Stay in the room
I recently got an email from a high school student doing research about being a writer. She wondered if I would answer a few questions about the profession of writing for her class project. I said I would, stifling my initial reaction of "you should really ask a writer," in order to help. I love doing email interviews because they force me to address things I never talk about and because I am usually surprised by my answers.
I think artists and writers – those with a creative spark – get a lot of messages in high school and college about how important it is to have a "real job," to develop a skill or knowledge set that will help them make money in the world. In such a way, the artistic and creative process is relegated to the realm of "hobby" or "when you're not working in your 'real job'". I wish I had known that being an artist or writer is big work in the world, that writers help all of us see the human condition in vital ways, and that just because the worth of their work in the world isn't often measured in dollars, its importance is without measure.
What advice do you have for high school students looking into this occupation?
Write every single day. Don't let a day go by that you don't write at least for 10 minutes. Writing is an art that is honed by sitting in a chair and writing. Writer Ron Carlson says that writers are people who stay in the room – even when the outside world calls you away to keep you from the agony of not knowing what to write, writers are those people who sit back down and stay in the room.
When you're not writing, read. Read everything you can get your hands on. Read in genres you don't necessarily even like – read essays and science fiction and novels and memoirs – read to explore how language creates an entire world with words.
Create a community of people around you with whom you can share and workshop your work. I was in my 40s before I realized the value of being around other writers, having them read my work and comment on it, and reading theirs and providing commentary. It's important, this exposure to how others use language.
Write because you long to say something, not because you want to be published.
I am a lifelong avid reader. I have always loved words. But until I was 45, it never occurred to me that I could be a writer. I still write "on the side," as an adjunct to my "real work." I haven't mastered the dance between those two things.
Story is a yearning meeting an obstacle. Writing requires us to identify very clearly both the deepest yearning (not the one on the surface, but the one way below) and the obstacles, and the dance between them. I love that.
What do I love about being a writer? I love the challenge of capturing a moment in words, of distilling a story into its most important and meaningful parts, of sometimes even capturing the deepest human moment on paper. It is a reflective, observational art that my introverted self loves.
Reframing the value of what I do when I write. What I am doing now is the most deeply important work I've ever done, and yet I've never been poorer. Putting words into the world because you yearn to say them doesn't mean that you will be rewarded financially for it. It's one thing to rant and rave against a materialistic culture in which that is true – and it is another to realize that one's own beliefs about starving artists and writers is actually contributing to the problem. It is one thing to write what you yearn to say, what you must say, and it is another to begin to pay attention to what will sell. I find myself in conversation with publishers and others about the next project–what will sell–and I have to step back to own and sit with my deepest intention in this work. That's the through-line I must follow, not sales. Saying what is significant may or may not be financially rewarding and artists and writers must stay true to that primary intention in a marketplace that often doesn't reward it. That's tough work, sometimes.
[photo is me at 16, packing to go to Sri Lanka]
