Why I Quit Trying to be a Writer

It began in 2020. We were all confused and home and wondering how to move on with life, I suppose. I was forty-four. The author that most made me want to write had her first book published when she was thirty-four. It felt far too late for me — not to ever succeed a little, but to begin something that could be called a career. Thirty-some agents had rejected or ignored my latest manuscript. It felt like my last attempt to apply for the job of my dreams at anything like a reasonable age to begin such a thing.

I set the manuscript aside after a fourth agent wrote to say the same thing three others had said, and I no longer considered the words subjective. It wasn’t their opinion that the book had fine writing without a compelling story; it was fact.

Next, I surprised myself and moved onto the next book — what will be my fourth manuscript — without spending more than a moment in the familiar despair of rejection. I had finally settled that writing is a thing I must do for my own sense of fully being in the world, but no one has to validate it. I would keep writing — I had no real choice in that — but the hope that I can ever write for a living is done.

It has to be.

Usually people write a piece like this when the next thing — after giving up on a dream — becomes clear. There are only a few things clear to me. The place writing will hold in my life — at least the place it will or will not hold in my legacy, in what I leave behind — is uncertain.

Do I keep writing novels? They say if you can stop, you should. Can I?

I don’t think so.

As much as I journal and blog and write things like this article, there is something else — something requiring a little more creative magic and hard work — that keeps me returning to fiction, to the attempt at telling stories since stories have been so meaningful to me.

This, I suppose, is what drove me to yet another how-to book on writing — a book by a successful, living writer. She wakes up to her own work every day, her computer, her ideas, the words she will try to put on paper. Her living depends on this rhythm, this returning to the words whether she feels like it or not — and that’s the story the book tells again and again.

I wake up to a time clock.

I punch it online. I do get to sit at my own desk in my own home — that’s a dream at least. I punch the clock, manage projects for eight hours, then punch out and try to summon the energy, discipline, and chutzpah to write a book that no one has asked for and no one cares if I finish.

We writers, the author of the how-to book would say — we writers can’t take holidays. We must find our writing rhythm and stick to it. We must go deeper. We must “spend it all” in the words of Annie Dillard. We must avoid adverbs but know when to use them, know the rules but dare to break them — all the things many books for writers have said.

It was the we writers that frustrated me. I’m not a writer like you, I wanted to say. Someone write me a book about being a writer beside the day job you have to keep. Someone, finally, tell me it’s okay to never find your rhythm — to dive in and out of a regular routine as life and the day job allow. I worked fifty-nine hours last week — it won’t happen every week, but it happened then. There was no writing routine beside that. There was no writing at all except in my head occasionally — maybe right before I fell asleep or in my dreams.

A friend wrote to me online — lunch, sometime? — and the next day in my reading, this writer who writes for a living said she never has lunch with a friend, that her day is “ruined” by conversation and laughter…the hours slipping away, her rhythm destroyed.

Do I want to be a writer if that is writing?

I think it’s time for writer how-to books and I to take a break. I no longer want to learn to write.

I want to learn to live.

Writing is sacred, Elizabeth Gilbert writes in Big Magic, and it is not sacred at all.

Writing feels sacred to me. I don’t do well when I abandon it for too long. But I will abandon it sometimes, and that has to be okay. If that means I never get to do it for a living, so be it. I don’t write for a living; I write to live. I write to see life. I write to play and imagine and wonder.

In 2020, I accepted the fact that life is the only story I get to tell no matter what. I’m not going to miss it because I am trying to be a thing I may never get to be.

I am no longer trying to be a writer.

I am a writer who is trying to be alive.

If there’s no love in it, it’s not life. In my view, connecting with others is not a distraction; it’s the point. Writing may be sacred and not sacred at all, but living is sacred always.

I need to go outside. I need cake pops occasionally and new clothes. If I can either write about a beautiful place or be there, I’ll take the latter.

Maybe I don’t want it enough. Maybe I should persist. Maybe the agent who would get my story was agent number forty, and I set the novel aside before I found her.

It doesn’t matter, really.

This is the story I am telling.

The least I can do is believe in it.