Writing isn’t a thing you do
… it’s how you do it.
This is a little notion I’ve been playing around with for a while. It seems that, more than with most careers, a lot of people who “want to be writers” don’t actually enjoy writing. I didn’t used to enjoy writing, myself. Mr. Improbable does enjoy it, although he’s never defined himself primarily as a writer.
People get hung up about writing in a way that they don’t seem to about other crafts or professions. I’m not saying there aren’t lawyers who hate their jobs sometimes, or musicians who get creatively stuck, or pastry chefs who are delusional about their career prospects. You find dysfunctionality, individual or structural, in all jobs. It does seem, though, that ambitions to write lead to peculiarly tortured relations with one’s calling.
I’ve given advice to writers before, and here’s my new take on it: stop defining yourself as a writer. Think of yourself as an X who writes, instead. Writing isn’t a thing you do, it’s how you do it. We happen to live in a culture that practices writing. If you didn’t live in such a culture, what would you be doing?
Telling stories?
Explaining how things work?
Making moral judgments and rules?
Investigating wrongdoing?
Would you be the jester or the shaman, the explorer or the teacher?
Whatever you would be, that’s what you are. Writing is only how you’re doing it.
Part of what’s made me enjoy writing more than I ever have is that blogging has helped me understand what I’m actually doing when I write. I don’t tell stories. I start conversations. And I teach. And I try to figure out the world around me, and let you watch while I’m doing it, because maybe you’ll notice something I missed.
If you’re a writer, or want to be–what are you using your writing for? What are you, really?
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What about those of us who hate writing and DON’T want to be writers only nobody will let us stop?
[...] saw this article by Robin Abrahams linked to on a loop and it’s got me thinking. Would you be the jester or [...]
I think you’re onto something here. What you say would explain my taste for writing by doctors (Gawande, Groopman); builders (Witold Rybczynski); chefs and gardeners; and ministers (Barbara Brown Taylor).
Of course, there’s writing talent there, too, and I don’t mind if Tracy Kidder, e.g., swims alongside on any of those subjects and does the actual writing, but these subjects offer me a promise that the story will not end.
I’m at the moment, two days before my self-imposed monthly deadline, when I hate to write. But I know I be glad to have written; and I can expect a moment when I couldn’t stand to be doing anything else. I’ll be caught up in the drive to make the book reviewI send out as good as it can be.
I promise myself a treat in the form of cryptic crosswords that a couple of people put out, coincidentally on the first of every month, just for the joy of it; and I remember my audience, fifty or sixty people who will see my piece in their mailbox, and send me a good thought. These are people who would buy me lunch, or cook me dinner–indeed, four of them did one or the other on my last vacation–so this is just my little contribution to the cultural potluck.
Mostly, I think, I’m a reader who writes; it’s awfully nice to do it in the gift economy.