Do Not Let This World Cause Your Steps to Falter
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.
