Why I Probably Should Hire Someone To Do My PR

A student that I like and respect tells me, “Talking to you about writing is kind of depressing.”

I understand.

I will never be the pitch-person for a Write Your Way to Happiness seminar.  At a book festival, after a reading, someone came up and wanted to discuss the life-affirming qualities of literature and the healing qualities of writing.  Perhaps it was simply out of orneriness, but I pointed at a shelf nearby that contained “Classics.”  Ernest Hemingway – suicide.  Sylvia Plath – suicide.  Anne Sexton – suicide.  Virginia Woolf – suicide.  Richard Brautigan – suicide.  David Foster Wallace – suicide.  Hunter S. Thompson – suicide.   I was about to work my way through the attempted suicides – Twain, Vonnegut – and then I was going to substitute “alcoholic” or “drug addict” for “suicide,” but I finally noticed the woman’s horrified expression.  I mumbled something like “Well, maybe writing helped them postpone killing themselves for a while.”  She moved away quickly, as if she was afraid that I was about to launch myself through a window.

My student made the comment she did, not because I had given a suicide litany, but because I had been explaining how writing doesn’t necessarily make me feel good as much as it makes me less miserable.  I’m irritable if I don’t do it, so much so that my wife can tell.  Noting my crankiness, she’ll say, “You haven’t written yet today, have you.”  And she’ll send me off so that my company will be more bearable.  But, even when I do sit down and put in some time, the next day I have to do it again.  In an interview recently, Billy Collins pointed out that a poet can finish work quickly, but this means a constant resetting back to zero and having to start all over.

As a writing teacher, I emphasize the work it takes.  The need to revise.  The need to put in the time.  The day-to-day struggle.  The discipline and craft.  It’s not romantic or inspiring.  It’s  … well . . . boring which is why it’s difficult.  Most of us have a low tolerance for boredom.  (It’s also why movies about writers are usually boring.  At least those that want to show them “working.”  The craft of writing is fundamentally uninteresting to watch; there is no action.)

I know my students want to hear something motivational.  Something elevating and quasi-mystical.  Maybe something that emphasizes the joy, the sense of accomplishment, the God-like power of creating worlds.  And sometimes I even want to say something like that.  But, just as I warn them about exclamation marks, I’m no Keating from Dead Poets Society.  I’m no coach, no personal trainer, no rah-rah speaker.

And yet . . .

F. Scott Fitzgerald (alcoholic) talked about a mind needing to be able to hold two opposing ideas at the same time.  I think the writing of poetry (and most writing) is … pfffff… piffle, not a waste of time, but certainly not as valuable as working in a hospital, fixing a toilet, taking care of a baby.  It’s just a poem, and usually not even that.  Just a draft.  It won’t affect anything, change anything, mean anything.  And yet simultaneously, I think it’s the most important thing that I can be doing. 

In the movie Shadowlands, someone tells C.S. Lewis that God may be answering his prayers.  He responds, “That's not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God, it changes me.”  

This is how I feel -- there is an internal need and my writing doesn't change anyone but myself -- but I'm no minister, so I don't put it in these terms.  Instead, I try to explain it more prosaically quoting Gloria Steinem who once said, “writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.”

Who You Sacrifice

           As I pull out of the drive, my ten year old daughter is crying and saying, “Daddy, I don’t want you to go.”  I could say that I don’t want to go either, and, in part, that’s true, but it would confuse her.  I’m making a choice to leave for a writing weekend.  As much as I love my family and try to arrange a schedule to get work done, sometimes I need uninterrupted time.

            There is the cliché of the struggling artist, and the idea that an artist makes sacrifices.  These are true, but the nature of the struggle and sacrifices are sometimes misunderstood.

            For me, these have nothing to do with money.  I’m primarily a poet, and although I might sell a few books at readings, it's rarely enough to cover the gas and coffee costs to get there.  But, I don’t write poetry expecting to be paid.  Nor do I believe that I'm "paying my dues" and one day I will hit it big like Billy Collins or Mary Oliver (who I'm sure are rolling in it with Rolex watches, champagne readings, custom-designed poetmobiles, etc.).  As long as I have enough to buy a morning pastry, I'm satisfied, and, because my local bakery -- Camino -- is owned by a friend, I suspect that she'll slip me a free muffin or two if things get rough.
            Time, however, is a different matter.

            To do almost any kind of writing takes concentration, and time is a zero sum quantity. There is only so much of it.  Time devoted to writing means less available for something else – my teaching job, my family, my falling apart old house, my other interests.  
           So, the “sacrifice” an artist makes is often being with other people, and the price is paid by them.  If I wasn’t a writer, my children might spend more time with me, and, when I am with them, I might be less distracted.  Right now, their memories of Saturday and Sunday mornings won’t be of making pancakes with Daddy, but of Daddy going off to the coffeeshop for a few hours.  Right now, they suspect, for good reason, that sometimes even when I'm there, I'm not actually there.

            And we sacrifice people in other ways.  The writer, Julie Suk, says, “If you’re acquainted with a poet, you’re going to have your life exposed.”  Or, as Joan Didion puts it, “Writers are always selling someone out.”  My family’s lives are my material.  I will sacrifice their privacy and often their feelings to explore it.

            Occasionally people say how wonderful it must be to be a writer, and often it is, except for those times that you’re driving away from your crying daughter.