what is writing to me?
Since graduating from my MA and leaving the safe, structured confines of the creative writing classroom, where you can be assured of a captive audience for your work as well as the discipline of having to make said work lest you fail your degree, I’ve been thinking a lot, on and off, about what relationship I want to have with writing in the long term.
This is something I have talked about here, but it hasn’t always so clearly taken that shape. I haven’t always articulated it quite that way in my mind or while discussing it with friends. But in essence, I think that is what I find myself coming back to and turning over and over again: when I ask myself how I can sustain my writing without burning out, or what success looks like to me, it comes down to what I’m writing for anyway and what role I want writing to play in my life.
The thing about writing and I guess about most creative pursuits is that most of us start out with a very narrow view of what success is (create work that lots of people love, win critical acclaim, win awards, profit), and frustratingly enough, it hardly ever widens. And we’re given so many contradicting pieces of advice as developing artists. Write every day, or don’t. Embrace the necessity of rest and fallow periods of creativity, but also, don’t just write when the muse hits because that’s not Disciplined. Park your butt in the chair and put words on the page. Be gentle with yourself. Write for others. Write for yourself. Honestly, what are we supposed to do?
I wish more attention were paid to how writing makes us feel. What it is we love about our art. What drew us to it in the first place. The impulse to create that made us pick up a pen and start making things up, even if no one was reading, even if the words never went anywhere beyond scrappy old notebooks (or pristine Leuchtturms, whatever you prefer). How to keep making work in a way that doesn’t sacrifice love for productivity.
Because really, isn’t that what matters? I find myself thinking often about a piece of advice I got while doing my MA. An editor said to my class: if there’s something you love to do more than writing, then do that instead, because you can’t count on writing to bring you anything other than joy.
It’s such a simple statement but it sounded profoundly counterintuitive, so at odds with the “writing is a practice and you have to keep at it” mindset that had been drilled into my head, that it didn’t fully sink in. Today, it’s still sinking in for me in ways that surprise me all the time. I don’t think the editor was telling us to give up the moment writing gets difficult, or not to persevere with it; I think it was a reminder to understand why we write. Your work might bring you fame or fortune or moments of incredible connection with readers if you’re lucky, but for the vast majority of people, the satisfaction of mucking around with words on a page is as far as it goes. And if you don’t even have that, then why not go do something else that’s more fun?
So what is writing, to me? Well—I learned to love exercise when I realised that doing it regularly made me feel happier, more energised, and more like the best version of myself I could be. And I think it’s not all that dissimilar with writing, or just being creative in general. Showing up for my writing makes me a better person. I do feel jaded on the idea of writing as production, writing with the end goal of finishing a book or a short story for competitions and publication, but I don’t feel that same jadedness when I think about just making stories up in my head and putting them down on paper. I don’t think I’ll ever find that unfun or unfulfilling, as long as I keep sight of the journey itself rather than any conventionally successful destination.