The question now, though, is totally different. After having spent most of my available free time over the last ten years focused as much as time would allow either on writing fiction or writing for this blog, I find myself unwilling to sit down and transfer thoughts into words. I still have the same urge as always, but inevitably, before I put my butt on the back-friendly yoga ball to begin writing, I am waylaid by wondering, "What's the point?"
Most writers will say one reason they write is because they can't stop themselves. I always felt that way, too. So where I am now is like waking up and finding I don't like sex or chocolate anymore. Or maybe it's like still liking chocolate but the last 32 times I've eaten it, it's given me explosive diarrhea, so now I'm reluctant to eat it again.
I don't like refraining from writing. I don't feel like myself. But there are also some pretty strong reasons why I can't get myself into my seat to write. They're not as strong as explosive diarrhea, maybe, but they're strong enough I don't know if I'll be able to get over them.
1. Maybe I'm not that good
When somebody asked Flannery O'Connor why she wrote, she said, "Because I'm good at it." I don't draw or paint precisely because what I create is ugly, and it gives me no pleasure to look at what I've made when I'm done. With writing, though, there are at least some occasions where I will re-read something I've written and feel joy reading it, the same kind of joy I would feel reading something somebody else had written.
But for almost three years now, I've just been unable to get anything published. Part of that is on me. For all that time, I've only been sending in work to top-tier journals. After I won New Letters' Robert Day Fiction Contest in 2020, followed soon after by publication in The Bellevue Literary Review, I felt like I had drawn pretty close to my goal of writing fiction good enough to be published in top tier journals. It's not that I'm a journal snob. I was always gratified and grateful when any journal, no matter how small, accepted my work. But I want to be read. When I was sending out to every journal on Earth, it was partly about trying to figure out if I was in the right ballpark. After twenty or so of those acceptances, I had the feedback I needed. If I want to be read, it doesn't do any good to be published in a smaller journal.
Since 2020, I've written five short stories that I think are better than anything I wrote before. None has broken into a top journal. I've still had plenty of encouraging rejections, including from The New Yorker, The Missouri Review, Agni, One Story, The Georgia Review, The Cincinnati Review, and The Colorado Review. Some have given me positive feedback more than once.
Maybe I ought to keep plugging away, feeling like I'm close and I just need to bide my time and wait to get lucky, but I feel now like "almost good enough for a top-tier journal" is my limit. I can't write better than what I've done in the last three years, and it's not good enough. I understand that sometimes, it's a matter of luck. Every journal gets tons of great stories and can only publish a few, and they're looking for a blend of perspectives, so I might just not fit that particular edition. But if I were as good as I want to be, I'd be impossible to reject. I'm not, and I don't think I ever will be.
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| When somebody tells me I should keep going with writing because I'm almost there, I always think of this gambler's fallacy meme my son showed me. |
2. For a variety of reasons, I don't think it's realistic I will get better
I might never have been talented enough. I'm sure there's a certain neural makeup to a great writer that's partly there when they're born, and that also has to be nurtured a certain way early on. It's possible I was doomed from birth, or doomed from early childhood because I missed certain developmental processes necessary to building the right neural network for a creative writer.
But even if that's not true, even if I still had a chance in adulthood, I don't think I have a chance now. It's true that if you work at something, you tend to get better. I've definitely improved greatly since taking writing seriously in my early 40s. But I'm in my early 50s now, and I feel myself slipping cognitively in a general sense. It's maybe not serious yet--I forget a word here and there while speaking more than I used to, I find long hours at work less easy to endure--but it's enough that I'm probably not really building the new connections in my brain necessary to improve creatively. It's like where I am at the gym now. I'm not really out there to be the strongest I've ever been. I'm just trying to slow down decline.
Even if I were younger, I've always had a stumbling block to developing as a writer, which is that I can't read prodigiously. I'm a good reader, but I can't read for long stretches most of the time. I get too caught up in my own thoughts about what I'm reading, and I have to take breaks to walk around and think about what I've just read. I've always been this way. It's always been a bit of an embarrassment for me around literary friends, who talk about reading a hundred books a year or more. I do read, of course. I don't do it efficiently, and so I don't read as widely as many serious readers do, but I try to make up for it by reading well when I do read. If I have to take a test, I'm capable of focusing for hours at a time, but I can't maintain that every day.
Reading well if not much is fine for much of the kind of analysis I do on this blog, but I think you have to read both deeply and broadly to improve as a writer. A would-be great writer has to fill their mind all the time with the best writing. I can't do that, and even if I could, I'm probably too old for it to have the impact it would have on a younger mind.
3. I can't get away from the world
I recently read Sigrid Nunez's "Life and Story" in The Sewanee Review, in which she ponders the "why write" question at great length. It's a great summary of the many explanations people have given to this question, along with many of the doubts a writer faces if she has any sense. Many are the same doubts I've expressed over the years, such as the question of how to justify writing about unreal things in a world with so many real problems.
One problem Nunez focuses on is how much concentration writing takes. All that concentration and focus and wrangling means time not spent with those around you. It means time not spent fixing the storm door or edging the lawn. It means time not spent on your day job, the one that pays the bills.
Nunez recalls how her mentor, Susan Sontag, encouraged her to let writing be the central focus of her life:
"While it seemed everyone else wanted to know how I intended to earn a living, or when I was going to settle down, Sontag was talking about something else. Put the writing first, she said. Teach if you must, but don't feel that you have to become affiliated with an institution. Don't give up your independence. Forget the safety of tenure. Forget safety, period. Forget everything but the work."
Living in financial uncertainty while devoted only to the work has been a popular choice for writers, perhaps second only to having enough of a fortune, through heredity or marriage, you don't have to think about survival at all. There's nobility to it, the same way there is nobility in those who choose penury and celibacy in the service of God. I was planning at one point on that path, but I fell in love and had a child, and at that point, I realized I HAD to care about safety.
Almost twenty years later, now with two kids, both of whom are struggling to figure out their own path to financial safety, the demands of the world are as great on me as ever. It has an effect on my writing. Even when I try to conserve some energy for writing, the effort and time I put into my job robs me of those same resources I need for arduous creative work. It fills my head with the wrong kind of energy.
Of course, other writers have managed to succeed while working for a living, but I think most succeeded at a younger age than I am now. I have writer friends who work and raise kids and write, mostly at teacher or editor jobs that don't pay as well as my job does, which means they have extra financial concerns I don't. But the thing is that none of those friends are doing any better at succeeding--based on my definition of the term--than I am. That's in spite of the fact that their teacher/editor jobs give them a better network to publicize their work with than I have. Writing is hard to do well even if you mortgage everything to focus on it, and anyone who's trying to both raise a family and cut open their spiritual veins to bleed onto the page is going to have an even harder time of it.
In my case, because my day job I've ended up in could be thought to be important in a cold and calculated "real world" sort of way, I often wonder if the morally right choice isn't to shutter writing altogether and focus on my day job. There's a good chance that an improvement in my ability to do my job could have more of a positive impact on the world than anything I'll write at home. The only reason I've continued to write is because my own mental health couldn't stand not doing it. I wouldn't have been able to do my day job at all if I didn't write, I reasoned, because I'd have killed myself or ended up in a loony bin. Sometimes, though, I think that my indulging of my writing habit is just my own selfishness or ego.
4. I'm exactly the wrong level of educated as a critic now
Since fiction writing wasn't working out how I'd hoped in the near term, I felt like I'd found a nice niche writing analysis of literary fiction on this blog. This was mostly of short story anthologies, such as Best American Short Stories and, if I had time and energy for it, Pushcart or O. Henry as well. It felt useful to me, because I thought that as a veteran of graduate-level studies in literature, I could be something of a bridge to ordinary people looking to investigate literary fiction. I've certainly been grateful for podcasts from philosophy Ph.D.s or other experts who seek to open up their disciplines to curious outsiders. I hoped to do the same for literature.
I realized I wasn't quite a full expert. I didn't go on for a Ph.D. myself, and there are gaps in my understanding of literary theory as well as the history of literature and literary criticism. Still, since as one of my favorite professors as an undergrad said, you can never go wrong with a sensitive close reading, I felt like performing my close readings for all would help them to do their own.
I was happy with my approach of close reading with occasional supplements from theory or literary history until last year. The mistake I made was trying to take criticism more seriously. I'd decided that since I was unlikely to ever make the breakthrough as a fiction writer I hoped to make, I should focus instead on doing the best job of writing the blog I could. I tried to go back and fill in gaps in theory and history.
All I succeeded in doing was to become more aware of how great a gap I have between the knowledge I actually have and what I'd like to have. To fill that gap, I'd have to quit my job and spend years pursuing the expertise I lack. All so I could write a blog that maybe a few hundred people occasionally look at. If I wasn't going to abandon my life for fiction, I certainly wasn't going to do it for writing about fiction.
So I've ended up in a place where I can't go back to just doing close readings, and I'm nowhere near being able to write what I'd like to be able to write, so I don't want to write anything. My shoot-from-the-hip close readings no longer seem to be enough, and what I'd like to do--a still-accessible but more informed flavor of criticism--is beyond me. I feel like the incarnation of Pope's a little learning being a dangerous thing, only I'm aware of how dangerous I am.
My cycle
So that's where I am. I'm miserable not writing, because it doesn't feel like me, but I'm also miserable writing, because it feels pointless. Yes, I know that many, many writers offer the therapeutic advice that you should write for yourself and whether it gets published or wins awards or earns praise isn't the point. But I do not want to write just to amuse myself. If nobody is ever going to read what I write, I don't want to write. That's not human connection, which, I think, ought to be at least part of why someone would write.
My day job values being succinct above all other writing virtues, and they love it when you can draw a picture for something instead of making people read words, which everyone hates. So I've summarized all the above verbosity into the following flow chart:
