So You Want to be a Writer
Authentic art requires you to do what inspires you and trust that a community of like-minded fans will find you
If you’re reading this on Friday, August 18th, we are busy moving in our daughter to her college dorm, something I wrote about earlier this week.
So, I brought in the big guns to fill in for me today. This is a guest post by my friend, extremely talented photographer and writer David Todd McCarty. If you like what you’ve read here today, click to follow more posts by David Todd McCarty over on Medium.
I’m close. I can feel it. It’s taken years, with all sorts of fits and starts, dark periods and times of manic productivity, success, and failure. I know I can write. I’m confident in my voice. I believe I have things to say that people want to hear, in a style they wish to hear it. But I haven’t quite found the broad audience I need to succeed. I’m so close.
My voice has developed over time, like all writers, but I can trace my current style back through the years with relative ease. It’s like watching my grandchildren grow. When they’re babies, you can’t imagine what they’ll look like as they age, but when you look backward, the signs are obvious. Of course, that’s what they used to look like. Just look at them now.
So how do we go about finding that audience that will ensure our success?
Delusions Are Your Friends
Any time you have a significant community of people trying to achieve something, whether it be writing, acting, music, or art, an entire industry will pop up, seemingly overnight, to convince them that there are seven easy steps to success. All you have to do is subscribe to their newsletter, podcast, or limited series of video tutorials, and you’re halfway to your guest spot on the Today Show.
I have good news, and I have bad news.
Let’s start with the bad news. There is no easy way to achieve success in a competitive field. None. If you were hoping there was one, let me save you a lot of time, money, and wasted effort. Quit now. Don’t even keep reading. There is nothing but hard work ahead.
I will go on, but that’s a cold, hard truth you might as well come to grips with right now. It will require more hard work and more time than you ever imagined. It will take so long and be so hard that if you think too much about it, you won’t bother. But there is a silver lining. The first bit of good news. If it’s not enough to keep you going, this isn’t for you. Here goes:
Most creative types are slightly, if not wholly, delusional.
Comics As Kindred Misfits
I have often considered standup comedians as kindred spirits with writers in the struggle for professional recognition and fame. They, too, toil away in obscurity against insurmountable odds, persisting long beyond what anyone else would deem reasonable or responsible. They, too, have chosen to go it alone, against all odds.
There is no hard and fast rule for how long it takes someone to get good at standup comedy, but most veterans will tell you that it takes at least 7–10 years to get good, and then however many years it takes to get your lucky break. Even when you look at the ones who broke early, such as Eddie Murphy and Dave Chappelle, they started when they were literally children.
Eddie was fifteen, and Dave was fourteen. So even though they are anomalies and were especially preternaturally advanced for their age, by the time they hit 21, they’d been doing comedy for six to seven years and were well prepared.
Jim Gaffigan, one of the top comics in the world, says there was a period of time, especially when he was starting out, where he finds it amazing he didn’t quit.
“The reason comedians think of themselves as insane,” explains Gaffigan, “is that — well, take my journey through standup. There was a point in that first year where any normal person would say, ‘You have to stop doing this. It’s not working. The results are not there. You’re miserable after you do these sets.”
“Being a comedian is like being a murderer,” Jerry Seinfeld tells him. “No matter what people tell you, you’re probably going to do it anyway.”¹
A Skill Is Learned, Not Gifted
The humorist David Sedaris says he wrote every day for fifteen years before anyone saw a word he was writing. Then one day, someone convinced him to read one of his stories at a party, which led to someone else asking him to read one of his stories at another party, which led to someone asking him to read one of his stories on the radio. Then he got a call from a publisher wondering if he might have a book they could publish. He did. It was sitting in a drawer, ready to go. He was an overnight success, as long as you don’t count the 15 years he was practicing alone in obscurity.
When I heard that, I thought, “Oh, that’s me. I’ve been writing since I was a kid, but never all that seriously. It’s only been about 15–20 years since I got remotely serious about it, and really only in the last five to seven years have I actually given a shit.”
It suddenly made sense to me. I realized I had been writing all this time, building those muscles and acquiring a particular set of skills. I felt like I could write about anything at a moment’s notice. The more mundane, the better. I could make it fascinating. It wasn’t a gift. It wasn’t talent. It was a skill I had mastered over many years.
Writing is a skill that can be learned by those with the talents and gifts necessary to become a writer. No amount of effort will create a writer from a lump of matter with no natural talent. But conversely, no matter how brilliant a diamond of talent you might have been born with, without a lot of hard work, it will remain buried underneath a lot of superficial nonsense.
There is no way around the work required to extract a diamond from a lump of rock. You might have the gift, but without the work, you will never shine.
So You Want To Be A Writer
In his classic poem, “so you want to be a writer,” Charles Bukowski proclaims, “If it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. Unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don’t do it…. Unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don’t do it. Unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don’t do it. When it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. There is no other way, and there never was.”²
There are two types of people in this world. The first are those who read that and find it discouraging, worried they don’t have the talent, the fire, or the work ethic to make it happen. It sounds too hard, too dark, or too much like work. Those people will likely quit. They don’t have what it takes, even if they have the talent. They have the gift, but they will never embrace it fully.
Then there are those who remain convinced that they’re writers and always will be, but who will secretly believe that not everyone has to work that hard. They will be the exception. They will get there faster and with less trouble. They have the talent, so they won’t have to toil away for years before being discovered. They’re delusional.
They might be right, of course. They might be one of the lucky few. But it’s much more likely that their delusion will be enough to allow them to do the hard required, and do so before they realize the years have flown by. None of us ever really escape the work. Even the phenoms struggle, sooner or later.
The Siren Song of Success
I’ve heard it said that very rarely does someone with talent, persistence, and a good work ethic, fail to find success. It’s more rare than talent itself. If you have the gift, and you’re willing to work for it, you will find an audience of kindred spirits. The gatekeepers and powers that be will be more than happy to enrich themselves, and you, by embracing your talent and hard-won skills.
But that can’t be the real goal, as it will never sustain you. It’s merely the trappings of a dream. The external affirmation of elites. The only club we want to belong to. The symbol that we are recognized and seen. There isn’t a successful artist alive who is not still chasing something, long after they’ve achieved commercial success. So that’s clearly not the end.
It seems to me that the ultimate irony is that we achieve commercial success after it no longer figures into our work. It’s the proverbial hero who is granted his wish the moment he realizes he doesn’t need it. We finally win the race once we understand that the finish line is an illusion. It was never about the finish line. It was always the running that counted.
If you don’t enjoy the process, you’ll never finish the race. On the other hand, if you fall in love with the process, you’ll no longer care who wins, or even who else is running. You’ll be running for the pure joy of it. Unhindered and unheralded. That’s precisely the moment when someone will pop out and try to throw a medal around your neck.
But you won’t notice, because you’ll be running as fast as you’ve ever run. Despite old age, crippling fears, and long-forgotten baggage, you will run free. If you’re lucky, that’s when you’ll realize the gift you were given. It wasn’t publishing. It wasn’t money. It wasn’t fame.
It was the love of running.
My Race Is Not Yet Run
I have not made it. Not in any commercial sense of the meaning. I remain an unknown, unheralded, lightly published writer, with delusions of grandeur. You could argue that I don’t know what I’m talking about, I guess, but I know differently, and you probably do too.
We all yearn for the affirmation of those we respect. We all want to be recognized and seen. I am no different. I want it all. I want the critical and commercial acclaim of success. I want money and fame and applause. But that’s the fantasy, not how I get through the day. There has to be more, and luckily, there is.
I have fallen in love with writing, not just the dream of being a writer, and that has made all the difference. I’m a writer because I write. Let that be enough. For now, however, I have to go to the dentist, for what I don’t know or remember.
Maybe I’ll write about it.
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Ah, there’s the rub.
Loved this!