I am here for all you motherfuckers
that never made it onto the 30 under 30 list and are still secretly
not okay about that. I see you who got to be the responsible one with
all that entails, or who just got dealt bad cards and now you’re
taking care of kids or parents or siblings or hell maybe all of them
and when you rush into the coffeeshop because you’re already late
doing things for someone else you see all the young faces in there
tapping away at their macbooks and you think, I used to write. You
can still. There is no expiration date. I am here for you who started
100 stories and haven’t finshed one yet. You will. Keep walking.
I am here for you, who did the things
everyone said you should and are now washed up on the far shore with
a dull ache in your chest and the lurking worry that you are so far
from where you wanted to be. I am here for Raymond Chandler, who
didn’t even start writing fiction until he was 44. I am here for
Annie Proulx, who wrote short stories for 30 years before getting her
first novel published when she was 57. I am here for all of you that
will never see your stories published, and I am here for those of you
that will and have your heart broken when they do not sell. I see you
looking out the side of your eyes at other people’s lives, lives
where bodies don’t hurt, that don’t seem to involve bills or shitty
jobs or just having to give and give and give of yourself to others
until there’s nothing left for you except that old composition book
by the bed that you haven’t picked up in a week.
I am here for you freelancers where
every day is a new war; I am here for you day-jobbers where it’s all
the same old battle and then family at night and you’re too tired to
work on the story and all you want to do is watch TV. I see you and I
want you to know that you’re okay. That we all fight this battle in
different ways, and I know you’re doing the best you can. Living is
hard. Creating is harder. I am here for you on the weeks you write
zero words and the weeks you only write 500 and the weeks it all
flows out of you like salt water and you’ve written 10,000. I see you
when you look back over it and wonder if any of it is any damn good
at all. Keep it. It’s good. Keep going. You can edit when you are
done.
I am here for you when the work is too
raw, too personal, and you lay down your pencil in fear of what
people will think. Writing is an act of opening, of empathy, of love.
It is an act, above all, of hope. It traffics in feelings we are too
scared to show in our public lives, and that is one of the great
consolations of fiction: it reassures us that others feel like this,
too. Do not shy away from these emotions; embrace them. Cause
them. It is the greatest thing you can do with your pen: make
people feel. Creating is a strange, teetering walk between a
terrifying self-criticism, and not giving a damn what anyone else
thinks. Go too far one way and you will never finish; go too far the
other and what you finish will never improve. Listen to the whispers
in your mind about the weaknesses in your work, but do not let them
shout.
I see those of you waiting for
permission to begin. Waiting to afford a course or read that How to
Write book or improve your grammar or find a publisher or even just
some assurance that your story is worth hearing in an industry
dominated by loud people who don’t look or sound like you. I hereby
give you permission: please begin. You need nothing more than a cheap
notebook and a pencil and the contents of your beautiful, unique,
experienced mind. We’re all faking it; we all stepped off the cliff
and learned to fly on the way down. We’re still faking it every damn
day. It looks scary but I promise you: you will fly. There is
craft to learn but it can come later, once you’re flushed with the
habit of putting words on paper as often as you can. Please begin.
You have a voice that is made only the sweeter for being heard. You
have a story that is all the richer for waiting.
I see you who begin over and over
again, and then become tired or frustrated or stuck. I want you to
forgive yourself. I want you to let this be fun. You don’t have to
be fancy. You don’t have to be literary. You don’t have to write the
Great American Novel straight off the starting blocks. Be silly.
Write smut. Write sci-fi. Write a sonnet. Put the big
story aside. If you keep writing, the problems in the big works tend
to unknot themselves on their own. It can take years, but one day
you’ll be working on something else and have an extra scene and
realise that’s what the old story needed all along, and all the
pieces will cascade into place with a simplicity and a beauty that
will stun you. Or maybe that old work will be the one lending scenes
and moments to a newer, more confident story. Keep writing. Be
excited for endings. Writing a great ending is one of the most
satisfying creative experiences in existence.
I am here for you writing at midnight
once everyone else is asleep, for you alt-tabbing away at work to a
Google doc with a tenuous few sentences, for you tapping notes on the
subway, for you just telling stories in your own head that you hope
you’ll find time to write down later. I am here for you daydreamers
and dawdlers and misfits, finding yourself on the page one difficult
mark at a time. Whether your notebook holds poetry, cartoons, short
stories, novels, fanfic, comics, essays, autobio, or anything else,
the way you express yourself is valid and worthwhile. Do not hold
yourself to popular forms; hold yourself only to your heart’s
desires. You will probably never make money out of this so you might
as well make yourself happy. Move towards joy, but know that there is
also work. Do not be afraid of the work. Do not be worried about
critics; once the story leaves your hands it begins a life of its
own, apart from and no longer beholden to you. And you won’t mind to
set this delicate paper ship onto the cold and contrary sea of
opinion, because you’ve already started on a new one.
I am here for you. There is no too late
or too early. There is only now.
It is time to begin.
The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.
At work, the good adult has problems too. As a child, they follow the rules; never make trouble and take care not to annoy anyone. But following the rules won’t get you very far in adult life. Almost everything that’s interesting, worth doing or important will meet with a degree of opposition. A brilliant idea will always disappoint certain people – and yet very much be worth holding on to. The good child is condemned to career mediocrity and sterile people-pleasing.
The charges that lay before the organizers of the Women’s Strike are that they privilege only those women who can afford not to work. They charge that the strike is somehow antifeminist because many if not most women cannot participate because so few can afford to risk their employment or their family’s wellbeing by opting out for a day.
This can be a completely valid critique but what does that actually say? Are people making this critique to impugn the organizers as antifeminist, elitist, racist, ableist, or whatever because they didn’t figure out a way to make sure everyone Capitalism is crushing could participate? Or are they pointing out exactly why such a strike needed to happen in the first place so that millions of women (and men) might realize how impossible it is for women to take one fucking Wednesday off without everyone losing their shit?
People asked me if I had known the war was coming — I did, I’d say, I just didn’t know I did, because my mind refused to accept the possibility that the only life and reality I had known could be so easily annihilated. I perceived and received information but could not process it and convert it into knowledge, because the mind could not accept the unimaginable, because I had no access to an alternative ontology.
For me, the symptom of that experience is a constant traumatic alertness, a terrible, exhausting need to pay attention to everything and everybody and not succumb to the temptation of comforting interpretation. As Bosnians say: “If you were bitten by snakes, you’re afraid of lizards.” Trauma makes everything abnormal, but the upside is that living with and in a mind where nothing appears normal or stable is the best antidote to normalization.
A bonus reward is a kind of retroactive alertness, which allows the previously normal past to be seen as utterly abnormal — nothing could ever again be the way it used to be. Or, in our banal, political terms: Trump is as American as apple pie; Obama’s hope was but a hit of pot that got us high and detached for a while; Trumpists were always here, and we didn’t see or take that presence seriously; the field of culpability encompasses, well, just about everybody; this has always been a capitalist country first, a democracy second; “the great American experiment” had no chance of success because it never really got going, etc.
There is no choice, in other words, other than owning a split mind that would probe and test America, all of its parts, all of its lies, all of us. “Reality” has finally earned its quotation marks. This is a consequence of an unimaginable catastrophe, to be sure, but a good writer should never let a good catastrophe go to waste. The necessary thing to do is to transform shock into a high alertness that prevents anything from being taken for granted — to confront fear and to love the way it makes everything appear strange.
“To write in and of America, we must be ready to lose everything, to recognize we never had any of it in the first place, to abandon hope and embrace struggle, to fight in the streets and in our sentences”
