Essays like Dani Shapiro’s in the Los Angeles Times appear on my radar once a year or so.  They are packaged as well-intentioned advice from seasoned veterans (who happen to be releasing a new book) and while the writer sighs about the old days, the new days, the subtext is often daunting and discouraging to a new writer.  I know I won’t feel better after reading these essays, but do so anyway and I don’t let these works keep me down and you shouldn’t either.  Shapiro raises a lot of distractions that can play with your mind, and even derail you from writing and publishing for a few weeks.  We don’t have the kind of time and energy to waste, so here’s how to read this type of essay and survive.

To give you lots of power over what you’re about to read, come to the piece understanding whether you are the “the instant score” writer, an MFA student or post-graduate writer, or somewhere in between.  It doesn’t matter which one you are, just be ready to look at the writers she describes and say, “That’s not me,” or “OMG, that is totally me.”  Yes, it takes a long time to learn how to write (well) and cultivate a network to get your work noticed and published.  And ten years sounds about right.  This is what I was told at my MFA program and coincides with the 10,000 hour rule from Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers.” 

And I write anyway. 

Second, identify what you want your writing to do for you.  Do you want adoration, respect?  If so, from whom?  What is your criteria for success?  If money is a desired outcome, be clear and honest about the relationship between your writing and money, the risks you’re willing to take, the compromises you’ll accept, and the time you’re willing to commit. 

Shapiro calls upon the “miserable trifecta: uncertainty, rejection, and disappointment” to expand upon why the brilliant may have given up.  Newbies, look at me, don’t look at Shapiro.  This trifecta applies to everything in life, including writing.  If anyone’s life today is untouched by this trifecta, then they live in a bubble and heaven forbid, if they’re writers, they aren’t writing anything interesting.  Don’t get sucked into this pity party, it will not make you write better.  If you quit writing because of this trifecta, you’ll have to live with them in another context.  There is no escaping uncertainty, rejection, and disappointment in a grown-up world.   

Another problem with the piece is Shapiro’s loosely constructed non-example assumes a lot about doctors and lawyers after they graduate from school.  She might be surprised that writers don’t corner the market on suffering or debt.  She needs to do some research about how life after law school, med school, and business school panned out for these professions.

And speaking of professions.  Writing is a profession and as such, this means producing under any circumstances.  I was surprised by Shapiro’s question, “How, under these conditions can a writer take the risks required to create something original and resonant and true?”  I would never approach the vice-president at my day job with a question like this.  He would tell me to get back to work.  Professionals just get things done.

And, yes, Shapiro is absolutely right, it’s hard to get published. 

And your audience doesn’t care. 

As Jack Grapes tells his workshop, “No one walks into the bookstore and asks to buy the book that was hardest to write and get published.”  Keep your hands on the keyboard, your fingers wrapped around the pen and keep writing things that will move your readers.  Honor your commitment to yourself and your writing under the terms you defined at the beginning of this post.  Write on your terms not to someone else’s.  And even though writing is the hardest thing I do, I know why I stay and why I won’t give it up.  And you shouldn’t give up either.

I don’t remember exactly when I came to writing.  This part of my artistic history is fuzzy, without a logical path or series of connections.  I am not a lover of words or language.  My struggle with both of them humbles me.  But when I read good writing, I can feel it.  I don’t commit prose to memory even though I have been a lifelong reader since the age of four.

I do remember writing in a journal as a corporate frequent flier over ten years ago.  To this day, the sound of ice breaking in a plastic bag dropped repeatedly on the galley floor by the cabin crew makes me want to write.  As I collected miles, the travel changed me and I noted these observations, images, stories, so I could think about them later and understand them.  I didn’t know then that writing was a means.  I just flew, worked, listened, and wrote in the margins of my life – one word after another.

And that’s how I became a writer.

And why do I stay?

This is a fair question.  Today, I live in a busy city with a busy mind in a life with an overflowing inbox, a buzzing BlackBerry, and a long commute.  These and other distractions from writing are my life and I return to the blank page because I don’t understand something unless I’ve written about it.  This practice on the blank page sustains me, makes me laugh, stretches me, and fills in the gaps of my journey and experience.  Writing is for my mind like a deep breath is for my body.  My life without writing is only half-lived.