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A Bit of Sage Love Advice From Master Po
A former co-worker of mine called me on Skype a few months ago. After a certain amount of hemming and hawing, he got down to it: I’m really into so-and-so and, now that we’re all working remotely, I want to let her know. But I have no idea what I’m doing. Tell me how. I’m summarizing about 2000 words of wind-up, preface, and self-obfuscation, but the heart of the matter, like all truths, came out relatively simple. He has an office crush in a time of no office. Ah so.
I lied and told him I was busy. He Skype-called me a few days later and wanted to talk. I told him I had no idea and suggested he ask his therapist. He told me he didn’t have a therapist and called me an asshole. Then he started crying. He’s in his 20s. I’m in my 40s. Gen Xers don’t cry. But I felt bad. I know. I really am an asshole. And to be completely honest, a small part of me was flattered. Nobody asks me for advice about anything and probably for good reason. I’m a horrible misanthrope. And I know nothing.
Why he came to me I will never really understand. Maybe I was the only person he could trust, since I’m also acquainted with so-and-so but I don’t work there anymore. Maybe he sensed some sympathy on my part—a shared belief that, in a perfect world, they’d be wonderful together. I suppose they would. But we don’t live in a perfect world. Some of us don’t even live. I’m not sure what you’d call the day-drinking lockdown existence many people are leading these days, but I suspect “living” ain’t it.
After some awkwardness, I agreed to entertain his tale of woe in exchange for him not being upset if I wrote about it. A devil’s bargain was struck. Consummatum est. I feel like people of my generation, having grown up before thirst-trap selfies and Onlyfans side-gigs, would never have agreed to such terms. But Generation Z seems less inhibited. That’s probably a good thing. I’ll shoot my mouth off in writing, but if you know me in real life, you’ll find me to be pretty quiet and withdrawn. Call it the Gen X split personality. I remember a time when there were consequences for revealing too much of yourself. Now everyone has closeups of their nipple rings on Instagram. I guess that makes me an old fogey.
Fogeyism aside, I really didn’t know what to say. Apparently, the stress was killing him. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. And he wanted to know if I thought he should unburden himself, if that would at least provide some kind of catharsis. And then they could avoid each other in perpetuity on Zoom. I thought about it for 30 seconds and this is what Master Po said.
First, don’t come on to co-workers. Just don’t. My thinking on this has evolved over the years. I used to be romantic about it, asking, who am I to stand in the way of love? But now I believe I have an answer to that question: an adult. Adult self-control, being the basis of all civilization, requires that you keep it in your pants in a professional environment. It’s right up there with germ theory, running water, and not frightening the horses. It’s how the pyramids got built and why grandpa never had to go to prison.
So that’s the first premise: nay, lad, control thyself and petition Venus in her proper temple. Here’s the logic. If it turns out so-and-so isn’t interested in you like that, it’s a problem. If she is interested, it’s an even bigger problem. Keep work at work and don’t go looking for love in all the wrong places.
Second, there’s always a reason when it’s hard to talk to someone. Yes, you’re shy and that’s something to consider, but there’s more to it than that. When people are interested in you, no matter how shy one or both of you are, you will eventually feel that affinity. This why the pre-Covid-19 handshake was so useful. It was like taking a reading of the other person.
Between men and women, the nonverbal interaction can be subtle, but it’s always there, for better or worse. And if it’s positive, it will eventually bring the two of you into proximity. If it doesn’t draw you together, that means, on some level, there is resistance. And that, Grasshopper, should not be overlooked. If she’s nice but keeps her distance, respect that resistance. It’s telling you how she feels, at least right now. If she’s an adult, the resistance may also be there because she wants to keep work at work. Respect that, too, and take a lesson.
Third, stop thinking strategically. You can’t think your way from how you feel into her life. There are no formulas. Dating formulas and methods are, without exception, worthless and designed to part clueless men from their money. They nearly always treat women like objects, complex puzzles that can be solved with a series of deft manipulations. So-and-so is far more like you than she is like a combination lock. And like you, she will resent it when she realizes you’re trying to game her. So don’t do that. Don’t confuse her with a boss fight in a video game. Analytical thinking has no place in this.
Fourth, stop taking lust for love. Master Po recommends large helpings of both, but he cautions you not to mix them up. When you work with someone to whom you might feel attracted and you’re looking at that person every day, it’s easy to tell yourself that you’re developing feelings. Maybe you’re just sexually frustrated. It happens.
Here’s the test: picture Monica Lewinski being interviewed on Oprah. After visualizing that conversation, revisit your feelings about so-and-so. Do you like her just because you work with her and she’s the president (at least, the president of your heart) and has strong masterful shoulders? Or do you actually have something that might qualify as two adults at the beginning of a romantic relationship? Be honest. Don’t change your name to Monica.
Last, I offer the relationship advice given to me by an older woman when I was in my 20s and lacking a clue: don’t start anything you can’t finish. In other words, don’t trap yourself in a situation that you can’t walk away from if it makes you miserable. This is a more general version of “keep work at work,” and it applies to just about everything in life.
We’re always telling ourselves stories about who we are and what we do. Society is always telling us who we should be and what we should do, even though society could care less if we’re happy or fulfilled. Everybody wants to be in charge, enforce their values, boss people about through the power of storytelling. It’s almost a fact of human nature.
But nearly everything that makes us consistently happy involves a degree of antinomian rebellion against other people’s narratives, against should. We’ve got should stories running all over the place designed to trap us into particular behaviors or commitments. Consummatum est, as Mephistopheles said to Dr. Faustus. But obligation-inducing narratives and reality are two different things.
Never start something if you can’t finish it, which is to say, if you don’t control the narrative and have to accept “shoulds.” That includes research projects, reading books, baking pizzas, and starting up ill-conceived office romances that take place in a situation where you don’t have power and alternatives. I know talking about power is unromantic. But a huge power differential usually dooms a relationship from the beginning, especially if it’s situational. Even if the situation has gone remote and online.
After I told him all this, there was a moment of silence. He said, “Thanks” and that he had to go. I haven’t heard from him since. I don’t think he took my sage advice. It’s probably for the best.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
— Andrew Marvell
Being a self-employed workaholic and knowing how to effectively relax is one of the biggest professional conundrums I’ve faced as an adult. And by “effective relaxation,” I mean not chemically induced relaxation or pseudo-relaxation that is just another form of work in disguise. Accepting the necessity of down time is really hard when you’re the one in charge of your schedule.
Add cyclical insomnia, a lot of repressed anger, and an emotionally abusive work ethic instilled from childhood and you get a large part of why I was a difficult person to be around in my 20s and early 30s. But I think I’ve learned a few things by now. Here are some ideas if you happen to be someone who shares these or similar issues (and I can think of a number of my friends who probably do).
(1) The most important thing is to be honest about being Type-A, especially if you use work to avoid other unpleasant thoughts, situations, or confrontations. The first and deepest honesty is with yourself. Then comes the need to practice outward-facing honesty by releasing the burden of holding these unflattering realizations about your obsessiveness in all the time. Speaking to others about it releases its hold on you. If you are afraid of judgment, consider that those who criticize you might feel threatened because they don’t want you to change or don’t want to face their own “stuff.” Honesty and transparency can renew you completely. And you probably need that kind of renewal.
(2) Understand your rhythms. Everything flows in evolving patterns, including everything in you—in your body and mind. If you can roughly predict when you will feel the urge to obliterate yourself by working to exhaustion, you can avoid that. Go home early. Make a nice dinner. Take a shower and get in bed. Avoid replacing one addiction with another: chemically induced relaxation will compound your problems. Avoid the bar. Instead, shut everything down for the moment. Even allow yourself to fail sometimes. Missing a deadline or taking an evening off in the interest of self-care will not result in the end of the world. Stop trying to control everything, especially when you feel that you’re going to fall apart unless you double down and pull an all-nighter. Because that’s what this is about: feeling like you need absolute control at all times. Workaholism is like any other addiction. It’s an ersatz mode of control. Getting over it means learning to relinquish control. It’s not easy, but it’s absolutely necessary if you want to progress.
(3) Be kind to yourself. This sort of self-torture has deep roots in those who suffer from it. You will slip up when you’re trying to lead a healthier life. You will have to deal with the unpleasantness of giving up your lousy self-destructive coping strategy. That cruel inner voice that says you need to prove your worthiness by striving for some unattainable and, frankly, mentally ill standard of perfection and productivity is not your friend. It’s a part of you that got misaligned early in your development and that is probably sustained by the culture around you. Learning to be kind to yourself is a good first step toward re-alignment. A humble and wide perspective also helps, realizing that you will never be at your best if you’re in a constant state of turmoil and burnout. Also accept that even when you are completely centered, well-rested, and healthy, you’re still fallible. You’re not always going to be on top of your game. Maybe never. So what? The overall quality of your life is more important. When you’re dead, hell won’t give you credit for “time already served” up at your desk.
And (4) avoid the game of childish posturing. In every workplace (and on the internet), you’ll meet a certain percentage of people who get off on how much they can overwork, as if that defines them as superior beings. They are looking to others for cheap validation because they feel empty. I know because I have been that person. Don’t make my stupid mistakes, kid. Working hard is good. But setting limits adds value to everything. Facing the reasons why you overwork might be painful, but it’s again about self-honesty. You have a limited amount of time. You should be using at least some of it to frolic in the dandelions and give biscuits to puppies. I say this as the badass motherfucker you know and love: puppies. Frolic. Get to it.
It goes without saying that, by writing this, I am actually practicing these things in my own way.
There was something evil in the glow of the room’s blue lights. I felt the weight of the man on top of me. He could no longer move. His eyes were closed. I stared long into his face. I realized that I wanted him. I wanted the passion he had until a moment ago. I wanted his shoulders, which were quite muscular for his age, and his naturally tan face. I got out from under his body, sat in a chair, and lit a cigarette. I had to wait like this until he fell into a deep sleep.
It was raining outside.
— The Kingdom, Fuminori Nakamura (trans. Kalau Almony)

20 thoughts on what it takes and how to do it.
1. Nobody owes you time, money, or sympathy. Editors have hard jobs and need to balance a lot of concerns that writers don’t. If an editor or some other client is spending time on you, take it as a compliment. This is true for all readers of your professional work, whether they’re publishers, managers, or website owners. Any time spent on you and your writing is a vote of hope and confidence in your abilities, even if the reader is critical or has a hard-edged personality. It’s a tough business. Keep that in mind.
2. Never write for “exposure” or because someone says the job will “look good on your resume.” That is usually a mistake.
3. Don’t waste time. There are a lot of ways to do this that seem good at first. Sometimes, you have to take a risk on something that will ultimately turn out to be a wasted effort. But most of the time, money is a good test. Are you getting paid? For real? In legal tender as opposed to “exposure”?
4. Write outside your comfort zone and don’t be afraid to do research. It’s the only way to grow. Get used to pushing yourself. You should be surprising yourself at what you can do on a regular basis. How do you expect your work to impress others if it’s the same old thing putting you to sleep?
5. The truth is compelling. Try to tell it as much as possible in and about your work. Contrary to popular belief, telling what you believe to be the truth is likely to result in a higher degree of personal effectiveness.
6. Don’t complain that it’s hard. Of course it’s hard. You can always go clean carpets for a living if you can’t handle being a writer.
7. Don’t complain that you’re broke. Of course you’re broke. A writer trades social respectability and small middle-class luxuries for the big luxury of being a professional writer.
8. Play the field. No one knows you exist unless you make them know. Moreover, rejection will be a constant. The writing world communicates primarily in metaphors of loss and rejection. Remember that it will hardly ever be personal, even when people try to make it seem that way.
9. An agent is not your personal savior. An agent is a businessperson who understands how to make money in your particular field of writing. Sometimes, agents help. Other times, they’re a waste of precious time and effort (see point 3 above).
10. Always plan six months to a year ahead of time. You will hit dry spells and in freelancing there is no security net on which you can depend.
11. Avoid wasting time convincing judgmental friends and relatives that you are honest and have an actual job (see point 3 above). People will be curious about how you exist. They will often assume that you are gaming the system somehow while they have to break their backs at jobs they hate. To non-writers, it will seem like you are getting paid for doing something everybody does on a daily basis. This attitude is grounded in ignorance, but don’t tire yourself out trying to correct it. For example, if you also write screenplays and novels, it’s better not to mention it. When people hear, “I write fiction,” the first thing they’ll think is, “How come I’ve never heard of him? If he were any good, I would have.” The way to avoid people automatically concluding that you’re a loser and a failure is to stay as boring as possible: “I mostly write technical stuff.” The upside is that if you’re a freelancer for any length of time, this will be at least partly true.
12. Get sleep. This should be obvious, but early college programming dies hard. You can’t write well with a bleary mind.
13. Don’t be afraid to disappear to get work done. Time gets distorted when you’re writing intensively. What seems like a week to you might only be a few days of sustained work. Often, your friends and family won’t even notice that you’ve spent the weekend at a small table in the attic.
14. Get out and meet people. Freelancers usually prefer to write from home in their pajamas. Outdo them by dressing like a professional and offering to meet with clients. Some people won’t be interested, but some will jump at the chance to avoid having to express themselves in text (their problem in the first place). This is especially true if you soak up the travel expense. While meeting with them, take pictures, notes, recordings. Practice active listening. Stay as engaged as possible with the culture of their organization. You may also mention that you offer writing tutorials and intensives. Be a walking advertisement of all you can do for them. You will develop some very meaningful business relationships that way.
15. Accept that much of what you write will be secret. It’s called “ghostwriting” and it exists at all levels in all fields. People don’t want it known that they had to hire you because they didn’t have the opportunity or capacity to do the writing themselves. Your CV should be honest, but accept that you’ll always have done more work than you can show. This is part of your professionalism. Some of the highest paying clients will require the most discretion.
16. You don’t need to impress anybody. That’s for escorts and politicians. Your writing has to impress people. It does this by being clear, precise, imaginative, and otherwise correct as defined in your guidelines. As long as you can produce work like that, you will get a lot of repeat business.
17. Have fallback income to reduce stress. This goes beyond just saving half a year in advance. There will be times when no one wants to hire you and you’re burning through your savings while you wait for new leads. This doesn’t mean you’re a failure. It’s just the way things go sometimes. Having a secondary way to pay the rent and get your teeth cleaned will keep you sane and actually make you a better writer by giving you new experiences. It also toughens you up in a lot of different ways. Just like Aunt Fanny used to say: every artist needs a trade.
18. Give yourself assignments. Writing well takes constant practice—just like playing the viola, only the viola is the writing part of your mind. So you need to write regularly even if no one is paying you to do it. You can use those pieces later as samples if you don’t have professional clips yet. Post your uncomissioned pieces to a blog and let the world in on what you’ve been thinking about. This practice is indispensable.
19. Help other writers out when you can. “Good will” comes back to you when you least expect it. This is another hidden dimension of what it is to function as a professional. It’s also just a decent way to live. That said, sometimes helping someone out means giving an honest appraisal of their work when they ask. It doesn’t mean hurting their feelings if you can avoid doing so. Never expect others to be as tough as you pretend to be.
20. Never apologize for what you do. Your cousin, Jimmy, might imagine that all you do is sit around all day while he busts his ass at the car lot. Send him a card at Christmas and let him feel superior. He will never understand your strange world of ideas, structures, and sounds. He doesn’t need to. Not everyone can sustain the writing life (see point 11 above).
As I have said many times and in many different ways, graduate study in literature and creative writing is not easy for anyone, even in the most favorable circumstances. There is an inner, emotional, psychological, processual effort that no one talks about and an outer, technical, rhetorical, production effort that everyone takes for granted. Both of these “efforts” are difficult. They must run concurrently and consistently for satisfactory completion of your program. And no one—not advisors or fellow

Philosopher with an Open Book by Salomon Coninck (1645)
students—will have the wherewithal to set aside their own problems in order to help you with yours. You are alone. You are responsible for expressing a universe of ideas in your own voice. You will accept this or fail.
If you pay attention, you will soon come to realize that your path is more or less unique—that you’re following a largely self-determined trajectory through the work. It may be partly modeled on someone else’s (such as that of a mentor with a strong personality telling you what you should be reading, writing, and thinking), but ultimately you’re making your own intellectual path by walking it. This is one of the signature characteristics of higher study in the humanities. It may be a strength.
A large part of this blog is dedicated to exploring these things, to making the implicit explicit for the good of those who feel drawn to the discipline of English studies and / or creative writing. It’s clear that I’m critical here of what I often see as hypocrisy and self-serving prevarication in greater academia. But I also disagree with the Libertarian voices currently developing the Don’t Go to Graduate School in the Humanities genre of business-oriented success advice. I think, in spite of very practical arguments to the contrary, if you feel called to study, write, and teach, by all means do it. Just don’t do it ignorantly and learn how to survive afterward so that you can keep doing it. How this unfolds in your life will be a mystery specific to your becoming.
With this in mind, I expose my own values here, my own work, which continues the inner-outer efforts I mention above. The Writing Expedition represents part of my disciplinary “production effort,” dedicated to expressing insights on what I have experienced in this field. Moreover, I think “expressing” is the right word because it implies a dichotomy. In order to ex-press something (or “squeeze out” if we want to look at the origin of the word), there must be an interior area where it already exists. An inner world. Often, a hidden world that can make the dominant scientistic discourse of reductive materialism very nervous. Like it or not, the Academy is subject to the dominant political, economic, and aesthetic tropes and discourses of the day; though, academics often find this distasteful and prefer to ignore it.
The ivory tower covered in camouflage.
It is safe to say that the Academy is an ancient type of institution that has survived to the present by appearing to be what society needs it to be in any era. Study the history of higher education in the West and it is easy to notice that the great universities have not existed in spite of what they imagine to be the barbarism and ignorance of the profane, but as a mode of cultural expression, a conglomeration of beliefs and rituals, a matrix of ideas given a particular form in the material world. In other words, the Academy is an extension of culture. It offers a product that society wants and survives by making that product seem relevant. It has always been that way; though the outer wrapper of the product is redesigned again and again to reinforce existing narratives of power and faith. In the rare times it fails to do this: Kent State, May 4, 1970.
As Martin Petersen writes of CIA tradecraft standards (intelligence agencies being very similar to universities), “We have to establish our credibility and usefulness individual by individual, administration by administration. There is no down time when it comes to quality” (“What I Learned in 40 Years of Doing Intelligence Analysis for US Foreign Policymakers,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 55, No. 1). Without being too cynical, we could easily convince ourselves that establishing credibility and usefulness is one of the ongoing directives of the Academy: we want to matter.
Enter: John, who also wanted to matter.
When I was in graduate school, studying creative writing and rhetoric, John, a friend of mine there who happened to be a gifted poet, went through a kind of nervous breakdown. Since no one knows what a “nervous breakdown” actually is, we can call it that or we can say he went through a season of harsh depression, anxiety, purposelessness, and emotional pain. His wife described it as a “slow-motion train wreck” and they both tried to laugh about it. But it was real and the pain he went through changed his life.
Before you even think it, I should note that this person is not me. Things may have changed for John since then, but what hasn’t changed is the high-schoolish competitiveness in our colleagues that has lingered for a long time. Since many of them read this blog, I will only tell the part of his story that everyone already knows. And I will do it for a particular reason. Nevertheless, I hope he forgives me for this and understands what I am trying to say. Knowing him, I think he will.
It started with the birth of his daughter in our second year. John had come to the PhD from a high-paying career in industry, such that he didn’t have to take out student loans and could rent a fairly large house (as opposed to the holes most of us were living in). His wife didn’t work and they were living off their considerable savings. Still, the pressure was on, partly because John now had a child to think about, but also because had an immense work ethic and he was no fool. He knew, as did we all, that there were very few full-time teaching positions available and that trying to get one (even getting an interview at AWP or MLA) was like playing the Irish sweepstakes.
Nevertheless, John applied himself, wrote good poems, said smart things, and generally did well. He was older, married, and didn’t waste his time like the rest of us at the sad graduate school parties or looking for love in all the wrong places. He had a particular energy around him that said, I know the truth and, if I don’t know, I’m sure we can discover it together. In short, he seemed like the type who should win the career sweepstakes and become an assistant professor. There should be more people like John in teaching positions. When I think of what it takes to be a great graduate student, I think of him.
But he reached a breaking point, something in his “inner process” that no longer worked the way he thought it should. The reality of being a father had become far more real and compelling than the realities he was creating as a student of English and a poet. His hair turned stark white over the course of a month and he went through a kind of existential fugue, which according to him involved a lot of crying, regret, and hopelessness. Eventually, he dropped out of the program. He moved with his wife and daughter to Arizona to live with his in-laws. And two or three years later re-entered a PhD program at a different university, this time to study British modernism. As far as I know, he’s now a professor somewhere in the Midwest and I am sure he is great.
I tell his story here because although it had an ostensibly happy ending, his dark night of the soul is one that most of us experienced on some level at some time in our work. The difference may have been that he suffered from pressures we didn’t have, destroying the credibility and usefulness of the Academy for him. I believe this as much as I believe that he also lacked certain essential qualities necessary for running those inner and outer efforts concurrently and consistently, at least the first time around.
The voice in the fire: one hears it or one does not.
A teacher of mine once made an interesting observation about “mystery.” The more one seeks out the lacunae in one’s life—the numinous moments, the noetic leaps of high strangeness that result in extraordinary creations, realizations, and states of consciousness—the more mystery seems to increase, not decrease. Seek the mysteries and you will find there are more mysterious things in this world than you ever imagined. Or maybe you will find yourself imagining more such things as you learn to accept new ways of knowing.
Conversely, if you let existing modes of expression, accepted narratives, the exoteric rituals of consensus culture (especially those of the Academy) crowd your senses, ways of knowing will become narrower; meaning will become increasingly delimited and rigid; and the dominant cultural discourses (for us, scientism and reductive materialism) will come to seem all-encompassing. This is what I believe happened to John in his first PhD program. His outer effort was strong, but his inner work was obstructed by the anxiety of feeling responsible for his family. I do not fault him for this. However, I think his experience offers us an interesting lesson.
Recall that the “inner effort” is an emotional, psychological process. It therefore partakes of mystery because interiority cannot be completely mapped. This is where the muse, the creative genius, lives. This is where we dream, where we hear that voice speaking to us about who we truly are and how we must express ourselves. It is the place artists go when they produce authentic and original work.
Funny thing about the muse. She gives and she takes. Dedicate your life to a particular mode of expression and you must always try to hear her. Your sense of the numinous will increase exponentially, but you will also have to make sacrifices. As your outer effort must concern itself with “credibility and usefulness,” your inner effort must be like a love affair with the mystery inside you, which is what we’re talking about when we refer to the inner life of an artist.
Hakim Bey discusses this in The Temporary Autonomous Zone and calls it “sorcery”:
The dullard finds even wine tasteless but the sorcerer can be intoxicated by the mere sight of water. Quality of perception defines the world of intoxication–but to sustain it & expand it to include others demands activity of a certain kind—sorcery. Sorcery breaks no law of nature because there is no Natural Law, only the spontaneity of natura naturans, the tao. Sorcery violates laws which seek to chain this flow—priests, kings, hierophants, mystics, scientists & shopkeepers all brand the sorcerer enemy for threatening the power of their charade, the tensile strength of their illusory web.
A poem can act as a spell & vice versa—but sorcery refuses to be a metaphor for mere literature–it insists that symbols must cause events as well as private epiphanies. It is not a critique but a re-making. It rejects all eschatology & metaphysics of removal, all bleary nostalgia & strident futurismo, in favor of a paroxysm or seizure of presence.
Incense & crystal, dagger & sword, wand, robes, rum, cigars, candles, herbs like dried dreams–the virgin boy staring into a bowl of ink—wine & ganja, meat, yantras & gestures—rituals of pleasure, the garden of houris & sakis—the sorcerer climbs these snakes & ladders to a moment which is fully saturated with its own color, where mountains are mountains & trees are trees, where the body becomes all time, the beloved all space.
We can just as easily speak of it in terms of embracing a wider spectrum of expression. Viktor Frankl puts it this way: “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible” (Man’s Search for Meaning).

The Green Muse by Albert Maignan (1895)
What, then, is the voice in the fire? It’s not a degree from Yale, tenure, and a tactless sense of entitlement. It’s that unmappable, ineffable interior effort, that numinous guidance system which instructs and inspires us to continue our work. It sustains us through years of advanced study, reveals the mystery inherent in the world (even in something as outwardly mundane as the sight of water), and helps us answer for our lives. If we are responsible practitioners of our art, we will listen to this voice just as carefully as we may express our work-products. If we stop listening and forget the internal process, focusing only on the external product, we will enter the dark night of the soul, which entails a lot of suffering.
This is the meaning of that famous line from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” If this is the life you choose (realizing that you have been chosen to answer for your life this way), I continue to wish the best for you.
Listen. And seek the mysteries.
I’ve written three books of fiction to date, all story collections; though, only one of them has been published. This is not remarkable or typical in any sense, even if I do have the stereotypical writer’s voice in my head telling me that I should be submitting to more book contests, etc. My submission schedule results in about 2-3 stories placed in magazines every year, a process I actually enjoy, and I have no plans to stop doing that. Still, I sometimes wonder whether the world needs another immature literary magazine, another lousy e-book marketing campaign (what Chuck Wendig calls the “shit volcano”), or another mediocre career-building novel entering the flotsam. What does the world need?
Better: what do I need?
Books are not the only way to be published, even if they are the fiction writer’s holy grail—specifically novels, ideally lots of novels—because they sell and therefore build careers. Or, as an industry professional once said to me at an AWP conference, “You need to write at least a novel a year for the next five years if you want to be a contender.” He was an important person in the publishing world, had a red nose, a cigar in his lapel pocket, and I was completely intimidated by him at the time. So I nodded as if I understood. But I didn’t and should have asked, “A contender for what, exactly?”
Publishing only feels like boxing. In reality, it’s business, the alchemy of transforming things into money. When business and art collide, a volatile chain reaction usually takes place resulting in all sorts of monstrous transmogrifications, creeping morbidity, and a certain amount of screaming. Put simply, how many writers have you heard of who built a career out of publishing a book a year? I can think of maybe one or two and none writing outside strictly defined genres.
The only literary writer who may produce full-length books with that kind of regularity is Joyce Carol Oates, someone as great as she is prolific but who is entirely unique. So “a book a year” might not be the best advice if you’re in this to make art. If you’re in it to make money, why aren’t you running a brothel, flipping houses, developing apps, or managing a hedge fund? You can probably make an app a year. Brothels, I don’t know, but I imagine their schedules are a bit more eventful.
Every writer asks a version of this question, sometimes on a regular basis: should I be writing harder, faster, longer, mo betta? Should I be soaking down the meadow like a frustrated stallion on horse viagra? How much is too much and why is it that by asking this question I feel soiled? Of course, as with most questions writers ask themselves, there are no answers. There are only opinions and that vague soiled feeling. To be honest, there is only subjectivity in this context.
So how much? Stop asking. Stop thinking about it. Just write. And if you want to be a “contender,” find a different metric against which to measure your progress.
- Set a word count goal. My minimum goal is 7 pages per week, which comes to about 2450 words.
- Give yourself permission to write poorly. You are the worst judge of your own writing, especially in a first draft. You need to get around your hangups if you want to be productive. The only way to do this is to stop caring what the world will think.
- Meditate. I do it for 15-20 minutes before I start. I close my eyes, pay attention to my breathing, and still my mind. You can’t focus if you have a head full of burning spiders.
- Never talk about what you’re currently writing. Talk about what you’ve already written if you must. Ideally, unless you need to be flogging your “platform” and self-promoting, don’t talk about your writing at all. Put it out there and let others talk about how great or horrible you are.
- Always talk about the craft of writing but only after you’ve done your writing for the day.
- Program yourself by creating rituals and routines that inform your body and mind it’s time to write. I try to write at the same time every day. After I meditate, I have coffee, light a little incense (which replaced a cigarette years ago), and disconnect from electronic media.
- Always end with something more left to say in the scene. It will take far more energy tomorrow to start from zero than in media res.
- Do not compare yourself to other writers, ever. You are a unique snowflake. Believe it.
- Avoiding low blood sugar is one of the secret keys to intellectual productivity, especially for creative people. Have your donut, but be sure to also snack on fruit and seeds.
- After you write and dump all your energy into your work, do a little exercise to avoid feeling exhausted for hours. I currently do yoga and chi gong, but a good swim or a jog would be just as effective, I think.
It was the beginning of a time when it was almost as if the novel itself didn’t matter anymore. Publishing a shiny booklike object was simply an excuse for parties and glamour and goodlooking authors reading finely honed minimalism to students who would listen rapt with slackjawed admiration, thinking, I could do that, I could be them. But of course if you weren’t photogenic enough, the sad truth was you couldn’t. – Bret Easton Ellis
John Berryman is supposed to have said that a writer never knows if he’s any good. He asks himself this throughout his life and dies without a satisfactory answer—no matter what prizes, money, publications, or objects of social approval have been tossed his way. It’s easy to conclude that this is just an egotistical hangup for celebrities with enough time and money to fish for validation. Am I good? Tell me. Really? Tell me again. But what Berryman didn’t say was that these doubts seem to come to every person in every field. And insofar as nothing in this world is ever finished or static, such questions must always remain open.
In fact, most things a writer may ask herself about writing (usually in a fallow time when she isn’t writing and feels hollow and dead inside) have no real answers. There is no objective standard for writerly success. You’re never going to know, quoth Berryman. Perhaps because of this, the path of a developing writer is fraught will all kinds of psychological pitfalls, uncertainties which emerge in the space between creation and judgment—writing the thing and then deciding whether it’s worthy.
Consider the luminous transcendent moment when Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for literature. Let’s be honest: she fucking deserved it as well as anybody else. Do you mean to tell me she isn’t a skilled writer? That she hasn’t led the life? That she doesn’t deserve to get paid? Sure, the Nobel system is a politicized, public relations hype-sandwich. In that, it’s no different than the Pulitzer, the MacArthur Genius Grant, the Stegner, or any of the other smaller awards that function as patronage for writers.
Still, I had to laugh when Bret Easton Ellis—who is also great but very different—commented that “Alice Munro was always an overrated writer and now that she’s won The Nobel she always will be. The Nobel is a joke and has been for ages.” After the inevitable social media backlash, he added, “The sentimental hatred for me has made me want to re-read Munro, who I never really got, because now I feel like I’ve beaten-up Santa Claus.” That one kept me laughing for about a week. But the truth is a lot simpler than whether or not Ellis beat up Father Christmas: Munro might not be his cup of tea. But nobody can say definitively that she is “completely overrated” because nobody actually knows. Not even, I will venture to say, Alice.
Young writers (in years and / or in terms of artistic development) especially try to fill this gap with metrics designed to quantify success and banish their excruciating doubts. But most writers have to fight this battle, some throughout their entire careers. Over the course of many years in the writing life, one sees it all:
- the hack machine who puts out a formulaic novel every three months like clockwork and points to this as the ultimate sign of achievement;
- the bitter self-publisher, who has completely dismissed the Manhattan book industry as a hive of scum and villainy, and who now only writes direct-to-Lulu ebooks because nothing else matters anymore;
- the one who can tell you any any minute of the day or night how much money his books are making and exactly why other writers are so jealous of his commercial prowess;
- the defensive YA-ist (Young Adulterer? Young Adulterator?), who started out trying to be Pam Houston but after the first orgy of rejections turned to Harry Potter the way an abused housewife turns to brandy—it takes the edge off in the middle of the day, helps her convince herself that writing about fairy children with super powers is her true calling, and makes it possible for her to stop experiencing those week-long fugues of black existential dread in which she used to compare herself to Pam;
- the lost soul in the MFA program, trying desperately to clone herself into Alice Munro or Donna Tartt or Jonathan Foer or Gary Shteyngart or whoever else is currently receiving the publishing industry’s golden shower du jour (Look how closely I can imitate X! Can I get a cookie? Do you love me? Why won’t anyone love me? You promised me a cookie. Where’s my cookie! I’ll be over there, cutting myself, until you bring me my cookie.);
- the lost soul after the MFA program, trying desperately to justify himself to his drunk brother-in-law at Christmas dinner by mentioning all his literary journal publications (I just put a story in Bumfuck Quarterly! It’s my fifteenth publication! And fuck you, you philistine.);
- the lost soul who got the two-book deal early on, enabling her to worm her way into a tenure track position at a small liberal arts college, and who behaves outwardly as if this validates every word she has written and will ever write (but who continually asks, Is this it? when she’s not buying cases of gin at the package store because maybe Gilbey’s is the only answer);
- others, many and various.
I know. I’m being cruel. Although cruelty does come standard with the writing life, these are stereotypes and we all have a little of this inside us. So pointing fingers is a bit hypocritical. Call it the pathology of trying to be a writer in a system that presents itself as a meritocracy but functions via medieval power games and nepotism. And we can be as angry as we want. We can shake our little fists at the heavens or spend hours upbraiding ourselves in the mirror. But we’re never going to know how to be good. We’re only ever going to know that we want to be.
There is an emotional truth or reality at the center of a story I may be writing. I have a fleeting sense of it and then I start off by trying to explore it, trying to get to the center. Then I always stop. Sometimes it’s because I’ve forgotten that “fleeting sense” and consequently do not know how to proceed (a kind of amnesia in which I know that I had the emotion, but I can’t feel it or understand how to be guided by it anymore). Sometimes, it’s because I can’t face what I’ve discovered–conditions in my life have made such an emotional realization too painful or too difficult in some way. But if I can realize the truth of that emotional center deeply in myself, if I can come to terms with it in the deepest possible way, then I can move the story toward completion. The end of the story is always a revelation because it remains hidden for most of the process.
In this sense, many of my “story fragments” are still waiting for me to come around to that place where I can recognize what they are and what they mean. A fragment waiting to be finished is a piece of me waiting to be recognized and realized.
Don’t buy into the romantic assumption that being a creative artist is easy for those who are truly talented and meant to do it. This is a materialistic commercial lie. Something I believe: art is part of being human and must therefore be available to everyone. And those who do it right never find it easy; though, the publishing industry, for example, may find it easier to sell certain books if readers believe that the writers being published are like idiot savants.
Everyone has an aptitude for some kind of creative process. Finding out what it is means finding out more of what it means to be human and alive. Not investigating this firsthand means voluntarily accepting an impersonal, commercially interested assumption about one’s creative potential—some external story about you imagined and written by someone who doesn’t even know you. It’s an affront to everything unique and valuable in the individual self.
Moreover, it elevates money over art, which is fundamentally disconnected from the reasons we make art in the first place. This is essentially stupid. Therefore, we need to appreciate art. We should create it and consume it, but we should not assume that it is something mysterious, selective, elite, or random. It is better to think of artistic ability as an attainment, a product of self-cultivation that uses materials we already have. And our job is to understand it, interact with it, develop it, and teach this praxis to others. Our job is not to worship those being held up to us as a select, anointed group. Our job is to understand how commerce reacts with art and then to set all that aside so we can do our own work.
The way to lead the writing life is brutally simple–simple because it’s easy to understand, brutal because it’s difficult to do. Here it is in three steps: write, bring into your life everything that helps you write, and eliminate from your life everything that prevents you from writing. This includes jobs, family members, social obligations, habits of mind and body, friends, and the opinions of others (especially other writers). Evaluate each one. Does the thing or the person help you accomplish your writing? If yes, good. If no, be ruthless in getting rid of that thing or person.
Additional advice that follows from this:
Learn to accept (and ideally ignore) the low opinions of others. They are not doing what you are doing and cannot be expected to understand. Forgive them and then jealously guard the rest of your emotional energy. This includes critics of your work. They may be accurate when they tell you that you have produced shoddy work, but whether their criticisms are accurate or not is irrelevant. You will write more. You will improve or take a different path in your writing. But promise yourself that it will not be in response to their braying. In creative workshops, see your colleagues as assistants and apply the test: are they helping you improve? If yes, take what is useful from their comments. If no, recycle their responses and save trees.
You can be a creative writer if you have space, time, and the ability to satisfy personal needs. Getting these amounts to bringing into your life everything that helps you write. You can be an electrician, secretary, housewife, criminal, janitor, teacher, cook, paralegal, or any other job that gives you space, time, and wellness. If you are working at the office 80 hours a week, you will not make it. Accept lower social status and forgive your disappointed parents. You do not have to be poor. By all means, be rich (and send some to me).
Read. You are not a scholar. You are a creative artist. This means you can read anything that inspires you, from recipes to comic books to Proust to the Greek Magical Papyri to Don Delillo. You don’t have to worry about acquiring an encyclopedic understanding of Kafka. If you like “In the Penal Colony” and do not like “The Metamorphosis,” good. You know what you like, which is part of being inspired. Read without guilt as long as you are learning and becoming inspired. As soon as you read literature out of obligation, you are no longer functioning as an artist.
Avoid trendiness and over-stylization. These are traps designed to convert art into money. If you want to make money your primary focus, go into business and save yourself the trouble. Do your own thing aesthetically. You know what you like, which is an invitation to pursue it artistically.
There is a lot more that can be said along these lines. However, it all comes down to the three essential steps: write, bring into your life everything that helps you write, and eliminate from your life everything that prevents you from writing.