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Writing is dying a bit every day, dying to your old self and watching that butterfly pupa squirm in its translucent cocoon to get out.
There are several levels to writing, as for anything else.
It can be a professional skill, for example, that you use to earn a living and survive the elements. I did it for twenty-two years as a technical writer producing user manuals. Met great people, fed my family, and did public good along the way. Nothing to regret there.
There is then the middle level where, as an ambitious would-be writer, you are lunging straight for the rewards (money and fame) and sniffing the air like a wolf searching for its prey.
The third level is when you realize fame and fortune and adoring masses of readers are not yours to be. That’s when you either fall back onto the second level of hoping and waiting… or you charge ahead with more fire than ever and start to write only for yourself.
On the first level there is no comparing yourself with the other writers. There’s no need to flatter yourself for a cause that doesn't exist.
On the second level all you do is comparing yourself with the other writers and burning with indignation and envy.
But on the third level, you again relax back to not comparing yourself with anyone else, this time for a destination that cuts to the bone.
They say the goal of life is to find yourself.
Not true, since the Self is not an object that you can find like a pair of lost socks.
The Self is built, nurtured, enabled. It ends up being what you make it to be.
On the first level, who you are is the last thing in your mind. You are a wordsmith, a curator, a crafts person hammering out words for a paycheck.
The second level is choked with the daily madness of finding-the-Self project. You pose, watch your profile in the mirror, strut like a peacock, and wonder when your ship will come in. A lot of sleepless nights is the common experience of keyboard cowboys at this stage.
On the last level, you are amazed at what’s showing up as you remove the crud and dirt from the top layer of your still-buried Stonehenge.
The thrill of at long last coming face to face with this familiar stranger is so delicious that you start to write your best stuff even when no one is reading.
You first remind yourself how famous authors were also rejected countless times before they had their breakthrough and became famous. But even that is a symptom of second-level writing.
In true third-level writing you are swept away with your own current even though you suspect there might be many waterfalls ahead as you become more vulnerable. You hear the roar of the falling water. You are half scared but also half ready, at long last.
Vulnerability becomes the testimony to the life you are gifted with. It becomes your shoulder-wide path to truth fit for only one person.
A candle burns brighter as it consumes itself
We all have traumas but we bury them.
Usually the things that are really worth talking about are never spoken. Subtext never sees the light of the day and is covered with a concrete slab of daily drivel (How are you? Fine, how about you?).
There is one level of writing where you take baby steps to the edge of the hell hole that you know you have to get across. Your traumas, your childhood, all the slights, disappointments and insults, the love of your life who left you for someone else, are all boiling down there in the red hot cauldron of yesterday.
If you stay on the first level of writing, you’ll never get across. You won’t even remember to get across.
It’s only on the last level of writing with no merchandise returns that you start to understand not only what others did to you, but also what you did to them.
Your world expands throbbing from its sutures which is inescapable at this stage of growth. Without pain there is no atonement, no redemption, no rehabilitation.
If you hide your vulnerability and write only safe topics pandering to the prime anxiety of not making a fool of yourself, you run the risk of falling back to the first level of insignificance even after years of devotion to your craft.
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Find a day job if you must.
A lot of brilliant writers held daytime jobs for years while writing like an earthquake in the evenings and weekends. John Grisham (plumber’s assistant), Kurt Vonnegut (salesman at a Saab dealership), and Charles Bukowski (USPS employee) comes to mind.
Harper Lee was an airline ticket inspector.
William Faulkner was a fourth-class postmaster in Oxford, Mississippi, making $1,500 a year.
J. D. Salinger worked for years as a cruise ship activities director.
Franz Kafka was a legal clerk before becoming the co-owner of an asbestos factory.
But don’t allow your writing leave you in the middle of the crossing. Whether anyone reads or not, your art is your only hope of salvation in this busy world.
When you are at long last at peace with who you became in understanding and wisdom through your third-level writing, you’ll feel that those years of scribbling away in total anonymity were all worth it.
That’s when, for the first time in your life, you’ll be Home.
Ugur, Your three phases of writing touch home. I also agree with your analysis that to get better, one has to get more vulnerable. Thanks for sharing your insights. D