Other People Get to Be Real Writers
A few years ago, I met a famous novelist at a conference. He’d sold millions of books. It seemed like he published a new book every time the wind changed direction. As I told him about National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo), he turned skeptical, and he asked me, “How many novels does the world need, anyway? Why should so many of these people write?”
I sometimes twitch with churlishness when I hear questions like this. Somewhere within the question, I hear a gate crashing down on people’s creativity. I see a sign, “Don’t presume to call yourself a writer.” I feel a judgment: “Why write a novel unless it’s going to get published and made into a product to be purchased and consumed?”
The question disregards the spirit that has guided every writer since the beginning of time: the need to create just for the sake of creating. The need to shape the world, see through others’ eyes, tame reality, find oneself, lose oneself — to touch what is magical, astonishing, and wondrous — to exult the possible, to make the strange obvious and the obvious strange. And much more.
Such questions dog every writer, though, and they too often smother their creative impulse and prevent them from showing up. In fact, each year I talk to hundreds of people who have perfected a peculiar and disturbing art: the art of telling themselves why they can’t jump in and write the novel of their dreams.
They tell themselves they’re not a “real writer.”* They tell themselves their story isn’t important (or, worse, isn’t marketable). They tell themselves they shouldn’t do something so fanciful, something so artsy … something so impractical.
I call this the “other syndrome” — as in “other people do this, but not me.”
We’ve all been there, right? We open up the pages of a magazine, and we read a profile of a magnificently coiffed artistic being — a twirling scarf, moody eyes, locks of hair falling over a pensive brow. We read the witticisms and wisdom the celebrated artistic being dispenses while drinking a bottle of wine with a reporter one afternoon in a hamlet in Italy.
And, as we sit in our house that is so very far from Italy, and we look across the kitchen, over the dishes on the counter, to the cheap bottle of wine from Safeway, and the phone rings with a call from a telemarketer, just as a bill slides off the stack of bills, we tell ourselves, “Other people are writers. Other people get the good fortune to have been born with a twirling scarf around their neck. Other people get to traipse through Italy to find a fantastic novel calling them. Other people get to be who they want to be — whether it’s through family connections, blessed luck, or natural talent. But that’s not me. That’s other people.”
And you know what, we’re right. The life of an artist is for others — because we just said so, and in saying so, we make it true.
But here’s the rub. Even after negating our creative potential, we’re bound to wake up the next day to a tickle of an idea dancing in a far corner of our mind, a memory that is trying to push a door open, a strange other world that is calling us. We wash those dishes, we pay that stack of bills, we drink that cheap bottle of wine, but we know there’s something else — we know there’s something more.
And there is something more. There’s the creative life. You don’t need a certificate for it, you don’t need to apply to do it, you don’t even need to ask permission to do it. You just have to claim it — and claim it every day by showing up to do it.
It’s not easy, of course. There will be naysayers, those people who think it’s silly or trivial to be a “creative type”, those who think it’s audacious and pretentious for you to write a novel, those who think you can’t do it because you lack the qualifications and the training.
Unfortunately, because humans are social beings by design, we tend to measure our worth according to the opinions of others. Opinions that come from who knows where, but most likely others’ own insecurities, their need for you not to fulfill yourself — because if you fulfill yourself, you might make them feel small.
The arts don’t belong to a chosen few, though. Quite the opposite: every one of us is chosen to be a creator by virtue of being human. If you’re not convinced of this, just step into any preschool and observe the unbridled creative energy of kids as they immerse themselves in fingerpainting, telling wild stories, banging on drums, and dancing just to dance. They’re creative types because they breathe.
I witness thousands of people break down the barricades that prevent them from writing the novel of their dreams and take on the Herculean task of writing a novel of 50,000 words in just 30 days. Writing suddenly leaps up from the cluttered basement of their daily tasks to stand tall on the pedestal of life for an entire month. An audacious goal and deadline serve as creative midwives (and an occasional bullwhip), and writers are propelled by the scintillating rushes of their imagination and the galvanizing force of the huzzahs coming from what can seem like the entire world writing with them.
So, when I’m asked what happens to all of those novels — as if they only matter if something happens to them beyond the wonderfulness of their creation — I always see a world of writers with an unquenchable thirst for storytelling. I see a world of writers who write because humans are wired to make meaning of the world through stories — because stories are the vehicles that we navigate the world with.
*You’re a writer because you write (that’s the definition of a “real writer”). There’s no other definition. Your task as a human being is to find that maker within, to decide that you’re not “other,” you’re a creator. That impetus is what makes life meaningful. After food, shelter, and love, I believe it’s what we need most in life.
We yearn to touch life’s mysteries, to step out into the world looking for new solutions to old problems, if not new worlds altogether. We need to tap into our vulnerabilities, seek to understand our fears, look at life through others’ eyes, ask questions, and open up our awareness of the wonders of the universe.
Each story is a gift, a door that opens a new way to see and relate with others in this crazy, crazy world. Stories are the oxygen our souls breathe, a way to bring the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable to life. Our creative lives shouldn’t be a hall pass from the stiff and forbidding demands of our lives. Writing our stories takes us beyond the grueling grind that life can unfortunately become, beyond the constraints of the roles we find ourselves in each day, to make the world a bigger place.
Stories remind us that we’re alive, and what being alive means.
“Only art penetrates . . . the seeming realities of this world,” said Saul Bellow in his Nobel Prize speech.
Leslie Marmon Silko said that stories are “all we have to fight off illness and death.”
Jacqueline Woodson said writers are “the ones who are bearing witness to what’s going on in the world.”
For a writer, life hasn’t really been lived until one’s stories find their way onto the page. We exist in the flickers of a rift with the world, searching for words that will sew the fissure, heal it. A rupture, a wound, finds the salve of a story. If you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. If you don’t create, you hurt yourself. The signature of your self is formed by the work you put into your story. Making art tells you who you are. Making art in turn makes you.
So it’s your duty as a writer, as a person, to build a world through your words and believe in your story as a beautiful work of incarnation, to see it as a gift to yourself and others, as something that elevates life with new meaning — your meaning.
Writing a story is many things: a quest, a prayer, a hunger, a tantrum, a flight of the imagination, a revolt, a daring escape that ironically leads you back to yourself. As long as we’re creating, we’re cultivating meaning. Our stories are the candles that light up the darkness that life can become, so we must live in the warm hues of our imaginative life.
If you hear the whispers of a novel coming from the other room, or ideas for other stories caterwauling for their day in the sun, dive in. “The days are long, but the years are short,” some wise person once said. Your story can’t wait. It needs you.
So sign up for National Novel Writing Month and write your story this November.
The Rundown
Reading: Horror Stories, by Liz Phair
Listening to: Soberish, by Liz Phair (her latest album)
Lusting for: Traveling back in time to the early 90s and listening to Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville after work with my friends at Radio Valencia.
Inspiration: "I think good art happens on that edge between comfortable and in a lot of pain, you know what I mean?" ~ Liz Phair
Random question: What if you pretend to be someone else today?
Photo prompt: Old diner mascots always speak to me like they did when I was a kid. The world feels safe and fun and full of milkshakes and fries.
