A Hard, Hard Truth of Writing

A Highlight of My Career

The New York Times book section published a piece that I believe all writers should read.

Titled A Writer’s Lament: The Better You Write, the More You Will Fail, Stephen Marche describes what it is like to be a writer in painful detail. My one critique is that he goes far, far back in history to make some of his points when it would be more meaningful to have a current example. But that is small ball. What he says is absolute truth and one that writers either learn to live with or learn to ignore or let it defeat them. There are a lot of former writers who made a stab at it then left, running for the exit for financial and emotional security.

I am somewhere between learning to live with the truth of being a writer and learning to ignore it. What helps is that I (mostly) am able to earn a living at this. But it is hard. The hardest thing I have ever done. But the modest joys of it are more than I can let go of. What keeps me here, too, is the roulette wheel nature of this lifelong project. I keep submitting and pushing forward and writing because I could break through. Not at the level of a David Sedaris but enough to bring some modest comfort and freedom to do more writing.

And then there is personal ego. When someone asks me what I do, I can say, “I am a writer.” That may not mean anything to someone else, but it means a lot to me. It defines me. My definition of myself? Father, writer. In that order, absolutely.

Marche sums our collective challenge here:

“Part of the problem, for writers of my generation anyway, is that we’re living in an aftermath. The relative peace and prosperity of the postwar era gave birth to an array of literary institutions that have been in managed decline ever since. Failure is spreading because of technological and social changes that are beyond anyone’s control. The writing of our time is in constant, unrelenting transition. One mode of writing (print) is dying and another mode (digital) is being born. And in digital writing, whole schemes of meaning arise and then dissolve or rot or flame out, leaving only ashes and uncertain memories of a bright flash. Each transition requires starting over, re-evaluating, submitting and, above all, failing. Just to survive, young writers today will have to live through multiple revisions of who they are and what they do. Within a few years, the modes of expression they’re learning now, the writerly identities they hunger to inhabit, won’t exist or won’t be recognizable.”

He then states, “Writers’ abilities and their careers simply do not correlate; they never have.” What he means is you may be a talented writer telling good stories, but you have no right to succeed. You may very well be rejected over and over and over—collecting a few acceptances here and there to keep you at the roulette table—until you either quit or die.

And finally, a truth that I have long warned of: “Lists of writing rules are very popular, like rules for life, and about as accurate.”