I just got back from AWP, the largest American writers’ conference — an ephemeral, literary vortex of readings and panels and temporarily-all-gender-friendly convention center restrooms.
It’s the kind of event where word nerds like me are totally in our element; where we can shake hands with and fangirl over (and yes, okay, surreptitiously stalk, especially at the Saturday night dance party) the kinds of community-specific celebrities whose names elicit the question who? in outside contexts. It’s the kind of event where you might run into an award-winning poet while catching a quick sit break, where said poet might offer you a chunk of dried mango out of the bag he’s snacking on over casual conversation.
It’s also, of course, pretentious and tiring and expensive and difficult to take seriously at times. Audiences snap at things in earnest; a mid-sized salad in a plastic clamshell sets you back a full twenty-eight dollars.
But even if I hadn’t gotten to reconnect with old friends, make some stellar new ones, and walk out with a tidy pile of brand-new books signed by their authors, my trip to AWP was totally worth it, mostly because of a panel I attended on the topic of failure.
Uplifting, right? Actually, yes. Hear me out.
One of the writers — a success, by all external measures, with several published novels and a gainful teaching career — explained that he actually has a total of fifteen failed books sitting on his hard drive: seven he scrapped midway through and eight finished volumes he couldn’t sell, even with an agent. He acknowledged that this sounds particularly dire, but then said something amazing.
The writer — whose name escapes me and who isn’t listed in the program because storms snowed some folks in, causing some last-minute panelist shuffles — sat down and realized that, at the end of his lifetime, even if no one had ever read any of his pieces, he’d still have felt better for having written them. In other words, he realized that at some level, we do this writing thing because we enjoy it — though it’s certainly a second-order volition sense of enjoyment, since it’s universally acknowledged that writing is extremely painful, especially amongst writers. (Another prime quote dropped in that panel: “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” — Thomas Mann)
Really, then, the only failure is failing to write at all, failing to pursue this thing we’re called to simply because its returns are uncertain. Making art, he went on, is a conscious commitment to uncertainty — a radical act in that we do it without any promises, merely (and amazingly) because we want to.
This statement reverberated through me bodily. I realized I’d been approaching the whole thing backwards. As I explained multiple times over the weekend, I quit grad school in part because I wasn’t convinced about publishing within the confines of the insular academic community, where the only people reading the journals are those trying to publish their own work in them. I wanted my words to reach out and touch people and change their lives in some tangible measure, even if that tangible measure was as prosaic as scoring them a free soft pretzel.
So I took a job with a personal finance blog, perhaps the most tangibly helpful way to channel my writing imaginable. Who doesn’t need help managing their money? Of course, after a year on staff, I realized I had little time or creative energy left to focus on personal writing ventures. So when I quit to freelance, I thought I’d spend those extra hours I’d earn back (see how much I was already mistaken?) putting down the poems and essays that had escaped me at my desk job.
But by that point, I’d been infected with the idea that writing that doesn’t end in payment, let alone publication, wasn’t worth doing. And so if my pitches fell through — when I even was pitching — I’d simply let those essays die. I prioritized and devoted the best part of my creative energy to the sure-thing, paycheck pieces, the SEO copy and listicles and “viral” blog posts. The spare time I did have was spent hiking or cleaning or watching Netflix, even as my list of writing ideas piled up.
I’m happy to report that, over the three days since the panel on Friday, I’ve written two poems and started three essays — about the same amount of unpaid, creative work I’d done in three months before the conference.
Writing is difficult, and it never stops being so. In fact, it’s gotten even harder as I’ve grown older and done more of it — perhaps because I’m more concerned about what I’m saying, or perhaps because I have more distractions and responsibilities to pull me out of the deep concentration it requires. It’s so much easier to run away from writing, and that’s just what I’ve been doing — ironically, exactly by becoming a full-time freelance writer. I’ve spent all my energy focusing on paid work to the exclusion of writing those uncertain-but-soul-wrought projects.
And so: I am recommitted now to valuing the process over the product, to writing things even when I know they may very well end up doing nothing but languishing on my hard drive. It won’t be easy or profitable or “productive” in the hurried, 21st-century sense of the term — and for all that, it won’t be anything like failure, either.