TL;DR : KEEP WRITING

strangeselkie:

I’ve been hesitant to post about this, because God knows, so much is going on in this world that is just making all of us want to say “FUCKETY BYE” and go live in a lake with no wifi access. 

But I can’t stop thinking about it, about the choices we make as adults that are really bone-deep sacrifices, and how they change us, and sometimes make us believe the worst things about ourselves and our worth. 

I was first paid for my writing in the 4th grade (incidentally, the first year I went to a school with other children and discovered my need for escapism). We paid the water bill with that prize check, and so it was brought home to me immediately and younger than most that you should want paying for your art. 

I kept writing. I went to an arts high school and I wrote. My bachelor’s degree and my ill-gotten, partial, recession-haunted master’s degree are in writing. For most of my life, I wrote any damn thing, I fell IN LOVE with prosody, I had to write a screenplay and I didn’t hate it (it did some permanent damage to my descriptive language, though, for real. I’m hard pressed to go over 120pp). 

I finished my master’s thesis – my first novel. 

And then I got a real job. The creative lights began to go out. [I’m NOT SAYING Don’t Get a Real Job, Just Starve and Make Art. I am a FIRM Believer in Paid Work. This is not about that.]

The desire to strut my stuff on the page and, more importantly, my belief in the quality and importance of what I could write deteriorated the less time I gave to writing. So… I wrote less. It was a loop, but I didn’t see it. 

You should go write, my spouse said, over and over, in the times we were dead-ass poor and scraping by, and in the times we had big-city for-profit jobs. But I believed it wasn’t as important as my paid labor. And so I wrote less. One poem, one short story sold in a year, maybe. Always for a fair rate, but less.

We had a baby. A very wanted, wished-for, amazing baby. 

Babies will just fuck your creativity right over for, like, the first two years.

In 2012, when that baby was two years old and kinda sleeping, to prove I could still string a cogent English sentence together, I wrote the draft/sketches/wire hangers of a Regency romance. Regency romances are – for given values of easy – easy to write; they have a formula people love and tropes to ring like bells. 

It’s 2018. It took me six years to put the clothes on the hangers of a book that’s still only about 55,000 words. It’s not because my life was harder, darker, or more complicated. It’s because I – just me, not any-fucking-body else in my life – valued my time for writing so much less than my time for washing diapers,  I did anything else before I did writing; so I was exhausted, my mind was blank, and I was unfair-on-myself to think I could produce anything decent or anything at all. 

I’m about to be thirty-seven years old and I JUST GOT this memo and I’m sharing it with you if you’re still reading: OH MY GOD, DON’T DO THAT. DON’T LIE TO YOURSELF AND SELL YOUR CREATIVE LABOR SHORT. DON’T DO THAT. 

If you have something to write, keep writing.