Why I Write (an unpopular perspective in 2022…)

Photo by Jessica Mangano on Unsplash

Let me start by telling you why I DON’T write. (Not to be negative. Bear with me: Over time you’ll hopefully learn to trust my skeptical, contrarian nature. Consider this a Hegelian dialectic between author and reader.)

I don’t write to be “positive.” I don’t write to join a “community.” I don’t write to feel good about myself. I don’t write to express a political ideology or perspective. I don’t write to try to convince you of anything. I don’t write so that I or you can feel “safe” or comfortable. (This, in my opinion, isn’t writing anyway.)

I write for a few simple reasons. I write to express the way I feel about this bizarre thing called life. I write to be seen and heard, if even only by myself. I write to communicate with society in some nuanced, complex, hopefully profound way. I write to attempt to dig up some notion of capital-T Truth as I understand it. I write to expose myself; to show you who I am; to render myself vulnerable. I want to be real, raw, naked. I want to get down to the brass tacks of What it Means to be Human. Not as a White Straight Male, because that isn’t my fundamental nature or spirit. That is a lazy, boring social category which has very little to do with my soul.

I am an individual alive in the world. And so, this being the case, I write to demonstrate that I feel pain, I suffer, I have the capacity to love and be loved, I want to connect somehow with the greater field of energy which invisibly binds all of us together on this torn, wayward planet we call Earth.

If the above paragraphs seem to contradict each other that’s the point: Life is a web of oozing complexity which never gets fully solved and is never fully understood.

But back to writing. Over the past twenty years—basically since the digitization of writing, moving from a physical art to a digital one—we have somehow arrived at this point where we feel that “everyone is a writer.” I blame Facebook for much of this. And the general rise of all social media. And then of course there’s the rise of self-publishing, both a blessing and a curse. Amazon: That unholy demon god of confusion and ease. (Which we all can’t live without.) And there are writers’ conferences and MFA programs which get their octopus tentacles around the young and wealthy and take advantage of their naïve desire to “be a NYT bestseller.” (We all know they won’t be, 99.999% of the time.) A cottage industry has arisen: Tricking non-writers into thinking they are writers.

Now, before you start saying, “Wow, this guy is pretentious!,” hear me out. This is the perspective I come from. Writing is like any other artform. It is a craft. You have to have an inborn skill at storytelling, a way with language, a rhythm, a voice, an understanding of plot and arc, developing characters, dialogue, etc. Yes, some of this you can more or less learn. But it’s not like being a mechanic and once you know the details you can make any car run. Concepts like literary voice, your particular world-view and perspective, getting emotion down on the page in an effective way, using language brilliantly, producing a cadence and a rhythm that feels organic and natural, telling a powerful story which grabs the reader and feels both personal and universal, laying down a natural, poignant, reflective, unique style: These are things you can really only learn through 1. Skill (natural organic talent); 2. Life experience; 3. Dedication.

Besides being a published writer—one of my stories was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2018—I have been a developmental book editor for over a decade. The clients who generally come to me are often quite good. However, more recently I joined the freelancer site “Upwork.” I feel good when I can offer these nascent writers solid, helpful feedback, both on their prose and on the reality of publishing, agents, query letters, etc. The problem I often encounter with many clients—and new writers in general—is that they aren’t serious authors-in-waiting. They generally want a fix-it-all edit, and they want it cheap, and they want it fast. Then they want to either get an agent and a major NYC publisher or else they think they’re going to self-publish on Amazon and it’s going to take off.

Of course most give up long before this point arrives. They never get that agent. They don’t self publish, or, far worse, they publish way too fast and put out shabby material that needs serious editing. (That’s anew trend I’ve seen as well: Self-publishing first, editing later after readers complain.) They get distracted by life. They get “busy.” Life happens. Marriage. Kids. Trips. Work. Etc. The stuff we all deal with. This is all normal. But it’s a reminder to me that there are many people writing things in the world, but there are very few writers. A writer—a true writer—is someone whose soul burns to sit down and pump prose; they can’t wait to do it as often as possible. In fact, really they HAVE to do it. It’s in their blood. They can’t not do it. Lord knows I tried many a time over the past decades to give up the ghost. People often read to me from the typical, cliché (and mostly true!) script: Don’t be a writer; do something that makes money.

And hey: Fair enough. Writing is almost certainly not going to make you rich. Most serious, ambitious writers do other work on the side, or else they are very, very unusual and lucky. It’s rare to make a living fulltime as a novelist, say. Decades ago the titans of the 20th century—Didion, Mailer, Updike, Sontag—could actually make a living doing writing. If you go back to the 19th century—before TV, before even radio—books were (shockingly to use now in our era of devices and distraction) the main forum for entertainment. Writers like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Dostoevsky, actually made a living doing what they couldn’t not do. But we are living in very different times now. Far fewer people read books than used to. Everyone is obsessed with the internet. YouTube, Substack, Facebook, etc. Online is the new reality. Americans are more interested in TiKToK videos than reading serious literature. (Can you sense my judgment and disappointment about this? And by the way: To some degree I am pointing out my own hypocrisy here. Yes. I am part of The Machine.)

Circling back to the craft of writing. You wouldn’t expect to watch a plumber do his job and suddenly know how to do it yourself. (There are YouTube videos but they only take you so far; at some point we call the plumber.) You wouldn’t observe a surgeon doing a heart-transplant and then be able to do that yourself. You couldn’t watch people running a marathon online and then, never having run in your life, do it yourself in real-time. So why do so many people think, after reading a book, Hey, I can do that! The truth: No, you most likely cannot do that. Sorry. But no. In our cultural moment of “everyone is a winner” (or “everyone is a writer”) I have to fervently disagree. If you’re a writer you will know it. No one will need to teach you how to think or what to do. I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t do that MFA program, or that you shouldn’t attend that writers’ conference, or that you shouldn’t take that class on “compelling voice.” And, by all means, if people in your life keep saying you have writing, talent: Please do nurture that skill; see where it takes you. What I am saying is, even if you do, if you don’t have the psychological makeup for the job, you’ll never be a writer, no matter how hard you try. Another way of saying this is: Respect writing. It’s known as The Subtle Craft. The best writers make writing look easy. But guess what: It’s not.

I don’t see this as a mean or judgmental axiom. I see it as realism. I am not and could never be a computer programmer. I’m terrible at math. I get far too impatient with computers when they do things I don’t understand. My father is a computer scientist, and his work confuses and baffles me. That doesn’t make me any less of a man or human being. Instead, I look for what drives me internally and always has. Writing. My mom is an author (Lori Mohr). My uncle is a novelist. Two cousins are writers. So it’s basically in my DNA. Growing up my mom read the classics to me at night while I sat on the couch and imagined conjured worlds produced by brilliant authors. I started reading young. I tried my hand at poetry as a kid. I picked up books like Doctor Zhivago from my mother’s library and tried to understand them when I was a little boy. Always, I had the disposition of a writer: Moody, deeply sensitive, contrarian, self-conscious, intense, very alive, intelligent, wounded, eager to unwrap some notion of Truth, desirous to see and feel everything. I wanted to grab life by the balls and GO! There was never any question in my mind that I was a writer. Destined to poor my soul out onto the white blank page.

I am bad at a lot of things. Like I said, I suck at math. (That’s putting it lightly.) I don’t understand the more complex components of a car’s engine. I can’t climb Mount Everest. When I throw a Frisbee it goes badly. I probably don’t have a great chance in a fist-fight with someone who’s from the streets or has trained. I cannot comprehend quantum physics in it’s intricacies. But. I can write. That I can do. So I do it. Because it’s a part of who I am. It’s as unavoidable as eating food and drinking water to survive. I can’t not do it. All my life I have been drawn back to it again and again and again. My literary ambition knows no bounds. And there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of serious, driven writers around the nation just like me. Some of them have been commercially successful, some of them haven’t. Some of them will be one day, some will forever remain under the radar of media and the literary establishment.

But all these driven writers are one thing: They are artists.

Is it controversial to say that not everyone is an artist?