benefit those of us who aren’t arrogant–we are simply ignorant.
Elissa, self-doubt just comes with the territory if you are actually paying attention to what you’re doing–whether it’s flipping burgers or writing novels.
And Sugar? We need t-shirts. Stat.
“Write… Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Like a motherfucker.â€
Dear Sugar,
I teach creative writing at SFSU in the MFA/MA/BA programs. I also teach “at-risk youth” creative writing through Performing Arts Workshop, and have had a private writing class called The Douglass Street Lab for many years. All of those places, all so different, and yet I’ve heard so many good and talented and smart young people who have stories, that are, at heart, much like Elissa’s.
You and I have much in common. I, myself, been an aspiring writer who has had many “minor successes.” Like the book that formed inside you after your mom died, I had a book lodge its way in my gut after my two best friends died of AIDS in the late 80s. I was a teenage runaway at the time.
I have continued to write and have yet to have a book published. Still, I have finished two novels, one recently after not knowing if I had it in me to do all over again after the first one came so close to publication but ultimately didn’t “go.”
Your column reads so truthfully. You seem so grounded, full of humility and wisdom. I will be using this essay on the first day of two upcoming classes and make a donation to The Rumpus for providing me with such great material.
Thank you Sugar, and Elissa, and Steven!
Love,
Matthew
Hey Sugar,
I just wanted to thank you for the columns you write.
They are beautiful and inspiring and spot on.
And Elissa, hang on.
My twenties were explosive, torment and wonder.
But the funny thing is, the more miles you travel, the richer life becomes.
I am not saying that it becomes easier, although it does, sorta.
It’s more that the payoff for keeping at it is that you get a glimpse at layers that you didn’t even know were there before, new depth.
Of course this is only possible if you are tough and smart and willing to keep at it.
And while I obviously don’t know you Elissa, you seem to have those qualities.
Don’t let the bastards get you down, even if one of the bastards pulling you under happens to be yourself from time to time.
Much as I love Sugar, I think I love Elissa more. I’m guessing that the writing trouble is symptomatic of the depression. The fucking depression really does get in the way, seriously. But when you can get rid of the symptoms, the rest will fall into place. You write too beautifully, too funnily, for that not to happen. In fact, good luck to anyone trying to stop you then.
Thank you, Sugar. So much. You just gave me what I’ve needed for so long I could cry.
Elissa, if you think it’s hard now, wait til you’re 40, with all the attendant responsibilities and worry about what people think and children and bills and shit. Do it now and don’t look back. That’s what I would tell my 26-year-old self. I wish I could go back. The depression is fed by not being true to oneself and one’s calling, it gets worse if you deny it, and I wish I could go back and write like a motherfucker instead of stopping to worry about making a living. Nothing worse than being a nonwriting writer in the throes of a midlife crisis!
XOXO
This Gladiator character: if he were as tough and smart as he pretends to be, he wouldn’t waste his valuable time getting involved in this kind of conversation. But he too wants to be read, he too seeks an audience, if only in a comments column, and if only by badmouthing the sincerity of the other contributors. Seems pointless.
Gladiator,
You are a straight shooter in a world of pseudo-intellectuals. “Right on.”
I hate to quote James Kilpatrick, so I will paraphrase him…if I am writing and a big word comes into my mind I sleep until the urge to use it goes away.
I don’t know who you are, but I love your thought processes…they remind me of Ohio University and bull sessions till dawn in the 60’s when we really knew that there was much more to this world than ourselves.
I want there to be a way to reply directly to particular comments here, because I want to say wow, Johann K.
I love reading your advice Sugar. I especially enjoy the 30 people in the comments thread who continue writing your response, always in “Sugar voice”. That’s how good you are at this. Your writing inspires imitation. I don’t mean that in a mocking, jerky way. I’m tempted to do it myself.
Anyway, as a scared writer, this one hits home for me. Good stuff as always. Hon.
Sugar, you’re gonna have to stop rocking the world so much or all I’m ever going to do on Facebook and Twitter is link your every damn column until it annoys people. You are just too good. And as someone who was 37 (and 9 months pregnant) when my first novel finally came out, after writing since I was 4, this all resonated . . . well, like a motherfucker.
elissa ~ if the pressure you place on yourself is serving you well, keep it up. if it has stopped serving you, if it’s just getting in your way and adding to your depression, take a rest from it.
gladiator’s got a perverse view of the world, but he has a point. writing is writing. you gotta do it, and sometimes the day-to-day of it can be useful. writing is something we just do, and despite your fears, you already know this. you’re not the usual 26-year-old wannabe writer, you’re someone who actually-really-writes, and gets published, and all that good stuff. you’re not DF Wallace. you don’t have to be Sylvia Plath. you’re you, and the path you create will be your own.
i’ve managed to live as a professional writer, with very view intervening normal jobs, for twenty years. i still haven’t written the full length novel i imagined at age 26 i should’ve already won awards for. i still haven’t managed to write a novel at all. it turns out that i’m very good at writing other things, like short fiction and reviews and interviews and poems. sure, i still lament the novel i haven’t written, and i still take ridiculous stabs at writing it. but i could’ve wasted the last two decades beating myself up about that. instead, i WROTE. i wrote for me, i wrote for clients, i wrote for magazines. i wrote for fun, i wrote because i was bored, i wrote for money. my doubt-ridden whining dried up at some point. whether or not being a writer is a good job or even a tolerable way to live, i am a writer. accepting that made everything easier. i don’t have to be the world’s greatest writer, but i do have to write.
all that said: feel free to take breaks from writing, especially if you also stop texting, emailing, facebooking, blogging, etc. for that period of time (try 30 days). works wonders.
I’m somewhere between Gladiator and the hugfest here. On one hand, I hate the thought of anyone blaming themselves for a writing block that might be better blamed on depression. That mental state’s an insidious bastard–like waking up with dark glasses on and not knowing it, and wondering why everything in your life (and your heart) looks like crap. Attempting, with a doctor or with therapy, to separate depressive symptoms away from your self-perception as a writer, could only help your writing and yourself.
But then, another part of me honestly feels impatient with this sort of psychological hand-wringing. Maybe you don’t write like a motherfucker because life hasn’t forced your to BE a motherfucker yet. It is possible to think too much, and do too little with your actual pen-down, non-writing LIFE.
I won’t take that “get over yourself” kind of attitude, because I think that’s just another kind of arrogance; “brutally honest” people are usually just assholes who feel righteously entitled to praise for their assholery. But you may need to get OUTSIDE yourself, outside of that damn overworked, overheated mind. It’s so easy for the deeply-thinky among us to start burning our mental circuits, and 24-26 is a frighteningly common age for that sort of thing. I remember a terrible three-year dip in my mid-twenties, in which everything I’d ever done looked like a terrible, uncorrectable mistake. I’d fucked up badly somewhere, and I couldn’t figure out where, and it was too late…I was on too different a track from everyone else to ever have a “successful” life. And yes, I thought of suicide.
Instead I went to Europe for a year, got really ill, ditched everything I’d ever been told I had to do to justify my existence, and committed to writing like it was a soulmate I’d almost lost. When you almost lose the chance, the actual act of writing (even the hard bits) becomes a simple pleasure. I’m 32, writing out that “second heart” of a first novel, and gorgeously, finally aware of how everything in my twenties that made me “take so long” to write it, is EXACTLY what’s going to give it its soul.
When life forces you to be a motherfucker just to keep alive, writing like a motherfucker becomes second nature. Maybe this depressive episode is exactly what you need, to force you to start punching back.
The biggest tool, and enemy, a smart person will ever have is their own mind, and their ability to make comparisons. You aren’t ever entitled to success, or obligated to pursue it by any age–that’s the siren song of an ego that still needs to be slapped to the mat. Slap it yourself–or as Sugar says, “get humble”–or Life will do it for you, worse than it might already have. If you think this current depressive headgame is hard, wait and see what sort of accident or illness or abuse the Universe will cook up to get you focused and bullshit-free.
I say this only as the older friend who just went that route, and I recommend its alternative–private reality-checking–a whole lot more.
wow, what an introduction to “Dear Sugar” … first time reading & with advice to “…write like a motherfucker”, this definitely won’t be my last. Awesome post!
Sugar, your response was healing/therapeutic in and of itself. Free therapy. And not the kind of therapy from a shrink who listens, nods and pauses a lot…but rather from the kind of kickass therapists we all need who almost hear us out, cut us off, and say, “Well that was stupid…what are you doing to do about it?”
In a word, thanks 🙂
Interesting. I don’t have any of the issues Elissa brought up, except chronic depression, but that has nothing to do with being a writer or a female, that has to do with having chronic depression.
It’s important to differentiate. But anyhow. Great article. Great responses.
Sugar and Gladiator both, THANK YOU! Elissa, thank you so much for starting this conversation.
Elissa,
If you’re reading, don’t give up. I was reborn as a writer at the ripe old age of 38 (GASP) and published my first novel this year, at 42. It’s never too late. Live your life, get out there, and then write, when it moves you. Read, read, read. Get inspired. See movies, have sex, play sports, go to museums and art galleries, fill that head with experiences. And then write about something that fascinates you. Start with short stuff, 500 words, 1000, then 5000, and work your way up to a novel (which is really hard to write, no joke). Find your voice. And then share it with the world.
Chuck Palahniuk said, and I paraphrase, “Teach me something, make me laugh, and break my heart.”
Write like a motherfucker, indeed.
given the title, i expected something rather different
fantastic. found through Autostraddle. am forwarding to my partner, who is a published author, working on her third book.
Sugar, I’ve recently discovered you.
Thank you so much.
I’m going to go overdose on your writing now, reading this entry over and over, possibly writing it on my wall or printing it out and sticking this entry in my journal to read every day to remember to stay close to the earth.
I don’t know how it can be, but this article came to me on the actual specific day I needed it. Thanks so much.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for posting this.
How do I get my hands on Sugar’s novel/book? I really want to read it.
Under the angst, we writers just need to write and stop making excuses about it. Woman, man, transgender, whatever. And if you don’t really want to write, then don’t! Go do something else. There are a lot of roles to play, and there’s nothing to say we all must be writers. I remember that advice about looking in the mirror and saying “I’m a writer.” I realized suddenly the other day that when people ask me what I do, I say “I’m a writer”, and I believe it. Whoah! How’d that happen? Because I write, and write, and write and write some more. How much I make at it or what I’ve published in what form or whether I’ve appeared in the New York Times Book Review isn’t important. I write. It’s what I do. Great, lovely, elegant post, as always, Sugar! Somehow I missed this one.
-Melissa
As a woman at the ripe old age of 39, whose first book is being published in 29 days, I think this might be the truest and most fabulous thing I’ve ever read on awesome reviews and blurbs. It took me nine years to write it, and I had to write two full versions just to get all the anger out (it’s a memoir.) About halfway through the process, my life changed dramatically and I learned a whole lot about love, humility, forgiveness, and, most importantly, JOY. I am beyond thankful that my agent didn’t send this book out before its time, even though I was all, “But it’s finished NOWWWWW!” Because I did a little bit more living, I ended up writing the story of a found person rather than a lost one.
Errr…lost a sentence there! after “read on,” insert “the internet.” The next sentence should say that the book is getting awesome reviews. Damn text-eating computer…
Wow. I’m not even 17, but I found myself engrossed in both letters. Like Elissa Bassist, I beat myself up for not accomplishing more than I feel like I should have (as arrogant as it is to do that as a teenager). And like Elissa Bassist, I’ve got some anxiety/depression issues (though much of this could just be my raging adolescent hormones talking; I openly admit that).
But your letter gave me the kick in the ass I needed. Your advice is compassionate and frank at the same time, and when I write the dedication for my current project, I am so mentioning you.
Thank you.
This post makes me think of a couple of things. The poem “Berryman” by Merwin, which I have framed in my office. “You never know, you die without knowing. If you have to know, don’t write.”
Then a line from a Margaret Atwood poem: “Most suicides are not poets: A good statistic.”
I learned to look up to women writers who embraced life. Poets who’ve lived to a good old age. Look, in fact, at Atwood! At poets like Maxine Kumin and Alicia Ostriker. Look at Lucille Clifton, lots of tough times, but she never quit. Plenty of women writers still at it, still working hard, still inspiring. We should aspire to be tough. To be long-lived, abundant writers.
I needed this. I so needed to read this. Thank you.
A friend of mine posted this on his FB page, and it found me at EXACTLY the right time. I’m not a writer by vocation, but right now I’m trying to finish my master’s thesis, and I just haven’t been able to summon that last ounce of energy to get it the fuck done. I suffer from some of the same worries – my work isn’t as good (gasp!) as the professor and mentor who is my advisor and one of the examiners. How arrogant is that? I’m 23… I need to grasp the fact that I’m not supposed to be that good yet! I have reposted it and sent to all my mates trying to get their own work done, and it is giving us all a desperately needed kick in the pants. Thank you Sugar.
I love you.
Thanks.
Kim
Dear Sugar aand Elissa,
I found myself sobbing reading your letter and the response. I don’t know if I’m a writer or not, but I posted a blog weeks ago that expressed similiar feelings about myself and my life in general: http://staceystartingover.blogspot.com/2011/03/lesson-4-you-cant-successfully-start.html
The similarities are scary and comforting to some degree. Thanks so much for sharing. You aren’t alone. Sugar, thanks so much for the great advice. I just wonder how many people feel this way and don’t get the opportunity to share and get feedback. That worries me.
Sugar I don’t have a double sided chalk board, but I’ve just written humility and surrender on two post its, above my dry erase board of to dos and goals. I too, am trying to write a book by 30. I have two more years to go, and I have the same trials and tribulations as Elissa. Seeing so many people respond to this article makes me wonder if writers are perpetually insecure or are we not awesome unless we are tormented. I’m assuming the answer is yes to both, but I’m hoping a therapist at some point will intervene to help all of us find a happy medium.
Keep writing Elissa! Vaginas, unrequited love, boys, and all.
Thanks Sugar <3
Thank you so much for this.
Thank you sugar, you cannot imagine how much this has helped me!thank you, thank you!
For what it’s worth, I’ve written and published 3 books, and I still want to kill myself on off days. 😛
I also began writing after my Mom died. Became a stand-up comic as well as humor writer. Her death was the catalyst for my beginning my life. Thank you for this article, it was inspiring.
Genius. Moving and kick-ass at the same time.
(BTW – Google has absconded with my blog, and until I can sort that out, it isn’t visible, but I’ve left the url anyway)
Thank you so much for this piece. I am in the midst of writing a novel and I’m 25. At times, it feels as though it will never live up to the grandiose expectations I have set upon it, but I force myself to keep going. And as per your advice, I’m going to write like a motherfucker!
This will help me! And I will pretend this letter was written to me. Thank you for the clarity. I know I have to get my own courage and humility!:
“I’d lowered myself to the notion that the absolute only thing that mattered was getting that extra beating heart out of my chest. Which meant I had to write my book. My very possibly mediocre book. My very possibly never-going-to-be-published book. My absolutely no-where-in-league-with-the-writers-I’d-admired-so-much-that-I-practically-memorized-their-sentences book. It was only then, when I humbly surrendered, that I was able to do the work I needed to do.”
I get hot angry, helpful tears every time I read this. Which has been many times. You are we, Sugar, all of us crazy glowbugs out here. And I know you wrote this for all of us.
Dear Elissa,
As a 43 year old who struggles to write, much less find the courage to share that writing, I want to tell you you’re not alone. I am possessed by the demon of Bipolar I, and I range from feeling like a bug on a windshield and feeling like I’m Superman. My point is this: all that tension and emotion and everything else you say that makes your writing seem trivial, is actually what will make it great. Use every emotion you feel, good and bad. They will elevate your craft while anchoring it to the hearts of your readers. People recognize a fake pretty quickly. So dig deep. A quote for you: “Writing is easy. All you have to do is stare at a sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”—Gene Fowler
Don’t quit. We need you out there!
“But the best possible thing you can do is get your ass down onto the floor. Write so blazingly good that you can’t be framed. Nobody is going to give you permission to write about your vagina, hon. Nobody is going to give you a thing. You have to give it yourself. You have to tell us what you have to say.”
Love. This.
Thank you.
I’m giving it to myself from here on out and I’ll be telling all of you what I have to say.
Elissa, have you ever heard of the Enneagram? It sounds like you might be a Type Four:
http://www.enneagraminstitute.com/TypeFour.asp
When I found out I was a Four, it explained a lot about myself. I seemed to have been given the gift of being able to see inside myself and pull out my story to share with the world. But the other side of this gift was a terrible awareness of how we humans suffer, and when I say humans, I mean specifically me.
Learning that these feelings are par for the course for Fours made things a lot easier.
Please go to your nearest bookstore and buy The Untethered Soul. This book will wrap you up like the softest blanket, and whisper liberating wisdom into your ears. You’ll fall asleep in its glow and when you wake up, the world will be a far sweeter place….
HÅ my goodness! First of all, I’d like to say to Elissa Bassist I love you already and you haven’t even wrote a book! You are HIGHLY dramatic, and I love that about you. I am highly dramatic myself. While reading your outpouring I couldn’t help but laugh, not because I’m a son-of-a-bitch as Sugar says were mother-fuckers, but because I get where your coming from. It’s just so ballzy or vaginay and heartfelt that you put it all out on the paper like that for everyone to see. Love it!
Sugar, I love when you said, “The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there’s arrogance at its core. It presumes you should be successful at 26, when really it takes most writers so much longer to get there. It laments that you’ll never be as good as David Foster Wallace—a genius, a master of the craft—while at the same time describing how little you write. You loathe yourself, and yet you’re consumed by the grandiose ideas you have about your own importance.” You’re a critical reader. We do need to humble ourselves!:-)
I love it, this post is so estimulating and give me energy to try it for myself.
Seems to be an awful lot of words written here about not being able to write. The hardest part is putting the USB stick in the port and opening Word. I think I could easily get a highly sexualized metaphor out of that.
Thanks for the Eudora
Holy fuck. I kind of accidentally stumbled across this article and really, I was hooked by every word both writers wrote here. Thank you, needed this!!
You know what I loved about this whole wonderful conundrum writers find themselves in? What Sugar said: You have to tell us what you have to say.
That’s it! I struggled thinking I wasn’t supposed to write anymore. After a season of nonwriting hibernation all the while wondering…I woke up one morning and flew out of bed. I had another story. I’m back! Don’t stop until you’re done…tell us what you have to say!!
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