The Creative Writer's Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist

Knowing Why

7 Knowing Why . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It’s useful to know why you want to write so you can adjust your expectations accordingly. If you want to write short stories for your family and friends to read, that’s great. If you want to write short stories with the hope of eventually publishing a book, that’s great, too. If you want to write short stories so that you can become a millionaire . . . okay, now we’re running into some problems. You get my point. Your expectations, your plans of action, even your daily writing habits: each of these will vary based on your ultimate goals for writing. Between fourth grade and my sophomore year of college, I had entertained the idea of being a professional writer, but I grew up in a part of Chicago where no one I knew, except for my teachers, had gone to college, let alone become a writer. Although I knew as early as the fourth grade that I wanted to write, it wasn’t until I took my first poetry-​ writing course in college that I realized that writing was something I wanted to dedicate my life to. But what did it mean to dedicate my life to writing? For me, it meant doing everything I possibly could. I would go to grad school for writing; I would start sending my work out; I would spend my spare time reading when I wasn’t writing. I was, in short, going to give myself a legitimate chance to make it as a writer. I often joke that if I knew back then what I know now about how damned hard it would be or how many set-​ backs I would encounter along the way, I probably would have chosen a different occupation . I’m not serious, of course—I would still have pursued writing— but there’s a nugget of truth in that I would have flinched at seeing how difficult it really was. The beauty of youth is ignorance. I wrote every short story as though it were going to appear in the Atlantic. I mapped out books as though Knopf and Viking were going to bid for them. In other words, my optimism sustained me. And when the story in question proved not to be destined for the Atlantic, I was already hard at work on another, certain that this onewould be the one. I knew why I wrote. I wrote because my life depended upon it. Not literally, of course. I wouldn’t die if I didn’t write. But I most definitely would be miserable. Unfulfilled. For lack of a better, more tangible 8 The Decision to Become a Writer way of putting it, writing is what nourishes my soul.There were lean times when I took other jobs, sometimes menial, sometimes merely mind-​ numbing, that didn’t allow for much if anyactual writing time, but even when I wasn’t writing, I was writing in my head: imagining scenes, committing interesting details to memory, dreaming up plots for entire novels. During one particularly dark period, I was juggling three jobs at once and not writing a word.Then I joined a gym, forced myself to wake up at 4:30 in the morning so that I could exercise for at least an hour, and then return home to write before heading off to my day job. The schedule was grueling, and I didn’t write much of anything worthwhile during that period, but I knew that I needed to provide an escape hatch from these jobs that had no meaningful connection towhat I wanted to dowith my life.The important thing was that I was writing. For me, writing was its own reward. Where would-​ be writers run into problems is when their reasons for writing don’t match their expectations. Years ago, I taught a proposal writing workshop for nonfiction book projects. One student had been commissioned by the community college that employed him to write a narrative of the school’s history. Somewhere along the way he got it into his head that Random House or Scribner might be interested in such a book, and that, if he could only convince one of the big New York publishing houses to accept it, Hollywood was bound to come knocking. Clearly, the man was enthusiastic about his project, but his expectations were completely unrealistic. There wasn’t anything particularly unique or distinctive about his school. He couldn’t understand why I didn...