One day last year some of us writers were talking about work habits—whether or not it’s essential to write every single day, how to prioritize writing projects, whether or not to quantify output or time, what’s the best way to start writing every day.
And the answers all came down to one thing:
What’s your goal with all this? Why are you writing your story?
Maybe you’re writing it because you grew up in the 1950s and sixties and seventies reading books by authors who—even though they weren’t famous—still made a sort of lower-middle-class living staying home with a typewriter all day doing what they were good at and they loved. And that was the future you saw for yourself. Because you just loved books.
Or maybe you’re writing it because, even though you’ve never been a writer, this one story came to you, and you really, seriously, passionately wanted to tell it, but the more you work on it the more you want to tell it exactly right. And so you’re struggling to learn how to discover exactly the right way.
Or maybe you’re writing it to become the next J.K. Rowling and make a killing in the book market and become famous as that break-out success everyone’s still talking about twenty years later. Truth be told, when you think this way you probably aren’t thinking about twenty years from now. You’re probably only thinking about next year and whether or not you’ll be so excited you’ll vomit on Oprah.
Or maybe you’re writing it because everywhere you go these days people are asking you if you’re on Twitter and Facebook, whether or not you have a blog, if you’re ‘online,’ and when you do go online everywhere you look people are talking about how you have to start marketing your book before you even write it, and they’re critiquing each other’s manuscripts and offering for critique their own novels on forums, and they’re bemoaning their wordcounts and trading tips on blogging agents and asking you if you’re doing NaNoWriMo this year.
And as soon as you ask yourself, “Am I? Why not?” you realize you’ve opened the Pandora’s Box of writing advice that hammers at you relentlessly from all directions, “Build your platform! Drive your traffic! Leverage your social media network! Accumulate your subscribers!” As though the whole world were out there right this second waiting around just for you—for you to give it what it wants—and none too patiently either. And you’re thinking, Huh. I always thought I was supposed to learn how to write well before I could sell anything I’d written. How wrong was I?. . .
Now more than ever in history the aspiring writer must guard against other people’s agendas. You must consider every day with as much clarity and self-awareness as you can muster why you, personally, write. You must ask yourself why you write what you write, just what you want to get out of writing, and how badly you want to get it. You must ask every single time you sit down with your story, “Why this? Why me? Why now?”
You must keep your head when all those around you are losing theirs.
Because the world of illusion has finally come off the page and taken over the actual experience of being a writer. It can seem it’s no longer about getting into that page and sinking with luxurious, tactile pleasure through the layers and layers and layers of brilliant and significant and riveting detail to the core underlying everything you could ever hope to write. As though it’s no longer about climbing back out of those depths when you look up and around and realize you’re sitting in a chair, at a desk, in a room, and your life is in here with you. No longer about going downstairs to sit on the front steps in the twilight after a solid day’s work and think of those satisfying pages, smell the grass, listen to the birds, watch the clouds cross the iridescent sky, feel the good, firm earth beneath your bare feet.
It’s all Barnum & Bailey, now, lost in the virtual blogosphere twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, always and forever unto infinity.
So remember, as you live your life—this life of the writer in the twenty-first century—what an illusion the circus is. And remember what they say is born every minute.
You didn’t choose this craft to be the craft of your soul just so you could be that.
Turn your back on the circus.
Turn to your story.