Want to Be the Best Writer You Can Be?
Then stop trying to be successful and remember why you do this
Why do you write?
It’s a question we rarely ask of ourselves. We write because we do.
But it’s worth thinking about seriously because within the answer lies the means of becoming the best writer you can be. As Rainer Maria Rilke, the great German poet, said to an acolyte, “You must seek for whatever it is that obliges you to write. You must discover if its roots reach down to the very depths of your heart.”
Because I’m willing to bet that what drives you to your keyboard has nothing really to do with being “successful.” It has nothing to do with refreshing your stats page on Medium. It has nothing to do with the pleasure of making money with your words.
I think Paul Kingsnorth has said it best.
“Nobody writes for money, power, fame or sex, none of which writing is likely to get you anywhere near, at least for long. It’s the blazing — the burning. It’s the intensity of being: of love, of sorrow, joy, grief, brokenness, loss. It’s the aching of all that is short and will soon be washed away. You have your one, brief, tiny life. You have your pen. Can you convey the heat of it?”
That might sound a bit much, but if you look deep enough, you will find that Kingsnorth is right.
That being said, I rarely feel the burning when I write. Usually, it’s the opposite — it’s a chilly glacial grind towards completing something I think might have some appeal, encouraged by the hope that people will read it and approve. And that’s a real shame because when I’m thinking like this I inevitably find myself dampened and uninspired.
Medium, for all its virtues, actively discourages burning and incentives glacial grinding. We often have an outcome in mind — to have the article curated and widely read — and if this doesn’t happen, then the writing has “failed.” So, to increase our chances of success, we find ourselves writing in a certain way — offering solutions to problems, or dangling alluring headlines that promise readers that something unmissable is to be found within.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, and clearly we’re always going to hope our work is widely read. But when we’re chasing stats and affirmation, we’re stifling our true writer’s spirit. When we lose touch with our burning, we lose any chance of being at our best. The best writing rarely comes in a neat package with a ribbon on top — it’s found in messy struggle and in the desperate attempt to name things that allude naming.
When we try to become a successful writer, we often find ourselves contorting our truth to be pleasing or interesting. Unwieldy but fiery thoughts are unconsciously dismissed before they can germinate, as our success-striving brain looks only for ideas that can be marketed easily or slotted into pre-existing conversations. Isn’t that a tragedy? How much brilliance is lost every day through this process of unconscious thought-murder?
As Annie Dillard wrote,
“Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people.”
In a digital age, writers are blessed. We have infinite opportunities for expression, but we’re also cursed , confronted as we are by continual glimpses of ourselves in the storefront window of statistics and comments.
Dillard encourages us to be innocent. She defines innocence as, “the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.” By being innocent, we stop trying to answer questions before we’ve asked them. We’re present with the reality before us, able to see through everything that seeks to cloud our vision. Much of what we’re taught imperils our innocence, but as Dillard wrote, “It is not lost to us; the world is a better place than that. Like any other of the spirit’s good gifts, it is there if you want it, free for the asking.”
The truth is that the only way to be the best writer you can be is to unmoor your art from aspiration. It’s the precise reason that so many now celebrated authors were penniless and ignored during their lifetimes. Look at British novelist DH Lawrence, who wrote as no one had written before, or has since, and lived the rootless life of an exile. As Paul Kingsnorth said of him, “He could feel the old mystery quivering in every thread of his body and he was bold and suicidal enough to say so to an audience of frightened twentieth-century cynics, and they never let him forget it.”
You may be thinking, “I don’t care if I’m not a great artist! I just want people to like my writing!”, which is indeed where I find myself most of the time. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be both a writer and not totally penniless! But, we should be mindful that in chasing this dream we are likely going to contort or ignore what we really have to offer. Beneath our rationalisations we writers are all driven by the compulsion to wrangle with our stupid, beautiful truths, and it’s a tragedy to repress that compulsion — it has the potential to take us on important journeys along roads less travelled.
And, without wanting to sound too grandiose, if we’re able to choose innocence over aspiration we’re in a position to offer an intensely valuable service to our species. We’re living in a time when many old certainties are being pulled apart, replaced instead by rough new questions — a process of philosophical unravelling that is only going to quicken over the next century. As our species grasp around for new stories, writers that can pursue truth in innocence are going to do much to help us rebuild our understanding of reality and our place within it.
So, my conclusion is this. The practicalities of life being what they are, there’s nothing wrong with us trying to be “successful.” But, every now and then, I hope we have the bravery to forget about the practicalities and to write in innocence, with our fire burning brightly in our chests. Because, when all is said and done, that is the reason we sit down at our keyboards at all.
