There is a poem by Sean Thomas Doughtery that I’ve seen repeatedly shared on Instagram and other online writing circles. It is called “Why Bother” and it simply reads:
Because right now there is someone
Out there with
a wound in the exact shape
of your words.
This is not a post discussing the intent or meaning of this poem. Its application on social media is meant to be motivational, a way to encourage fellow writers or yourself to keep at it. Keep writing. Writing is a time-consuming practice and apart from a small minority of professional writers, most people who do it have other jobs that take up the majority of their days. They fit writing into their free time, their family time, their TV time. They turn down social invitations and rearrange their schedules, waking early or staying up late to fit in writing wherever they can. And they do all of this for very little gain. The odds of success by any generally accepted measure of success are very small. The act of writing is often hard and frustrating, and the effort to get published is mostly demoralizing. I once described the submission and querying process to my husband as being like if every time you tried to make a new friend, you instead got punched in the face. You tamp down your vulnerability, gather up your courage and introduce yourself, but instead of the start of a beautiful friendship, you get a face full of fist. And when you recover from that hit, you have to get up and do it again with someone new and repeat the whole horrible process. After enough times of being punched in the face, it would be reasonable to wonder if you’re simply not meant to have friends and you should maybe go ahead and just give up that dream.
So why bother writing? Why take the repeated hits? Because the world needs your words, we are told. Because somewhere out there is a person “with a wound in the exact shape” of those words and they need you to keep going. Someone needs the story that only you can tell.
No they don’t. Or maybe they do, but who cares? What are the odds that your specific words are ever going to reach this hypothetical person in need? There is an endless supply of things to read and most of it will go largely unseen. The author Linda Holmes wrote an essay called “The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything,” way back in 2011 and it has stuck with me since I first read it over a decade ago. In it she writes:
The vast majority of the world's books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It's just numbers.
Consider books alone. Let's say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That's quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let's say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you're 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you're 80. That's 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.
Let's do you another favor: Let's further assume you limit yourself to books from the last, say, 250 years. Nothing before 1761. This cuts out giant, enormous swaths of literature, of course, but we'll assume you're willing to write off thousands of years of writing in an effort to be reasonably well-read.
Of course, by the time you're 80, there will be 65 more years of new books, so by then, you're dealing with 315 years of books, which allows you to read about 20 books from each year. You'll have to break down your 20 books each year between fiction and nonfiction – you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory ... I hope you weren't planning to go out very much.
You can hit the highlights, and you can specialize enough to become knowledgeable in some things, but most of what's out there, you'll have to ignore.
As writers, we’re not screaming into a void. We’re screaming into a wall of sound and praying that by some miracle, ours are the words that break through. Meanwhile, that person who is desperately waiting for your words? Either their wound has continued growing such that your words will no longer be enough to fill it, or they’ve found another way to help it scab over. I think you can let yourself off the hook.
I’m not trying to suggest that writing doesn’t matter, I just think the only reason to do it is because it matters to you, and not because it matters in some larger global sense. Do it because you like it and because you want to. Because it challenges you or it fills you up, or it lets you escape yourself for a while. The most common writing advice you see is to write every day. Even if it’s just a little bit, every day should include some amount of writing. Why? Is there anything else you do every single day apart from eat, sleep, and use the bathroom?
I tend to set a writing schedule for myself because I want to dedicate the time and it can be too easy to let other concerns and responsibilities creep in and get in the way of writing. But during that writing time, whether or not I actually write depends entirely on my mood. Sometimes I work on something new, sometimes I fiddle with an old draft, sometimes I am firmly in revision mode, but there are other times when I don’t feel like doing any of that and I sit and read instead. I think about writing. Jot down a couple loose story ideas or a random line that sounds good in my head but is only just fine on paper. I’ve stopped telling myself, you should be writing. I write when I want to. Luckily, I find that most of the time I do still want to write. But over the past year I’ve more frequently hit stretches where I’m just not that into it, and I’ve given myself permission to let it go and wait for when the urge returns at some point in the future, which it always does eventually.
My husband plays the guitar and the piano. He’s played both for most of his life and is particularly skilled at playing by ear. Let him hear a song once and he’ll start picking it up within a couple of minutes of sitting down at the keys. But he also likes to compose little pieces of his own. When he started working from home during the pandemic, he would often grab his guitar throughout the day and fiddle around between meetings, writing short little songs. “What is that?” I would ask him every time I heard him playing, wondering if it was something I should recognize and he would shrug and say it was just something he was making up in the moment. I am not musical so I find this skill baffling. I’m sorry, the music comes to you as you go along, the ways words come when I’m writing a story? I simply cannot comprehend thinking in music.
Many nights, when it is my turn to put our son to bed, I will come downstairs to find my husband seated at the piano with the headphones plugged in so that only he can hear what he is playing (it’s an electric piano if that wasn’t obvious). He looks so at peace in these moments, lost in his own world, playing only for himself. It’s a creative outlet that exists solely for his own pleasure. He’s not planning to record any of these pieces. He doesn’t need to share them with anyone else. Any dreams he may have once held of being a professional musician have long since been abandoned, and not because he tried and failed and had to slink away friendless and bloodied, but because that’s not the purpose music holds in his life. He plays because he likes playing. He does it just for himself. How lovely!
During the first year of the pandemic, I wrote obsessively, in a frenzy. In a way, I had more time than usual because my job couldn’t be done remotely so I had to shut down my business, but in reality I had way less time because my son, who had just turned three when the pandemic started, was home with me all day, every day and only took one short nap in the morning. But I filled every available second with writing. I sat him in front of the TV longer than I otherwise might have just to create a little more time to write. I needed the outlet, a way to release my pent-up anxiety and frustration, and to break free of the monotony of days where we couldn’t go anywhere or see anyone. But more than that, I think I was afraid of dying. What if I got covid and died and all that I left behind was a life that didn’t feel like it had amounted to very much? I needed to write and I needed to be published so that some piece of me could exist beyond the walls of my own home. So someone could point to my work and say, ah yes, Claire lived and this is what she had to say.
You need a healthy dose of ego to believe your words are worth reading. And an even healthier dose to keep on believing it after your inbox has filled with agents and editors telling you sorry, but they have to disagree. But more than that, I think you have to learn to see the value and significance of your life that exist independently from what you create for other people’s consumption. Write because writing helps you live, not because someone out there needs your words and will remember them long after you’ve died.
My father has been a writer for most of his life. His writing is primarily academic, but he’s spent some time writing fiction and poetry. He always has a project going. Always something he is working on. We’ve had a lot of conversations over the years about writing and ambition, about thwarted dreams. He tells me about how he’d like to have some collection of writing to leave behind. Something he can pass along to his kids and grandkids. We all want to go on living in some way, even after we’re gone. I’m sure I would find a collection of his writing to be a comfort, something I could return to again and again, and hear his voice in my head as I read it. Losing my dad would leave me with a wound that is shaped in a way that truly only his words could fill. And yet they wouldn’t be enough, not even close, to replace the experience of actually knowing him and they’d be a poor substitute for my own memories. A stranger could come along and read everything my dad has ever written and they still wouldn’t know what he looks like on the occasions when he laughs so hard he can’t breathe, or how free and easily he moves when he dances with my mother, or the way his face scrunches up when he falls asleep while reading, his pencil still suspended in the air, waiting to make a note in the margin of a book.
Whenever I find myself tempted by the idea that if I can amass enough publications, leave enough of myself in print, I’ll be able to live on in some small way after I’m gone, I try to remind myself of how peaceful my husband looks when he strums the guitar, how at ease my son is when he sets marker to paper and the image in his mind spills out onto a page. It is so beautiful to watch someone doing something they love. And it is so wonderful to give yourself over to something you love to do regardless of whether anyone else will ever see it, regardless of whether anyone else needs it, or will be made better by it, made whole. Do it simply because you want to, because it makes your life better. Do it entirely for yourself.