(Images provided by DWB)
“You’ll find it when you stop looking.” – D.W. Barrigar
At 18, she doesn’t quite know it yet, but the way she walks, the way she talks, the way she thinks, and the way she acts all indicate one thing: writer.
Just who and what a writer is now is undergoing great flux and change, great challenges and readjustments. It’s been happening very dramatically since around the year 2000. We live in a period of rapid and sudden uncertainty, and we, of course, don’t know how things will pan out.
Edgar Allan Poe, it’s often said, was the first American writer who actually tried to make a living from his pen and nothing but his pen.
He failed miserably, had to work mostly as an editor instead, and died in the gutter because of it.
Before that, it wasn’t as if America didn’t have writers. Most people wrote and read letters, for instance, every day. (If they were “illiterate,” they dictated their letters and had letters from others read aloud to them from someone around them who could read and write.) It was simply the case that making a living as a creative writer was fairly unheard of. There were zero copyright laws at that time, among other reasons, many other reasons.
Geoffrey Chaucer, of England, author of the Canterbury Tales, is considered the first actual, individual author in the English language, in the modern sense. (Rome and other societies had their own versions much earlier than that.)
And making a living as a writer, as nothing more than a writer, never crossed Chaucer’s mind.
He had a million other jobs instead, while also completing the most lasting work in the English language outside of Shakespeare. And we all know how Shakespeare supported himself.
So even if she never publishes a word, and even as she also does other things, too, this is a writer in action – not tomorrow, not in a few years or decades, now.
America thinks everything is about money.
The best-seller mentality has poisoned the well of the minds of so many writers that many, or even most, of them have stopped writing seriously even as they still dream of writing.
I taught in the writing schools of the Midwestern USA for over twenty years, first as a graduate student, later as a professor and lecturer.
It gradually dawned on me that there was a mindset that was killing the creativity of many of my students.
Too many of them believed that if they didn’t become rich and famous writers overnight, then they weren’t writers at all.
And they quit doing it. They stopped writing. Because they thought the lack of instant “success” meant they weren’t good enough. So they bowed out, with embarrassed smiles on their faces. It was sad to see, sad that so many had (and still do) fallen for the lie. The big lie.
Writing, creative writing, is something you do if you’re called to it. Any outward success, or lack of so-called outward success, is never going to stop you if you’re a real writer.
We are all writers today, in many ways, inventing personas for ourselves, using words to text and email each other all the time every single day.
Jesus was a writer, even though he never wrote a word, except one known time, with his finger in the sand.
But who told more lasting, wide-ranging stories than he did? Short stories, usually very, very short stories, so powerful they turned him into the most famous human being who’s ever lived or ever will live – bar none. It was his words that did everything, including bringing back the dead. (“Lazarus, come out!”) And that makes him a writer. He was never paid a pittance for it, not even a single cent, ever, not even one time.
(He was never directly paid, but he was given free food, lodging, and wine from his audiences and hearers.)
The person in these pictures is a writer in action, even if she doesn’t quite know it yet, even if she never “publishes” a word.
“Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, but it’s free,” wrote Kris Kristofferson.
Saragun Springs 
DWB
Writers In Action might be the best future for our world. Not an organized group (only bad things happen there); not a single generation (hoping for that adds to the definition of madness); nor one single person, but a billion such persons (not people) seeking truth inside, finding it and somehow telling it. Lovingly done.
And thank you for putting together a bunch of meaningful somethings on demand–I know how that goes.
Leila
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Leila
Thank you, your first paragraph here is beautiful. It covers all the bases in a few gorgeous words and is something to work for and toward, especially since the world is so far away from this now. May it be like what you describe one day in the future.
As far as the second paragraph, no problem! Like the writer Harry Crews said, “Walking the wire is everything. The rest is just waiting.” Self-imposed deadlines (both parts of that phrase) can lead to some of the best ideas. Not that my ideas are good, but in general the process can lead to that.
I would MUCH rather have a very small band of truly interested and caring Readers, as opposed to vast numbers of cynical people who don’t really care and are only following trends and name recognition, probably out of a vast, yawning boredom. Thanks for the opportunity!
Dale
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Hello DWB
And it is good you have helped bring two young artists into the world. To them I can honestly say the world is no worse than it waa when I was their age. The thing is to do something you find real and let go of the idea that Utopia will happen in your time. Just keep adding to the good stuff and keep an eye out for really good donut shops.
LA
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All very true. If you are a writer you don’t have much choice. I find that if real life interferes and I don’t hit the keyboard for a few days then I am all ridges and furrows. Royalties are lovely, of course, but reading something you wrote and being happy with it is worth much more. Thanks for this – dd
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Thank you Diane!
For myself, without writing I would probably end up tearing my hair out and going mad. While I’ve pushed the envelope in lots of different ways over the years, it’s always been reading, writing, and art that have given me a reason for being (even when I was an unemployed professor and almost no one was listening). And more than enough reason for being it has been. Reading/writing was the NUMBER ONE REASON why I quit drinking 20 years ago. As soon as I saw that the drink was damaging my writing brain (which took a while), the bottle was thrown out of the window immediately (even though a mild case of the DTs followed). Thanks again for thoughtful, positive commentary every single time!
Dale
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Dale –
My story about stories. Mathematician by interest and profession, but thought about writing. In the 1990s I wrote some stories, but the environment was much different then. My literary friends discouraged by writing.
2015 with so many journals (Duotrope says 7694 today), my joke is that if you wrote Filipina porn you could probably find a place for it. I started subbing and almost immediately got accepted – by Hash which went under before it was ever published. I had thought nothing would happen for six months and I would quit. Now Maysam in Tehran has made a website dedicated to me, and I have ten or so collaborations with Bill in Illinois. I get plenty of rejections like other non-Stephen KIngs (whom I have parodied). It’s been more fun than getting a sports car when I hit middle age. Another perk is that my legend will last maybe three weeks posthumous.
mm
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Doug
You are right about too many publishers. But a hundred years ago the same was true just in another venue. Getting stuff across at some places is the only result. LS, however, for example, rejects well over ninety percent despite what some scoreboards say. It really depends on whether it is good enough or not.
Leila
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Leila – I hope that you would agree “good enough” is subjective. I’ve had the same story rejected and highly praised. It also depends on whether the jounal accepts 90% or .9%.
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If there is a number for whatever…
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Mirthless
Your legend shall persist beyond a mere three weeks.
Leila is totally right, too. The nineteenth century saw a massive explosion of magazines, journals, newspapers, broadsides, etc., with the increase in printing and paper technology (and most of the writers weren’t paid). The eighteenth century had seen the same. The Mimeo Revolution was another such explosion. Thousands of different magazines and papers and pamphlets, etc etc. Most of which were very short-lived. Very few lasting a hugely impressive ten years and counting like LS.
A website in Tehran is an amazing accomplishment!
Dale
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Hi Dale
What is a writer? I’ve thought about this… You’re right. Money overshadows everything and especially writing. You have to make gobs of money to be a real writer.
I don’t usually tell people I’m a writer, and when I do I regret it. I think for a long time I was afraid to even say it out loud to myself. But what is someone who writes everyday?
One scoffer, a humanoid, said , “Writer huh, oh it’s just a hobby.” People are quick to burn you down if they think you are “some kind of writer.” Other writers who aren’t always your brethren or sister, are also quick to cut. Usually the ones who can’t write very well.
Sometimes I think writing is just a friendlier addiction. Something you can actually get a good buzz from that doesn’t kill your ass.
This essay makes me feel better about writing to know that even Poe didn’t make it in the monetary sense, sadly.
I’m always drawn in by your writing. Your perspectives are intelligent, highly educational (but also gritty and real) and engaging.
Christopher
PS: I’ll have to check out the PKD story you mentioned. Makes me want to get back into his work! One of my favorites is, “The Golden Man.”
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Hi Christopher
Yes, the list of great writers who didn’t monetarily support themselves with their writing is very long, of course. It includes some of America’s greatest poets (and almost all poets). Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, none of them worked as professional writers in the sense of getting paid for it. Herman Melville had a brief few years where he was able to support himself from writing. Very brief. Poe’s editorial duties were often humiliating as he was the employee, not the employer. Raymond Carver, until the very end, had to work as a teacher. Even Hemingway’s royalties were not enough to support him. He relied on his job as a journalist, and he married four times, and all the ladies were wealthy (much wealthier than he was in every case). One does what one needs to. He had a boat but it was a small one that broke down a lot.
The best-seller, do-nothing-but-writing myth really is a myth (in the sad and bad sense of myth), and while it has been the case for a few great writers (like King) it is manifestly NOT the case for, truly, almost all literary writers. Royalties from good writing almost never pay the bills, or not all the bills, at the very least.
I once read a sentence from someone, don’t remember who; it said this: “Most writers have another job.”
When F. Scott Fitzgerald died, THE GREAT GATSBY was an unknown book that had sold very few copies and made Fitzgerald almost no money. For most of his writing career, he was forced to do humiliating, poorly paid script work in Hollywood where they didn’t even give him writing credits on the screen. Exactly the same thing with William Faulkner.
America has produced many of the world’s greatest writers in this last 200 years or so, and yet there is so much ignorance about how it all really works that it shocks the system on a regular basis.
And yet, keeping the secret about being a writer can often be a good thing. People can tell there’s something different about you, but they don’t know what it is. Always keep ’em guessing! Literature is the long game, the longest game of all (there is none longer, at least not among humans). I think Europe, in general, treats it writers much better than America does. Not just now – since the beginning.
D
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