Follow Your Bliss, Maybe

But Don’t Take Any Advice From Writers

I don’t know what moves anyone to become a writer, except maybe a flair for self-punishment.

Writing’s never the soaring flight that dreamy writers like to call it. It’s never the fantastic journey aloft over fairy landscapes that earns it such a hallowed reputation. Famous writers have expressed this opinion.

“Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living,” said Gustave Flaubert.

“I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide,” said Harper Lee.

“I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it,” said William Carlos Williams, a medical doctor, so he should know.

If you’re a writer, you have written novels or non-fiction books, or huge volumes of poetry, and all of it has come from your own personal head.

But most “writers” have not done this. Most are among those numberless ranks of scribblers hanging on from commercial job to commercial job, getting paid peanuts to extol this or that brand of necktie. Their lives are measured out in column inches.

I belong to a writing group where my principle function seems to be preventing the plummet into despair of all other group members, and they do the same for me. There are writing groups without number in the world, a reflection of the odd human proclivity for rugged individualist enterprise in company with supportive others.

The one I belong to starts every weekday morning with a group writing session, held on Zoom. Writers from all over the world zoom in at the same time and then scribble and struggle and grope their way through an hour together, in silence, with their cameras on.

Imagine a group of 150 or so writers, each occupying a little box, laid out in rows on the computer screen, all of them staring at you earnestly, hopefully, frowningly, their eyes moving to and fro over their own screens as they try to think of that next line, that next word, the next thought that will justify their spending hours doing this sort of performance every week.

Sometimes I forget about writing and just scan through the ranks of optimistic faces, and wonder how many of them might forget they are on camera, and start scratching their behinds in a vigorous and photogenic way.

Then, at the end of the hour, the lights come back up, as it were, and the host interviews one of the boxed writers about “how it went”, and the writer talks about how she struggled at first, but then found a good narrative line and followed it carefully and was surprised when the hour ended, as she wanted to keep going. This is the sort of strangeness I encounter every day.

And sometimes it does go well. Sometimes it flows smoothly and all the words get laid down in good order and shine brightly in their places and add up to something interesting. Except of course at the second reading the situation changes and the whole piece sounds idiotic.

Often I feel I should try to concentrate on something more productive, like juggling knives or playing with explosives.

Writers do have useful purposes, in any event. You can use them as doorstops. You can use them as paperweights. You can use them to hold scrap cardboard down in the back of your pickup truck.

But do I say stop it? Do I say hang up the pen and paper? No, I do not! I say keep going, keep writing, if only because a foolish practice undertaken diligently eventually becomes a kind of virtue, or at least a charming eccentricity. You’ll need this when you’re old.

Let all the ambitions run wild, I say. Let all the artistic impulses out to play. God knows we have enough of the selfish kind. Write what you want and be happy with it, or not.

Maybe someone will read it. Maybe someone will like it. Maybe, in the dim precincts of cosmic improbability, someone will find it inspiring, and reach out to you for some genuine contact with the author, and let you know, through enthusiastic words and cries, that they had completely misunderstood what you were saying.

Then you will know that you have arrived.