Writers Write
There is a scene in the Hulu series The Bear in which the main character, struggling restaurant owner Carmen Berzatto, says of his work and his business, “Loving something doesn’t make it fun.” This sentiment is utterly true of writing. I have a feeling it is true of every deeply worthwhile pursuit. But it is true of writing.
[About this piece: I am exploring simple mottos that have helped me as a writer. Here is a preceding post in this series.]
Writers do not like to write. Start there. Writers like it when their writing is done, which is different, and they may like the smoother and easier part of the writing when the piece is getting close to being done, but that’s it. Writers post, and this act of completion can bring a feeling of lightness and victory. But once the work is complete enough to post, there is more writing to be done, more of the struggle to take up, the struggle to serve readers and to forge the thought that is central to the next piece. The work does not end so long as the love does not end that draws us into this struggle.
I am writing about writing. But in order to do that, I must take up the question of why we do the things we do—why we do any of the things we do. As captured in the quote above, it cannot be that it is about fun. We see this even more clearly in bigger roles. Anyone who has ever become a parent knows fun is not the reason. Parents surrender fun, or much of it. Indeed, anyone who has had the temerity to just advance by decades into adulthood, accepting the burdens of this, knows that fun is the casualty of this advance. And yet worth, and meaning, and yes love—all these increase by way of both advancing in years and caring for new life. So there are calls and hopes and possibilities that each of us accepts or pursues or follows, and the reason is greater than immediate pleasure. And that is where we find the writer.
Writers write. The writer is not the person who writes because writing is fun. The writer is practically the opposite: the one who writes even though it is not.
When people have asked me why I like to write, I have searched for ways to express to them how I am not precisely sure that I do. I used to tell them, “I write because it’s the only way I have found to silence the voices in my head.” I will not be saying that anymore, because I have had two different conversations now in which that line did not land at all well. But if you are a writer in the way that I am, then I trust you understand. Thoughts wash up like driftwood on the beach of understanding. They cry out to be whittled and crafted into something polished and self-supporting. So we journal or blog or write letters, or we begin the next article or essay or book. This work is not essential—it can be ignored—but if it is ignored too long, then the result is a sullenness, an incompleteness, from which any other optional pursuit is just a fleeting escape. The beach gets cluttered. To do the work is difficult, but the effect of the work is a clearing away, and perhaps a respite of soulful and thoroughgoing peace.
Writers write. Of all the simple mottos about writing that I carry with me, this one is the simplest and maybe it is the very broadest, because this motto is descriptive and prescriptive both.
It is descriptive: Writers write. By day, I am part of a company that employs writers, and sometimes there are seasons or moments of seeking new writers for this staff. In the times I have looked for a writer, I have learned that this is one of the clearest ways to know I have found one: Writers write. If the person is a writer, then he or she is finding a way, somehow, to give expression to thought through writing, because this is what this person does. It is how she rolls, it is how he breathes. Writing is so hard that why would one do it, except that the person is made this way?
And then the motto is also prescriptive: Writers write. When I bring this motto to mind, to myself, it is as advice, as counsel. When sullenness comes, the gray indifference that tries to blanket and obscure my uncertainty about what comes next or what I should look to next, the answer I know to urge myself toward is to work on the next thing. The next piece of writing. The next article, or post, or literary project, or the next charting of private possibility and worry into the pages of a notebook.
And here is where the motto gets even bigger than writing. Writing is one of the things I was made for—not the only thing, but a thing nonetheless, and perhaps to some extent I have participated in making myself this way through the inclinations I have fed and who I undertook to be. I don’t know. But a writer is who I am now, by love and by nature. And to see this is to see that other people are also themselves. They are other, very different people: working in different ways, breathing in different ways, following different natures. For all of those who have love moving within them, there is a way given to express that love. Our nature is to do that thing. Our choice is to do that thing. The fullness of love is found in the thing we do that is not fun, but that allows the soul to feel its stillness.
Photo: “A man picks up driftwood at Monterrico beach” from the World Bank Photo Collection