The Reasonable Expectations of a Creative Life
I think a lot about being “right-sized,” and I think a lot about living in the multiple registers. I’ve been thinking and talking with other creatives about tall poppy syndrome. I’ve been thinking (ongoingly) about what it means to live the creative life. The how of it the why. I’ve been thinking about how everything we mull over has the backdrop of the world. The events of the world.
You’d think by now that with 10+ books in I’d have the balance figured out, you’d think I’d have more bills paid, you’d think I’d be a shoe-in. You’d think I’d have learned to be more elegant, to have and give more grace.
I worked a lot of things through in my book The Flower Can Always Be Changing, about what the writing/creative life is, what it gives and what it takes. I thought I was good. (You know, like in SpongeBob, I’m good, I’m good, I’m goooood, don’t worry we’ll buff out those scratches). Well, then the pandemic. And maybe that meant that the flower fucking changed again and a lot and more than we know or want to know. Of course it did.
The writing life was never just one thing. There are so many ways to be a writer, to navigate as a writer in the world. The writing is still really just the writing though. You sit. You open. You daydream. You hope. You rage. You shut down. Open again. You continue. Sometimes you just fucking quit. (Sorry about all the swearing but I watched Ted Lasso and I’m Roy Kent now). Some people will be jealous of you and you will be jealous of some people. Some writers will get great stuff and you will not. And then you will. And then, again, you won’t. It’s fine. You will apply for a job and crickets. You will find out a producer is interested in your novels. You will be asked to travel across the world. And then in your own little world you will be shunned. As it should be. These are the reasonable expectations you need to have as a writer: you get to think about and write something every day. You get to look at the world with the lens of someone who is going to sit quietly later and make some fucking sense of it.
You will have some successes and you will have some failures. You will meet some generous and amazing people. You will try to be like them and you will fail at that too. You will meet some less generous people and you will try not to be like them, just like Marcus Aurelius says. But you will fuck that up as well most likely. Then you will say, fuuuuuccckkk. And try again to be better. You know that you actually might not though and this makes you sad. Oh well. Keep trying.
You will get to give talks and readings and you will always wish you had sparkled more. Next time. You want to give more and be more encouraging to others. You will want to have more time to write. You realize you will never have enough time to write. Because now all your friends are retiring from their day jobs but you will never be able to retire because you spent so much of your time writing weird little things that some people liked but other people didn’t or they ignored because that’s the way the reading life goes. It’s fair, you know. But yes, you will be working until you die because you were writing instead of saving. And now it hits you yah you are so fucked lol.
We won’t even talk about all the ways your old writer’s body will betray you this late in the game. We won’t. Yuck. Let’s not. It really sucks though. Some people think you live the life of Riley because you make it look like that on social media because that’s what you’re supposed to do and anyway it’s nice to look like that somewhere. Your friends know the truth and you can lol about your collective aches and pains behind the scenes. Lol.
Your life is such that one day someone threatens to kill you and the next you get one of those boons writers sometimes get. It is that glamorous, the writing life. Things will get published, and other things will not get published. Some folks will be happy for you and some not. Some will smile when they see you coming and others will roll their eyes. If you write about easy stuff you’re a lightweight and if you write about hard stuff you’re a bore. You’ll be passed over and picked up on the same day or years apart but it’s all weird and unexpected.
And after the pandemic there’s maybe a lot of second guessing and bitterness and despair and our bodies our bodies OOF and also hope because we need that we really do. Even though you used to think that you never had enough time to write, you will as you get older have even less time to write, and now it all feels like such a wild gift when you do scrape out the time. Naturally, when you have the time your mind might be a trash bin because the world. The world! Your personal triumphs will become fewer and far between. Other things will consume you even though your heart has ceased to be in them. You will scream more constantly into the fucking void.
But seriously. The writing life is a comedy. And it is the best comedy you could ask for. It is a magnificent lark! and I’m not even kidding.
And in the end: we get to write. We don’t need AI to write boring mushy sentences we can write them ourselves! (For more on AI follow Justine Bateman on Instagram).
Whatever else, the writing life is a balm. And that my friends, is what the reasonable expectations of a writing life might look like. Maybe.
