The Writing Life

A friend writes me, a quote from Jorge Luis Borges: “A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.” This is the only content in the e-mail, and I haven’t heard from or written to this friend in some time. When I get the e-mail, I feel both mysteriously guilty for not having written to her, and also mysteriously understood. Borges knows his writers; and, it seems, my friend knows me.

For dozens of years - they seem to span back much farther than my own life does, so ancient is the desire in me - I have wanted to be a writer. It’s what I’ve told people again and again was my goal. “I want to be a writer. I want to live a writer’s life.” Always, that seemed like enough to say, enough of a goal to have, and self-explanatory. Until one day in December 2005, about two years ago, when Ingrid asked me over the phone point-blank: “What do you mean? What does that look like to you?”

If a soul can stammer or a heart stutter, mine did right then. I mumbled out something like, “I want to write, and I want to publish. I want to be known for my writing.” I’m pretty sure she said, “Oh, okay,” and we both recognized that I had no clear idea what I wanted. No specifics. Just a sort of vague, cloudy daydream - probably not unlike the vague, cloudy daydream my father had when he moved to Los Angeles “to be a writer.” In fairness, I think artistic pursuit naturally lends itself to this sort of opacity. I can’t imagine that it’s any clearer a thing to say “I want to be a musician” or “I want to be an artist” or “I want to be a poet”. Because each of these is not an occupation, per se, nor really a vocation either, but some brew that’s one-third nostalgia, one-third stereotype, and one-third idealization, putting a finger on the specifics of the practice is challenging.

This is, perhaps, why there are so many books of writers on writing - accomplished authors telling us what it means to live the writing life. What’s interesting about these books, and their quantity and diversity, is that they really do not go very far in illuminating specifics upon which one may build the daydream. They lend narrative to a life lived in the service of words, but each narrative is so different that they are far from instructional.

A student (not my own) wrote to me recently to ask about how best she could pursue a freelance career as a writer. Not interested in poetry, she expressed a desire to make a living from writing non-fiction and journalistic articles. I haven’t responded to her yet. To be honest, I don’t know if I should. I am inclined to say one of two things if I write her: first, that she should pursue teaching, because many of our most successful writers nonetheless teach for a living; second, that I have no clue as to the answer she is after, but she should continue her investigation and let me know if she discovers an answer herself. Because, really, it’s not unlike the search for the Holy Grail, or the Fountain of Youth, or any other panacea for what ails the disturbed life.

I don’t mean to sound pessimistic. I’m not, in all honesty. In general, I resist the idea that recognizing the problematic in life is somehow a less-than-optimistic behavior; it’s not pragmatism, either, but for me it is a kind of constructiveness. I know a few people whom one could classify as successful in their artistic lives. My partner Matt is in the midst of recording a record for a major label; my daughter’s mother Ingrid is poised for her first pre-publication five-city book tour; Ingrid’s father Rick creates new art every day, expanding his horizons and showing his work prolifically; my very good friend, Ben, has just now sent me a copy of his new book of poetry, a profoundly gratifying collection; Matt’s friend Andrew has just had his play optioned. The evidence is there, and it surrounds me: there is some kind of artistic life to lead.

Yet, even these folks don’t fully understand how to lead it - right in the midst of doing so. “I feel like I should be…” is a theme that comes up often in conversation with them. “I feel like I should be writing more.” “I feel like I should work on my website more.” “I feel like I should be reading/listening/looking… etc. more.” There is also a regular sense of otherworldliness about the work they do, as though they’ve found themselves part of that mix of nostalgia, stereotype, and idealization; but the concoction doesn’t account entirely for their lives. Still, there are groceries to buy, bills to pay; still there is the need to make money; still the body fails to feel good some days, and sugar and caffeine are as much a solution for them as it is for me. The artist’s-life-concoction, in fact, seems more a thing projected upon them than something they themselves live.

Which then leads to a perfectly abhorrent question: is there any way at all to be a writer, or is that a state that is ultimately a fabrication? Looking at the lives of the artists I know, it seems one never stops being pretty much everything. Granted, many artists have exerted a directed, focused effort to achieve what they have achieved, working on music or books or surrounding themselves with the stuff of their desired profession with singular purpose; but there are equally as many cases of accidental or unexpected artistic accomplishments.

I catch my reflection in the mirror. I wonder if I look like a writer. Then I wonder if looking like one will make me more a writer than I already am. I don’t suppose it will. Then I wonder if having a project - a novel, a set of stories, even this blog - makes me more a writer. I cannot be a writer because no one can. I can no more be a writer than I can be my finger, or my eyelash. Does that make sense? Seems to me that being a writer, or living the writing life, isn’t about how you act, what you do, where you live, what you read, who you know. It’s bodily, visceral, whole. And sometimes, publishing happens; but that doesn’t change how you put your pants on, or who you invite to dinner, or how you order your Starbucks.

Does it?

Culpability

I haven’t posted for a few days. Reason being, there’s been little news. Another rejection from an agent I never heard of but found online. A trip to Austin to dive head-first into the recording industry (head-first and a little naked, too. There’s no way of looking from the outside here). And in there, a lot of thinking about my place in the literary world, in the world of writing. More thinking than I really know how to process here.

I am sitting outside in Austin composing this. I am sitting near a fountain downtown, and there is a girl nearby on the brick steps leading down to the fountain. She’s reading. And I look at the book and I wonder what brought it to fruition, to pages, to a purchaseable material? I wonder how she got it, essentially, but by that I mean the book’s entire genealogy. How does a book become a book? And more than that, what is a book?

I have done very little since turning 32 besides pursue the creation of a book, the writing of a story. I have done very little, too, besides teaching about story and writing and expression. I am always telling my students to tell their stories, to believe in their stories as important, as artifacts even. And I have done gigantic hours of work to create my own stories.

But to what end? So they would become a book held in the hands of a pretty Austin woman sitting by a fountain.

One problem I see with that end is that it means my stories are only as good as their reception. They are only as good as who reads them, or that anyone reads them. Without readership, the stories lack value, materiality, culpability (what author does not want his book blamed for something?). And in this, I see a dilemma - that what it boils down to is that I am writing for the fame of it, for the prestige, and for the hopeful and eventual release from the dreaded “day job.”

It feels ironic, really, to come this far in my writing career and my teaching-writing career, to hear myself saying “you shouldn’t write for anybody else but you.” Ironic, I think, because I have always told my students to refer and sometimes defer to audience as a practice. But I wonder - and I fear I’m not saying this well - if perhaps the instinct to say what you will as you will is maybe the most trustworthy one when writing?

Two years ago, I had given up on Super. I was trying my hand at committing to some new idea, or to short stories. But I took up Matt Riley’s banner again in the name of possible fame and fortune; and I suppose now I’m wondering if that motivation wasn’t entirely unstable.