I know I’m not alone in occasionally shaking my head and wondering, why write at all in our digital day & age? Visual entertainment has proliferated in attractive formats, capturing most available eyeballs. These include social media, games, and shows available on-demand from a multitude of services, not to mention traditional networks and movie theaters.
Why keep slaving over a blank page, struggling to publish, and offending one’s introverted nature by putting precious time into self-promotion? All in the frequently vain hope that words will strike a chord in someone’s heart, maybe making it worthwhile even if we never hear about it…
Why write?
Many of us focus on the joys of self-expression, turning our backs on publication and its dubious rewards. Some content themselves with personal writing—journaling, keeping up correspondence (that endangered species of yore), perhaps, building stacks of poems and jottings in a drawer. A few share their work exclusively on Facebook, blogs, substacks, and other forms of self-publishing to sneak around the gatekeepers of the consolidated industry that has stifled so many dreams over the decades.
Still, a long-awaited milestone, such as the publication of a novel, brings both joy and reflection. Mine, I Never Do This, was published last month by Sibylline Press of Grass Valley, California, after years of effort. Writers, including yours truly, often cite the slogan, “Never give up!” But in fact, I gave up many times when the grief of frustrated hopes became overwhelming: I gave up submitting to magazines and quarterlies, gave up querying agents, and threw in the towel on searching for small presses.
Questions flooded my mind, some my own and others posed by friends or fellow writers: What do we accomplish by creating books nowadays? Why crank out hundreds of pages in the era of 140-character tweets or, now, X-es? Is the “game worth the candle” in terms of what we get out of it—to borrow a phrase from a time when reading had less competition as a form of entertainment and enlightenment?
My favorite uncle, a student of art history in his youth, always affirmed the adage that, “Truth is beauty and beauty, truth.” With a smirk, he would add, “That’s all you need to know!” My truth in writing a novel of social conflict set in the notorious former swing state of Ohio involves such controversial matters as abortion and prejudice based on class, race, and sexual orientation. The effort to treat these issues with a fictional type of truth earns me no love from several quarters, including a few branches of my own family.
Was it worth it? Does publishing a book justify losing friends and alienating people? I don’t expect fame or life-altering royalty checks. So, the question leads me to ponder the notion of a “writing career.” Actually, the prospect of a career has been on my mind for at least 50 years—shining in the distance as the highest achievement I could possibly attain! Social media reveals that this goal is shared by tens of thousands of people in the English-speaking world. But it’s not self-evident how most of us define the term “career.”
One obvious question is whether a career must produce income. Things we do, no matter how much we love them, tend to be considered hobbies if they fail to bring in at least as much money as required for ongoing practice. No doubt, hobbies get an undeserved negative rap since the word has a connotation of light amusement. Distraction for dilettantes: knitting today, macrame tomorrow.
This is nothing like the attitude of most writers toward our craft. The inner voice that guides the pen (or fingers on keyboard) is an intimate part of our selfhood. Writing expresses a quality of mind that seems to embody a higher personality. A soul. Until we frame experience in words, we hardly know what happened or what we think. At the same time, writing is a way of reaching out to people we could never meet in our physical lives, a point of contact with humanity. Or, at least, a hope for contact if we succeed in finding readers.
Eventually, we couldn’t switch to another “career,” or even another “creative outlet,” if we wanted to. As writers are known to declare in moments of despond, “I’m entirely unfit to do anything else!” (Although some have done quite well, after all. Bless their hearts.)
Throughout history, writers have failed to earn enough money to shake a quill at. Yet many of these wound up contributing to the canon of world literature and belatedly entered the hearts of more readers than they ever dreamed of finding while they wrote and struggled. Among the members of this special club are Thoreau, Dickinson, Poe, Kafka, at least two of the Brontës, and John Kennedy Toole (the posthumous Pulitzer Prizewinner for A Confederacy of Dunces). The now beloved Zora Neale Hurston achieved some success as a writer, only to find herself working as a chamber maid in later life; she ended her days in Florida’s St. Lucie County Welfare Home.
These scribes may not have enjoyed grand careers, but they pursued their calling as writers with the devotion we might expect of a sacred vocation.
And it should never be forgotten that others have paid the ultimate price for stubbornly practicing their craft under repressive regimes. Not merely denied a living wage, these writers were hounded, imprisoned, and killed for the truth of their words: Osip Mandelstam, Nikolai Gumilyov, and Víctor Jara. Still more were marginalized and persecuted: Anna Akhmatova, Theodor Kramer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
The PEN International Writers in Prison Committee reminds us that persecution continues around the world today. Journalists have come under attack in recent years like never before. And such an august figure as Salman Rushdi was assaulted in public in 2022, suffering grave injury.
American writers may have little more to fear than being ignored and unsupported, but we share the dedication to a practice that often resembles a calling more than a career. We feel an inner drive to seek perfect self-expression despite the lack of material reward. Or reward of any kind: Even praise, recognition, a place in society, and self-respect can become rarities. When our work is such a profound reflection of our minds, affirmation is a persistent craving, but all may be withheld by the cruel muse.
Not to mention a society enthralled by “other priorities.” Still, writers persevere.
Having known a good number of aspiring authors, I feel qualified to insist that few are hoping for lifetime poverty followed by posthumous fame. In fact, few appear to give any thought to what might become the “great works” of the future. Most would like to realize a modest profit on book sales, or at minimum, covering their outlays on materials and services. Our wildest dreams may involve the sale of film rights, which might at least begin to pay down an English major’s student loans. Only those who train in the style of popular genre authors seriously imagine their work will bring riches or renown.
Samuel Johnson would say that the world has grown crowded with blockheads. (He of the famous quote, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”) True, Mr. Johnson lived in an illiterate age, when the slightest skill with letters could pay a premium. It’s far easier today to go broke amid a crowd of scriveners than it was in the 18th century. Nonetheless, this deters few from trying to distinguish themselves. Ourselves. So again, I ask, why do we do it? How do we go on?
It’s hard to turn away from a true calling. What’s often termed “the writing life” requires an almost spiritual discipline. When it may take years to complete a draft, and longer to perfect it, deferred gratification is the order of the day. But for a writer striving to publish, it’s even more essential to “sit with” your ego, in the Buddhist sense: to tolerate its flights of arrogance without succumbing to them. To use the ego’s energy while resisting its delusions of grandeur.
You must believe in your skills enough to keep applying words to page, but not so much as to allow specific hopes—This agent will take me! That magazine will feature me!—to outgrow the proverbial tiny mustard seed. Disappointment is always around the corner…though fresh efforts are available as well.
And so, many of us take a monkish satisfaction amid careful management of our expectations. A life of self-denial? To keep faith with one’s artistry, always striving in uncertainty to bring forth greater truth—it’s a type of loyalty to one’s humanity. To all of humanity.
Then comes the occasional response from a reader: Your story touched a chord, raised a memory, sparked new ideas! Or a reviewer demonstrates a deep engagement with the work, and we exclaim, “Someone saw me at last!” For a moment, drudgery vanishes, and the calling becomes a blessing we cannot fail to answer. The struggle was worth every word: all the words on the page and the thousands more crossed out like submerged stones that let you walk on water.
Great thanks to Anne Leigh Parrish for hosting an early version of this post on her blog back in 2015. She helped me keep going for many more years.
Visit Anesa Miller’s website at https://anesamiller.com/.
Author visits with Anesa Miller are available via Adventures by the Book.