Ten Years

When I finished my MFA, my thesis advisor said that if I gave myself ten years, I could get established as a writer. In the eight years since then, I have often thought about that time period. When I was twenty-five, I wanted everything to happen immediately. In fact, I felt like I was already behind. But then I recalled that ten-year window, a long horizon stretched out in front of me, and I was consoled.

Is it coincidence that writer John Baker commends this same ten-year apprenticeship?

When I was young I read somewhere - don’t remember who said it any more - that if you want to be a writer, you should write. You should sit down and write for ten years and at the end of that time you’ll be a writer.

So that’s what I did. That was my way. I thought it was good advice. I still believe it to be good advice. But these days, if I say that to someone, I have to qualify it by stressing that one should also read. Read, read, read.

Ten years gives you time to write hundreds of thousands of words, submit stories and query letters, find fellow writers to critique your work, and read shelves full of books. It also gives you time to grow, to observe the world and your own history with a writer's sensibility. Time to find your material.

Since I started writing in my twenties, the end of my ten-year apprenticeship will land me in my mid-thirties. And I was intrigued to read Jane Smiley's theory in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel that the thirties often mark a significant shift for writers:

For some authors, the desire to write and the interest in character come first, and the product is some short stories; after a while, understanding the implications of a larger picture--a longer time frame or a larger group of characters--is inspiring, and a novel is begun. This may happen at about the time the writer is thirty, a good age for integrating what you have learned in childhood and youth. If we look at our list of authors, we can see that those who were writing in their twenties, whether successful or unsuccessful, often reconceived their work at about age thirty. Dickens was hugely popular and successful with The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and other episodic novels of his twenties, but when he began Martin Chuzzlewit at thirty, he took up his first overarching theme, that of selfishness, to give unity to both his writing and his social theories.

I am definitely noticing this shift in my own work. I am embarking on my first novel after writing many short stories, and I am revisiting my past more deliberately than ever before. I have also learned much about myself, often in the struggle to get my writing done, and I don't think I could have written this particular book two years ago.

I'm grateful that my thesis advisor made that ten-year prophecy. More than anything, her words have given me permission to take my time, and be patient with myself as I learn the craft.

Inspiration vs. Comparison

For the next three days, I'll be attending the Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I hope to get lots of writing life stories to share with you.

One of the challenges of attending writing conferences like this one is walking the line between inspiration and comparison. Hearing other writers' work, their tales of struggle and accomplishment, their thoughts on craft, can get me very fired up about my vocation. On the other hand, it can make me discouraged, frustrated, and disappointed with myself and my current writing career. I want to focus on giving myself an infusion of positive energy this week, rather than comparing myself to others and putting myself down.

In her list of 10 ways to infuse your work with your personality, artist keri smith lists both sides of this inspiration/comparison conundrum:

7. "Pay no attention to the man behind that curtain." Ignore what other people are doing. It has no bearing on your existence or vision of the world. The times we feel the most discouraged are usually due to the fact we are comparing ourselves to others. Most times reading awards annuals, and industry mags only serves to make us feel inadequate. Try cutting it out entirely. Designer Bruce Mau recommends not entering awards competitions. His reasoning, “Just don’t do it, it’s not good for you.”

10. Study other artists or creators who followed their own vision. Research.

Even though they seem contradictory, I think the key to following both of those suggestions is in attitude. If I can attend this conference with an attitude of confidence, a firm sense of my identity as a writer, and trust in my own journey, I hope to learn a lot and avoid the pitfalls of comparison and discouragement. Wish me luck!

The Siren Call of Money and Prestige

Mark Pettus of The Bluff made a comment on my entry "If a Book Falls in the Forest":

My writing actually suffers because I'm successful - if I hadn't figured out how to make a living writing non-fiction, I'd probably be working much harder producing fiction. To my local readers, I'm Mark Twain, and I catch myself enjoying their compliments and recognition a bit more than I should. In my heart, I'm a novelist, not a reporter. But, the money seduces me, keeps me working on stories that people throw away when they are finished reading.

I bet a lot of writers can relate to this tension between writing something successful (by critical or monetary standards) and writing what's important to them. I find myself tempted away from my fiction by writing that is easier and more immediately rewarding, like blogging or technical writing. It helps to re-examine my priorities and remind myself that, yes, I would much rather finish my novel than anything else. Tapping into desire can help keep me on track.

Paul Graham has a great post on How to Do What You Love. He mentions prestige and money as two of the distractions that can take us away from the work we love:

Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.

That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you're going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies.

The other big force leading people astray is money. Money by itself is not that dangerous. When something pays well but is regarded with contempt, like telemarketing, or prostitution, or personal injury litigation, ambitious people aren't tempted by it. That kind of work ends up being done by people who are "just trying to make a living." (Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners say this.) The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in, say, corporate law, or medicine. A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young, who hasn't thought much about what they really like.

Mark Pettus has a double-whammy: his non-fiction writing brings money and prestige! Hopefully he can resist the siren call enough to get that Dickensian novel written.

Here's one of Paul Graham's yardsticks for whether your dream work is a genuine desire or just a sign of laziness:

Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you're actually writing.

It's a tough job, finding and doing the work we love. But considering how much of our lives we spend working, I think it's worth the effort.

Beginning to Practice

Rather than thinking of my writing as a task on my to-do list, a chore to be crossed off, I'm starting to envision it as a practice like yoga or meditation. Writing every day is part of the practice, as is noticing my response to each writing session.

A friend recently gave me a copy of an article, "The Light Spills into Words" by John Tarrant, from The Best Buddhist Writing 2005. Tarrant describes how he first came to writing:

Writing actually began for me as a practice of the night, a hidden vice. As a teenager I worked for a while in a copper smelter, a minor demon in a satisfyingly vivid underworld full of fire and struggle--green flames, blue flames, golden metal, and the ringing of sledge hammers. When we weren't tending the furnace, it was good to be invisible. I used to climb up into the girders to read and write. No one looked up so I had the solitude and privacy I was hungry for. That was for me the quiet pleasant spot, suitable for meditation, that the Buddha recommended.

Later, when I came to practice meditation in a formal way, I kept it secret too, a love affair that would disintigrate if brought out into the day. A practice involves initiation and at first might need to be hidden, sealed in, like wine fermenting, seeds germinating, copper being cooked. In the dark we can operate by different, non-daylight rules, without considering what we gain or lose by our actions.

Now if someone asks me why I meditate, or write, I can give them a reason--health, transformation, the light the orange tree gives off at dawn--but the explanation is after the fact. It's like saying why you love what you love; you just do. I didn't know where this practice was leading and that seemed something important to protect. I didn't want to pretend that I did know or be tempted to explain myself even to myself.

Then last week I got Cynthia Morris's book Create Your Writer's Life, and low and behold, she also talks about writing as practice:

When we practice something, such as our spirituality or our exercise regimen, we devote ourselves to it. We commit to repeating certain acts over and over because we know that the repetition and the regularity of it strengthens our overall commitment. We may have a desired outcome in mind. We may commit to a spiritual practice or an exercise practice because it gives us peace or brings us closer to our essential self. With consistency, devotion, and passion, we experience changes on both the inner and outer levels. A writing practice is like that.

Years ago I learned to consider my writing a practice. In her book, One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers (Penguin Arkana, 1992), Gail Sher says that if writing is a practice, the only way you can fail is if you do not do it. The idea of writing as a practice eliminates notions of good or bad writing. It can help you sidestep the fears that accompany you to the blank page. A practice is something we do over and over, learning and listening as we go.

I'm probably the last writer in the world who hasn't read Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, but I believe she approaches writing in much the same way.

When one comes to writing through academic courses, as I did, there is much less emphasis on the process than on the product. You have assignments, deadlines, evaluations, marks. There's competition and judgment. What matters is what you produce and how good it is, not how you got there.

I'd like to bring in this other element, writing for writing's sake, not for "having written."

Being a Poet and Writing Poetry

Following on from yesterday's thoughts about what we call ourselves as writers and artists, I have some quotations by Ted Kooser (the current U.S. Poet Laureate) from his book The Poetry Home Repair Manual [with thanks to Susan, who sent them along.]

[Explaining how he got interested in poetry because he wanted to be "a poet" and attract the girls; discussing the difference between being a poet and writing poetry]

Today I read poems, I write poems, and at times, yes, sometimes for hours on end, I forget about women. Yet there are still the two poets present, the one who quietly concentrates on perfecting the poem and the one who wants more than anything else to be celebrated and adored. I'm delighted and nourished by the first poet and embarrassed by the second.

Poetry is a lot more important than poets.

[On whether we can have too many poets]

Considering the ways in which so many of us waste our time, what would be wrong with a world in which everybody were writing poems? After all, there's a significant service to humanity in spending time doing no harm. While you're writing your poem, there's one less scoundrel in the world. And I'd like a world, wouldn't you, in which people actually took time to think about what they were saying? It would be, I'm certain, a more peaceful, more reasonable place. I don't think there could ever be too many poets. By writing poetry, even those poems that fail and fail miserably, we honor and affirm life. We say "We loved the earth but could not stay."

I don't consider myself a poet. I don't feel that I understand or love poetry well enough to merit the title; it doesn't fit comfortably. But I do sometimes write poetry ... I like Kooser's distinction between the two.

And what comfort in the idea that there can never be too many poets (or writers or artists). We don't have to earn a spot at the crowded table, because there's room for all.

Declaring Yourself

Mark Pettus asks an interesting question on his latest post at The Bluff:

Have you been outed? Did you out yourself? Are you out with everyone, or only with people you know are cool? Are you even out with yourself? Are you a writer? Do you call yourself a writer in public? Do you tell other people what you do when you're sitting alone in front of your computer?

The way we name ourselves to others is so potent. I often think of Andrea Scher's post about the moment she accepted the label of artist:

What came to mind is something a friend of mine told me years ago. I was saying something self-deprecating and insecure about my artwork and he turned to me and said, "When are you going to take it for granted that you are a talented artist? When are you going to stop trying to prove it? Assume it. Take it for granted and imagine what you could create from that place..."

My whole life changed that day.

I finally saw how much energy I was putting into becoming an artist. I thought I had to somehow earn the title, that there was some special magic attached to it. I thought I had to be plucked from the crowd, that someone from the outside (who? I have no idea) would say to me, NOW. You are good enough.

What a bunch of crap.

Alice Munro vividly recalls the first time she put down her occupation as "writer" rather than "housewife" on the Canadian census. For Margaret Atwood, the moment of truth occurred when she was filling out her passport application.

I notice that I have no trouble calling myself a writer, but when people ask what I write, I first explain the software manuals and technical editing, and mention fiction as an afterthought, as though the work I'm paid for is more important than what I do for love.

Last week I started wearing my jacket with the "I Write Books" button I got from National Novel Writing Month. Now the woman at the bakery and the guy at the copy shop are saying, "Hey, you write books? Cool. What kind of books?" and I'm embarrassed but also pleased to be reminded in these anonymous places that yes, I do write books, I am a writer. It's an important step in our apprenticeship to the craft, giving ourselves permission to assume the title.