My Relationship To Writing
I’ve always hated writing and I’ve always been bad at it. But I can’t stop writing even though it makes me no money and eats away at my sanity, and whenever I’m doing it, I’m constantly reminded of how much I hate it, and how I’ve always been so bad at it. And I hate reading because I hate writing, because when I’m reading I’m simply not writing. I’m happy when I can justify doing things that are not writing, which, these days, pretty much only involves coding or brushing my teeth and wiping my ass. During the happiest and sanest periods of my life, I found justification to not write anything at all.
I am pathologically dependent on writing because I have a parasitic relationship to language. Writing was not an outlet, an expression—it was work. Writing well became a drive, a base desire. I need to write good as badly as most men need sex. I never took a single creative writing class because I think the workshop format is a joke. I would only take workshop from an abusive, Whiplash-esque professor, and none of them were that. To become a better writer you need to read better writers, not equivalent-or-worse writers with the same narrow fields of vision as you. If you are putting fresh shit on the table, other people shouldn’t be going, “I think this shit smells really interesting and is bravely shaped, but I have some concerns about the food it was digesting, which, again, I think I'm more so posing as a question about the way your intestines are organically shaped than a critique of your digestive abilities,” they should be going, “I have seen a lot of shit in my life and this is the worse shit I’ve ever seen and you should probably never shit where I can see it again, so help me god.”
Nobody hates reading and writing more than I do, but I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Though I’ve been reading and writing since before I learned to walk, it simply gets harder, not easier, every year. Learning to read and write better only makes reading and writing more difficult. You learn about more ways to deploy your attention, more things to look out for, more ways to make sense. In learning to write better you always learn about more things to consider and more methods of balance. And after all these years, I’m already so old, and I’m still so bad.
The first few actual bylines I had, I was lucky enough to have friends who lambasted me over text about where I did wrong. Good; I’m thankful. In college I took multiple classes with two professors who’d give me Bs and Cs in the English department (and I’d gladly finish English courses with B-s or Cs even though it’s almost unheard of) because they’d tell me where I went wrong. I needed to stop saying “reify” in essays and stop using mixed metaphors in poetry. I needed to “de-Spivakify my writing,” that is, to stop hiding behind big words and complex sentence structures.
Turns out all I needed to fix that was to work a year in a real white collar job, during which a summer intern from Princeton asked me if I concentrated in reading or writing for my English degree. When I visited my advisor a year out of college he said, "I don't mean to say this to offend you, but out of all my students in the past two years, I didn't expect YOU to be seriously writing and supporting yourself too." That says everything you need to know about my talent and ability. The fact that I'm still doing requires either delusion or compulsion of the highest degree.
And I can gladly tell you it's the latter. I don’t care about any writing advice except the five questions I always ask about writing:
- Is it good?
- Is it new?
- Is it fun?
- Is it interesting?
- Is it working?
Because I’m really trying to answer one question: do I care? And most of the time I don’t, even though I read so widely that it takes very little to make me care.
When I meet new people, I don’t mention writing at all. I avoid meeting people who write. If they have a book and it’s good, it drives me insane. If they have a book and it’s bad, it drives me insane. If they don’t have a book, if they’re bad or good, it also drives me insane. If they’re older or younger, insane. Whatever gender, nationality, background, drives me insane. Whatever level of more precarious or less precarious than me, and you do need precarity to be a good writer, drives me insane all the same. The more writers I meet, the more I’m convinced that there are already so many people writing that there is no reason for me to write. People have finite attention. I am very good at doing things other than writing. And worse, there is virtually nobody out there to write for.
I think you should always write in public because if you deserve recognition, then you also deserve humiliation. Writing in a Substack is bad because it’s just you; on the contrary, in a magazine, when you see your name next to a bunch of other really good writers, you can see how much you suck, and so you can get better. Also, people have finite attention. Every moment someone is reading your Substack or Google Docs or PDF is a moment they are not reading a Public Medium. If you stand behind those private Texts as a piece of Your Writing (unless it’s a senseless rant like this one or something you've already written that an outlet didn't take), you are essentially doing what OnlyFans does to sex except—wait, sex sells, but your writing doesn’t. You should never expect to make money from your writing. Grow up and get another job. People shouldn’t be professional writers anyway; people working all sorts of jobs should be writers. If you have something to say, share it with the class.
You should try to write for outlets because I believe you will only get better through edits. I got free education from every editor who worked with me on my pieces. It’s not really different from playing violin or basketball or dancing; when someone gives you a note on a piece it’s a gentle way of saying don’t do that again, and you develop muscle memory, and you get better. I can’t justify submitting poetry and fiction to most literary magazines because 1) you don’t receive edits, 2) no one reads them; and if 1 or 2 doesn’t apply it’s likely that the time spent getting a submission into that magazine is better spent on writing, so you can get better.
When younger alumni visit me I say, “if you have friends who have dreams in this area, send them to me, I’ll talk them out of it.” Writing has given me nothing except pain: I hate it, and I’m bad at it, and I have no fame, no money, no hoes, no swag, no juice, no sauce, it makes me sad, neurotic, obsessive, and yet it seems to be the only thing I know to do with my time. It seems incredibly ludicrous to continue when I have more profitable skills and I enjoy doing those things more.
And when they ask how I stay engaged after college, I answer it’s just work. You have to choose this over other things you can do. I write in my notes app, wherever, all the time. Some days I stay up till 3, 4 to write. Some days I wake up at 6, 7 to write. I read every single day without any exception. When I wake up on a Saturday, the first thing I think about is getting 8000 words down today. I know my friends are relaxing, hanging out, doing other stuff, and sometimes I do that too, but I know that this stuff compounds. Five Saturdays spent writing is five Saturdays developing an instinct and a habit and getting better and becoming more driven because I got better. Five Saturdays not writing is losing the drive to write altogether.
Some people have this drive more than I do, work harder than I do, and yet they are so bad that I wish they never wrote anything in the first place. Some people have a career and will still never be good or relevant or have anything to say. I only hope I’m not one of them. Some people probably have a better time reading and writing because they are not a hater like me, but I am only a hater because I am a lover, and being a lover, I care about this, even though I don’t want to. And I will keep going until I am good.