"Like Every Book I Haven't Written, It's My Best"

A Brief History of Writing

The title quote is from G.K. Chesterton. I’ve been sharing it for a little over twenty years. It’s easy to find excuses for not writing. Right now my go-to is that taking care of twin two -year-old boys takes a lot of time. And it does. And before the boys were born, I was busy taking my daughter to playdates and indoor kid cafes (in the increasingly wonderful pre-Covid past). And before that I had a series of full-time jobs with yearly work-life balance training sessions because being on-call to respond to various crises frequently led to 60+ hour work weeks. But of course, none of those excuses are the truth. I found time to binge-watch popular tv shows. I spent hours making the perfect jogging playlists. 

During these stay-at-home times, the excellent Craig Clevenger has been hosting monthly writing seminars. Usually, he brings in a guest author. Question and answer format. Some discussion. A question that’s been raised a couple times is “Why do you write?” 

Why do you write? 

I was surprised at how almost all the other participants answered that they felt compelled, they couldn’t fathom not writing. They all expressed what I’d call an internal motivation. Writing fiction, if they were to be believed (and why not?), was who they were. 

That’s not me. It’d be great if it was. I’d get a lot more writing done. 

I need an external motivation. I need the potential for financial reward. Or acclaim and applause. Or just knowing I have a friend who wants to read what I’m working on.

There’s more reasons to write, here are a few I hope to embrace: 

Therapy. Fun. Preparation for one of those loftier reasons. 

I keep trying to work out some personal dilemma in one of my stories. Those drafts tend to the be the ones I abandon quickest. 

Fun¹. This motivation is the one I’m finding to be most true in retrospect, but is hard to accept when starting a story. So let me come back to it after discussing and dismissing some other worries, objections, and delusions :)

I’m growing amenable to the likelihood that I will never see my name in lights for anything I write and that I’m not going to be able to support my family through stringing words together. When I was just thinking about writing, it was easy to think if I ever got around to putting my ideas to paper, that they would be successful - adapted into miniseries, printed onto t-shirts, spun-off into comic adaptations. Now that I am writing regularly (recognizing my output is still minimal), I’m proud of myself for putting the words together. But it’s harder to push aside the doubt that my words will only ever be read by a few close friends, and even then, generously, as a favor to me. There are so many good stories out there and good writers not getting the accolades or financial success they deserve. It’s not impossible my stuff will sit on the bookstore shelf beside the authors I admire, but it’s very unlikely. And I need to write a lot to get to the skill level I desire. Tim Waggoner posted a great essay on writing recently where he shared that:

   When I first started writing, old pros used to say that “the first million words are practice.” (This was back before anyone could self-publish the first thing they wrote by uploading it to Amazon.) I internalized this advice as a need to start working and keep working steadily in order to improve, and that I need to write regularly in order to keep my writing brain in shape.

Incidentally, I think my awareness that I’ll write better later if I write more now prevents me from writing for therapy or tackling those ideas that are intimately personal (whether painful or joyous). I want to be at the top of my game before I tackle the story ideas I’ve been thinking about for years.

Which is, let’s face it, another excuse.

I recently read (or heard on a podcast) the author Stephen Graham Jones discuss how if he doesn’t finish a short story in a day or two, he abandons it, because there are so many other things he knows he could be writing instead.

I think that’s great advice and I hope to make the time to capture the ideas that I’ve had bouncing around in my head for years. Then I can edit, rearrange, share, see if they work. Why wait until I assume I’m good enough to write them? Write the stories now and I can always come back with those imagined future skills to fix them later.

Additionally, I was struck by a recent Jeff Tweedy podcast where he talked about why you don’t need to be a professional musician to write a song; he compared how someone’s lack of athletic skills doesn’t prevent them from tossing a football around with friends. That you don’t need a Nike endorsement deal to enjoy shooting hoops at the park. He wishes people shared a similar perspective for the creative process, that you don’t need to be a professional to create something. It’s worthwhile to lose yourself in what you’re making, forget your ego². 

Which leads me back to writing for fun. It’s an enjoyable hobby. The answer to “why write?” seems more and more like a feeling than a thought; perhaps because it works on the heart instead of the head, it’s also more convincing. Yet, for the same reason, it’s also harder to accept? When I’m not writing, I’m incredibly skeptical that it’s worthwhile for me to start a story.

All the doubts - I don’t have time, this will never get published, I’m not good enough³ - all are true. Except, when I am writing, none of those doubts seem to matter. Especially after I have gotten the first draft down and I am editing and rearranging sentences, looking up synonyms, selecting the best word, writing a a final sentence ten different ways and choosing the one I think sounds best to end the story - 

I do not feel compelled to write, but when I am writing - the feeling of fun and joy and satisfaction that I get from working to make a story perfect - that seems like an unassailable justification. 

But if I am honest, more often than not, it takes faith to remember how creating makes me feel. It’s easy to convince myself that there is something else more important that I should be doing. 

Lately, my faith⁴ in the worth of writing stories is pretty strong. I’ve got a couple friends who’ve been encouraging me, motivating me to create. My boys nap at least two hours a day and I’m happy to delay washing the dishes until they wake up. I’ve been writing a couple short stories a month. I’m optimistic I’ll complete a novella by the end of the year. Maybe I’ll tackle something novel length before too long.

But the world is full of devils⁵. 

1. Should fun be considered an internal motivation? I began writing this post assuming I was externally motivated, but maybe I am moving towards embracing an internal motivation? Or maybe I have all along?  Am I like the professor in Dostoevsky’s Demons, realizing at the end that “I’ve been lying my entire life and only now realized it.”

Or, maybe fun should be considered as both an internal AND external motivation.

Or, maybe the binary categorizing of motivations is misguided.

2. Incidentally, in my younger years I fully embraced this idea around making music. I loved recording songs, but knew they were only ever “for fun.” 

3. Paradoxically, this doubt increases with my productivity because the more I write the more I submit and the more rejection letters fill my inbox.

4. Let me honest about faith in “fun” as a reason to write - it’s no doubt easier to believe this is the ideal motivation I should embrace for why I write when all the other motivations and rationales have failed/will likely disappoint. I suspect if I was on the nytimes best-seller list, I wouldn’t be extolling “fun” as my motivation. But until then, I’m glad I enjoy writing. 

5. (I have diapers to change).