The other day, a friend of mine said he was giving up writing. This friend happens to be a very good writer. Why? I asked. Too many people already write about the things I write about, he said. I thought about this for a long time, and while I understand (and even sympathize) with this idea, I feel compelled to call bullshit on it.
I write a lot about death. About love. About bad relationships. About identity. About failure. About beauty. About home. Probably, 90% of literature is about these things. There have been many writers who have tackled these subjects with more skill and heart than I have, and there are many people at this very second writing about these things, but that hardly seems reason enough to abandon the whole endeavor.
There are a limited number of human emotions, and this is why we all write about the same things. But this doesn’t bother me, because it’s not really the same thing. My idea of love is not your idea of love. And my experience of love certainly isn’t yours. My entire existence is mine alone, and yours is yours alone.
There is this existential saying: No one can take a bath for you. This is what I am getting at. We define our world based on our own experience, and our writing stems from that experience. So in the end, there can be an infinite number of unique stories about love.
Not writing is easy. I could write a compelling essay about the many reasons to give up writing, but I won’t because I am an eternal optimist who believes in books. But my friend did get me thinking. How did I get here? Why do I write?
These kinds of essays tend to come from writers who are well into their careers (as they probably should), people who have more perspective and insight into their own histories. I’m at the relative beginning of my writing career. I have a novel, a novella, and a collection of short stories in the works, and there is only the slightest bit of indication that any of these things will be remotely successful. Nevertheless, one must start somewhere.
So, dear friend who is giving up writing, I hope you’ll reconsider. The world needs your words. Perhaps I can convince you by telling you why I write:
I didn’t always want to be a writer. The fact that I always wrote seems irrelevant. I can’t remember writing anything of consequence before the age of twenty, though I suppose there were things. Many terrible poems. In high school, I wrote a story from the perspective of a spoon. There was another story where a bar of chocolate melted on a park bench. It was symbolic, I’m sure.
I wrote songs and thought I would become a musician. I stood on street corners with a guitar and tried to make people smile. I wanted to learn how to play the drums, but my teacher told me I didn’t have any rhythm. You can’t keep a beat, he said. It’s one of the saddest things anyone has ever told me. Some things we just can’t do, no matter how hard we try. We are wired for certain things. We are wired to be someone.
I wrote a novel in college. It wasn’t very good and no one read it. It was easy to write in Seattle because it rained so much, we all lived in coffee shops and talked about books and read books and fell in love with books, even more than with each other.
I majored in philosophy because I wanted to learn how to think. Later on, I figured out that college can’t teach you how to think. I went to South Africa and I unlearned everything by working in the world, my hands in the dirt. I thought I might become a photojournalist, but taking pictures of strangers made me anxious.
I worked in an office for a while, where everyone was smart and beautiful and well-dressed, but I couldn’t figure out what they actually did all day. It was about this time—when the concept of an expense report took on some meaning—that I thought I might really pursue writing. I hate this phrase. We don’t really pursue anything. We do, or we don’t. We fail, and that is fine.
I moved to New York, thinking proximity to other writers was good, or maybe it was just some romanticized idea of what that city was, or could be to me. There was no logic to this plan. I arrived in August and it felt like walking in soup. New York is a strange city for a shy person. The anonymity is appealing; connecting to other human beings is much more tricky.
I derailed myself, as I often do, and went to design school, fell in love with typography, and landed in the art department of a magazine. I took a lot of wrong turns, which has made my life very uneven. This is what I think they call building character; I suppose I am a different person now than I was then.
I wrote another novel in grad school. It was about a bunch of disaffected New Yorkers, which is probably what every other hack in the city was writing about. It was about myself, obviously. A few people read it, and didn’t hate it. I don’t know why I wrote it, only that I needed to write something because fiction was the only way I could be honest.
I was very sick for a while. I went to a lot of doctors. I sat at my desk at the magazine, and looked at proofs, and cried a lot because I didn’t know what was wrong with me, only that everything hurt. After a while, pain just became my normal state and I forgot what it was like to feel anything else. Three years later, after I’d resigned myself to it, they figured it out. My immune system was fucked. They fixed me. I still get very nervous around doctors. I never write about sick characters. I can’t.
I grew up in Boise, a small city in southern Idaho that lies in a valley surrounded by golden hills. Sitting on my stoop on Brooklyn, I often wondered how I could possibly live in a city without mountains. A city without a horizon. I feel an obligation to write about Idaho. To dispel the myths. To show people how beautiful it is. That it’s my home, and the idea of home (the ideal idea of home) means something to me. My childhood house sat on the corner, there was a porch and a porch swing, and the swing creaked whenever you sat in it, and there was a deaf white cat that we inherited who always sat on the porch and watched the swing move, but we knew he couldn’t hear anything.
Someone broke my heart, bad. Sliced it right though.
I moved back to Seattle. I worked in some more swanky offices. I designed a bunch of shit that I didn’t care about. Sitting in offices, doing work that has no meaning is the quickest way to become profoundly unhappy. It happened so fast I surprised myself. I was broken-hearted and bored in a chilly, grey city, sitting alone in a room full of books. I don’t know why it took me so long to see the most obvious thing; I’d been lugging books around the country, from one coast to the other. My rooms—all of them—had always been filled with books.
So I read. I read hundreds of books that year. I took comfort in perfect word pairs, and strange sentence constructions, and unexpected phrases. And I wrote. I wrote short stories. I wrote essays. I wrote the beginnings of novels, which I will never finish. I wrote, and I wasn’t broken-hearted, and I wasn’t bored anymore.
With a new purpose in mind, I moved to San Francisco, the beautiful city by the bay, and I went to MFAland, which may or may not have made me a better writer. Mostly I think reading is the only thing that can make you a better writer. I love this city in the way I love other people, as if we exist in the same space for a reason. I sit and write in my sunny kitchen window where it’s bright and I can watch the people walk by below.
My life isn’t extraordinary. My route to writing isn’t unusual. But, it’s mine. I don’t think one needs to be extraordinary or unusual to be a good writer. The only thing beyond technical skill that one needs to be a good writer is curiosity. Carefully observe every inch of your world and then say something about it—something only you could say—and then share it.
Writing chooses you. Literature chooses you. Books jump from shelves into your hands, words jump from pages into your mind and these words mean something to you, more than to other people, so much in fact, you feel that you must write something of your own, that you must create a book of your own to place on a shelf, which will eventually jump into other hands and minds.
The thing I always believed in, and never stopped believing in—language, books, paragraphs, sentences, words, punctuation, all of it—was always there, always sitting in neat rows on my shelf. I write because I want to add something of my own to that shelf. I write because I have stories to tell. Stories that only I can tell.
So, friend who is giving up writing, figure out what brought you to writing in the first place because I think you’ll see that you really aren’t writing what everyone else is writing about. And I, for one, want to know what you have to say about love, death, identity, failure, beauty, home, and whatever else we all write about, because only you can tell your stories.
21 responses
I once thought of giving up writing too. My reason was: everybody wants to be a writer.
It seemed almost cliché to say “I write”.
I wanted to give up writing because I’m not really getting anywhere with it and everyone else seemed to be doing it too, and something about doing what everyone else is doing gives me an itch.
I have detoured many times, I also worked in corporate offices, I finished graduate school, I kept going at all the things that bring me NO passion at all. But in every single free moment, I keep writing.
I blogged for nearly 9 years before I pulled the plug, why? Everybody’s blogging… which is a really stupid thought.
Your essay found me just when I’m at a crossroads again: should I pursue a carreer in ‘?’, or should I once and for all give myself permission to write. Do I even need permission? When every waking moment that’s all I think about?
I specifically find comfort in the paragraph where you say, “Writing chooses you”. It’s so true. And it’s also true that even if you write about love, or the absence of it, death, melancholia, etc.. nobody can tell the story the way you can. I have to keep that in mind.
So thank you.
*Please excuse any horrific grammar mistakes. English is not my first language.
Isolde, you never need permission to write. And your English is better than many native speakers I tutor. Write write write write. Unapologetically, write.
Nancy, what a fantastic article. Thank you.
Karen
You write to connect and you have with this fantastic essay. I live in Seattle and read and write all day but it can be disheartening when you feel alone. But we aren’t alone, just alone in our rooms working independently on a group project. Thank you.
Nancy! This is a fantastic essay! I love it. And I’m so glad you’re writing…and flourishing!
Well said, Nancy. Your argument is correct. I hope that your friend takes your plea to heart.
If he doesn’t, then maybe he needs to quit for a minute. Walk out the door with the remote control, the chair, this magazine. Tuck your wishes for him in his jacket pocket.
I hope you both get what you want.
I have a musician friend who periodically gives up music. She packs her fiddle away under the bed (perhaps not the best place…) and after awhile it starts talking to her. Then it nags a little, Then she pulls it out and plays it again.
Your friend may well give up writing. He may do that more than once. And it may not last, any longer than he can stand. All those words may start talking to him.
This essay rings with eloquence and passion. Yes, writing chooses us. And I couldn’t agree more re: curiosity as a key. Curiosity about the world. Curiosity about the way words shape themselves into sentences and paragraphs. Curiosity about the oh-so-vari
varied voices of writers I’ve long admired and ones I’m so glad to be discovering.
Great essay!
I wrote for years and then, about eight years ago, I got discouraged and quit. It seemed so pointless, so masturbatory to sit and type for hours on books that I had convinced myself that nobody except my critique group would ever read.
Almost immediately, I took up visual art. I didn’t see it at the time, but it was obviously a reaction to cutting off my writing; you dam a stream and it will take a new path.
Fast forward to a couple years ago when I got talked into participating in NANOWRIMO. The “novel” (I use that term very loosely to describe those 50K words) was amazingly terrible, but nevertheless it did it’s job. It reminded me how much fun writing could be.
So, now I’m back writing, happily. And I staying focused on the process and my love of telling a story versus focusing on the final outcome of my book. After all, writing the best book I can write right now is all I have control over in the end.
Thank you, you got me at just the right moment. I write for me and want to write for others to read. I have been trying to decide what to do, give up or get some help, take a class or just keep writing. I’ve felt I have nothing to say, especially anything new. I felt I was reading my own bio, up until the part where you are living in SF and writing.Thank you for the timely article. I saved it for inspiration.
Thank you for writing this, because I needed to read it.
I love this, Nancy. Thank you.
this is the best piece of writing ON writing I have ever read.
This is so spot-on. I’ve thought about giving up too- mostly because I had to earn a living as a copywriter and, contrary to other people’s experiences, I found that this put my literary voice out of whack. After writing straplines, headlines and body copy year-in and year-out, I discovered I couldn’t write a decent paragraph, let alone a short story.
What’s more, my Copywriter Self always demanded “Originality”. If my Literary Self was working on a story idea, my Copywriter Self would whisper: “Nooo, that’s been done before!” -as if I were writing an ad campaign or a strapline. I couldn’t silence the demanding, condemning voice until one day, I just got so angry and tired of it that I sat down and wrote this rebuttal: “A Last Word on Originality” (in my blog), where I basically stand my ground and say: all stories can be original if I have the courage to approach it as close as I can and see it, feel it, examine it with my own heart and my own eyes. There are 7 billion living stories right now on this planet, and every one of them is original. I haven’t heard from the copywriter ever since. Maybe she’s busy producing more original ads. (http://cybonnishere.blogspot.com/2011/05/to-copywriter-last-word-on-originality.html)
i gave up writing. fast forward twenty years.
Writing is the only thing that wouldn’t let me turn its back on it. Thanks for enumerating some of the reasons.
I love this. “Carefully observe every inch of your world and then say something about it—something only you could say—and then share it.” This reminds me of what Seymour Glass writes to his brother, Buddy in “Seymour: An Introduction”: “…sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself…”
Bless you Nancy.
This is so true and essential. I vacillate between writing and not writing every single day. The nuttiest part is that it’s all I think about whether I’m doing it or not doing it.
Then when I’m writing in my journal or on my blog or sending out a query for a travel article, I tell myself I still haven’t done any ‘real’ writing until I get to work on my big project that I’m still too afraid to call a book.
Writing is my way into my life and the best way I know of trying to understood the world.
Thanks for your clear observations.
Thank you thank you thank you so much for this.
I agree that as writers we over-worry about originality; that there’s enough oxygen for each of us to speak our voice in our own unique way. What one starts writing rarely ends up being the end project one imagined. That’s because imagination has a mind of its own, no? I disagree with “the only thing beyond technical skill that one needs to be a good writer is curiosity.” “Good” being the troublesome word. People who are compelled to write should practice it without concern for whether it’s good. Most of it will not be.
Click here to subscribe today and leave your comment.