Today I finished the spell check on the latest revision of my novel and sent it off to my agent.
Now I kind of want just to keep typing that sentence over and over again. I have this frozen elation—or is that terror? This morning over breakfast, I was reading book reviews in The Economist. (That sounds a lot grander than it was—the nearest magazine on hand while I was shoveling down corn flakes before one of my kids called for a wipe . . .) And I thought, “Soon people will be saying mean things like this about my book.”
Success looks different from the inside than from the outside. The fantasy of being a writer—which still, somehow, for some creative minds, includes making a lot of money—does not play out in reality.
This is not to say that there aren’t wonderful things about being a writer. In fact, I would venture to say that for some, and I count myself among them, it’s the best job in the world.
Except for one tiny factor: it’s not a job. It just doesn’t pay enough and there are no health benefits. No security. Limited success—say, publication without the attendant sales and accolades—is worse than no success at all.
So, why write?
First, because we are all so abundantly creative. We are creatures who observe, invent, dance with the world, and can grab swaths of that and confine it to the page. Yesterday, two recent college graduates visited my writing class, and their writing was so fresh, their passion and wonder about the existence of the world so close to that of my own children (who are heading into kindergarten in the fall), it was dazzling to witness. As they left my house, they noticed a book belonging to my kids, a big book about fish with lots of color photographs. “Fish!” the squealed, and stopped to leaf through the book.
As writers, we all aspire to the same delight in the details of the world. As writers, we come closest to achieving it.
Second, it is possible to keep perspective. (Right?) The books that we love—the ones that you or the ones that I cannot live without—are for some people unreadable. “I couldn’t get into it,” some decent person, a real reader, might say about the greatest book in the universe. And some decent person will, no doubt, say it about my book—and about yours. If we are lucky. If we are lucky enough that our books find their way out in the world, turn into objects that some people love and others . . . don’t. Can’t please all of the people all of the time—no doubt about it. For a long time that was my goal—pleasing all of the people all of the time—which accounts for the stack of drafts of the novel-in-a-drawer that I wrote and rewrote a hundred times between my first published novel and the one I just sent to my agent.
Third, if you write consistently, devotedly, whether you feel like it or not, something awesome will happen. You will become simultaneously a reader and the writer of your book. You will be eager to see what will happen, how events will unfold, what you and your characters have to say. And we all got into this business—writing, I mean—because we are readers, right? We were swept up in the magic that is books and thought, wouldn’t it be incredible to make that magic myself? (Which at times can seem a little like going to a very fancy restaurant, enjoying a gourmet meal, and deciding to wait tables just because the food was so delicious .) But if you persist, stick to it, get very regular about your habit and make it through your manuscript, this new pleasure will visit itself upon you, and you will have created the magic you are experiencing. Nothing better.
Well, there are lots of other reasons to write and reasons to press send—what are some of yours? Really. Why write?
Elizabeth Stark is the author of the novel Shy Girl (FSG, Seal Press) and co-director and co-writer of several short films, including FtF: Female to Femme and Little Mutinies (both distributed by Frameline). She earned an M.F.A. from Columbia University in Creative Writing. Currently the lead mentor and teacher at the Book Writing World, she’s taught writing and literature at UCSC, Pratt Institute, the Peralta Colleges, Hobart & William Smith Colleges and St. Mary’s College. She’s at work on a novel about Kafka.