Should You Be A Writer?
A quiz (After the obligatory article. Which is awesome.)
“Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god, you’re alive, and it’s spectacular.” —Joseph Campbell
People will tell you not to be a writer. Sometimes they’re authors, themselves. Sometimes they’re smart, but, darling, they’re wrong.
Of course, the writing process, let alone becoming an author, is not all sunshine on vampires. Like, do you know how many people with MFAs in creative writing are forced to swan-dive down the undulating gullet of a life-long “normal” job like a sacrifice into a volcano? I carefully haven’t checked, but anecdotally, the answer is in the muffled weeping of grads everywhere.
I’m still getting my MFA. I work a day job for now, and the nightmare-level knowledge that people spend their lives doing this even though they share with me that visceral, burning desire for something more haunts the hours from 8 to 5. I go a little weird when I focus on it too much. Like, “take two weeks off for my mental health” weird. Not that I can afford to. Ordinary jobs pay shit, especially for my generation. (I’m a millennial. We spent our just-got-a-bachelors years fighting for employment gladiator-style in the Arby’s parking lot. It takes time to climb into office work from there. And office work when you don’t care about the company’s mission? Is very. Very. Boring.)
Well-meaning, worried parental figures eyed my artistic tendencies and affirmed that following them seriously would be challenging. Then they gave me that worried Boomer look that no other generation has been able to match. I was young, scared, and there was no work anywhere, so I listened and tried to be as conventionally responsible as I could.
Conventional responsibility is not where my talents lie.
My coworkers and acquaintances seemed, if not content, then resigned, or painfully bitter. They could maintain. I couldn’t. Something in me hurt almost all the time, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, but constant. I ached to get up from my desk chair, walk out the office door, and leave. But if I walked out the office door the only “different” I’d get would be worse. Those days, I didn’t write much in my off time. But the words, the identity, the want for stories, all of that was there, as constant as the hurt. Do I need to include the caveat that others have it worse? Many do. But those who’d criticize me for these feelings have no idea what my real story is, and I have no intention of telling them.
Here’s my only advice. If you are a writer, be a writer. Build your life around it, even if you have to fool your boss into thinking you live for your day job and your 20 minute bathroom breaks are due to IBS and not you writing a manuscript in the Docs app on your phone. I won’t lie. Writing can be wretched in all its haunted beauty. It splits you open while it heals you up. It’s reveals you to yourself, and makes you naked to the world.
So, yeah! The quiz!
Should You Be a Writer?
Question 1: Do you enjoy either writing or having written?
Answers: Y/N
Question 2: Are you willing to take criticism without descending to the pits of hell for vengeance against those who would speak against your *genius*? (This can be a work in progress. Plenty of early writers have stood at the crossroads and made dark deals. Looking at you, Earnest.)
Answers: Y/N
Question 3: Do you promise not to be that guy in the MFA program who thinks he’s smarter than every professor combined?
Answers: Y (There is no other acceptable answer.)
Key:
I know, it’s a mystery what the answers will indicate! If you want to be a writer, then enjoying the writing process is probs good.
Any answer other than, “I already signed a pact in blood, and the devil said no takesies-backsies,” and you’ve got an A-OK from me.
That guy, man. I have to burn sage after reading his comments.
If you love something, go after it. I believe in you. It’ll be hard, but so is everything, and it’s still fucking incredible.
