Coin of the Realm: the cost of the creative writing life

by Ellen Santasiero

Photo by Shaojie on Unsplash

In Montreal recently for a writing retreat, I paid for a latte at the Café Olimpico by tapping my VISA on a card reader. The window seats at the Olimpico were deep and inviting due to the café’s thick sandstone walls, but I was there to work, so I settled at a small marble-topped table in the back. I got out my notebook, sipped my coffee, and continued work on a short story draft I’d started a few months before.

I never did use Canadian currency, or even exchange for it, while I was there, as it was tap tap tap everywhere I went. I could pay later, and so I did.

Not so in the land of creative writing.

There is no kicking the cost down the road to remit next month, or year. It’s a cash economy there, and too, you must pay up front. With your time, your attention, and your energy.

But even when we have an abundance of those coins, we aren’t always able to pay.

In 1995 when I was a beginning creative writer, I worked a nine-to-five as a graphic designer. After a few years, I asked my boss if I could reduce my hours so I could have Fridays off. I wanted to use that day to write. My boyfriend was OK with my using the spare bedroom in the house we shared, and so I set up a desk and chair in there for myself. Did I go in there and write?

Reader, I did not. Even though I had taken a pay cut, I did not use my Fridays to write.

What held me back?

I read poet Kathleen Norris’s book about acedia, the mental or spiritual torpor that plagued monks and mystics committed to the disciplined contemplative life, but their lot didn’t resonate with me. People suffering from acedia simply do not care. I did care. I deeply yearned to write. For me, the obstacle was resistance, described in rather spartan register by Steven Pressfield in The War of Art.

“Resistance seems to come from outside ourselves,” wrote Pressfield. “We locate it in spouses, jobs, bosses, kids. ‘Peripheral opponents,’ as Pat Riley used to say when he coached the Los Angeles Lakers. Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. Resistance is the enemy within.”

The book helped me. There was something in knowing that I just had the ordinary, everyday, run-of-the-mill resistance that every other human being possesses.

But other things helped me show up regularly to my creative writing practice, too.

I recently led a workshop called “Tying the Knot: Committing to Your Writing Life” during which I revealed to seventeen eager-but-beleaguered souls that:

1. I set a timer for ten minutes and tell myself that all I have to do is write for ten minutes. I can do most anything for ten minutes! When the timer goes off, I’m always in, and I stay in.

2. I have three writers’ groups, two for critique, and one for submitting work. These groups not only give me constructive feedback and moral support, but they keep me accountable by holding me to my deadlines.

3. Finally, I regularly read at open mics or arrange to be a featured reader. There is nothing like the fear of humiliation to motivate oneself.

Writing is hard. It’s damned hard. But we’re not alone. We talk about that all the time at The Forge, and we’re continually inspired by the effect of The Forge’s creative writing community on the Smithys—they up their commitment to their writing lives each month.

I got a lot done on that short story in the café, and in other French colonial style restaurants and cafés in Montreal, and now my draft is off, on time, to an editor for her feedback. To achieve that goal, I paid up front—ka-ching!—with time, attention, and energy.

I must say, it helps to write in a beautiful old city, too.

The Writing Life: A Matter of Perspective

by Irene Cooper

I went searching for a recent tweet by a writer I admire, and couldn’t find it. Fittingly, the tweet mused on the suggestion that everyone has been writing the same human dramedies—the same histories of trauma and triumph—for eons, each from a slightly different perspective. As with many tweets, it can be read (at the very least) in two ways: that there is nothing new under the sun, and we (especially we who fancy ourselves creative) only replicate rather than innovate; conversely, that we are indeed snowflakes, made up of the same stuff but in awesome, infinite arrangement. Additional possibilities abound, of course. Some are cheerier than others.

I say fitting, too—that I couldn’t locate the thought in the 24/7 textual Indie 500 that is Twitter—because Michael and I will this week head to the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) to rub patched elbows with twelve thousand of our fellow writers. Twelve thousand people will sit on and in front of panels that will discuss writing concerns including voice, genre, education, and the ever-shifting landscape of the publishing industry. As both writers and instructors of The Forge, a creative writing program, we have a good deal of skin in the game. This year our Superbowl is in Seattle, a virtual home field.

Once upon a time I had a conversation with a judge in Reno, Nevada, a place where you might as well tell the truth. It was a friendly chat, nothing law-bound, in which I’d said there was a time I thought I’d be a public defense attorney in NYC. He said public defense was a hard row to hoe. He himself had run a notoriously successful firm with scandalously wealthy clients. He suggested I go back to school. “There is always room at the top,” he said.

I recognized the quote—purportedly a response from Daniel Webster when he was cautioned against becoming a lawyer—he was advised (by people who meant well, we shall presume), that the field, in the early nineteenth century, was saturated. The idea of a “top,” even to the synapses in my young-twenties brain, even in 1986—the year before Wall Street glamorized rather than vilified abject greed—felt wonky. Wonky, but prevailing, like a March wind whipping the Nebraska plains.

It would be another three decades or so before dancer, choreographer, educator, and visionary Liz Lerman would give me language for my ambivalence regarding “top” (and the implied “bottom”). Lerman founded and developed Critical Response Process, a dialogic alternative to creative workshop models that traditionally silence the artist. She also wrote a collection of essays called, Hiking the Horizontal, which her website says, “offers readers a gentle manifesto to bring a horizontal focus to bear on a hierarchical world.” Neither a top, nor a bottom, then, but a horizon of indiscernible end. Of boundless access and possibility.

AWP is a curious event: Twelve thousand introverts crushed together under one roof, twelve thousand hearts pounding with ambition, twelve thousand and more perspectives on a single moment. No recollection or interpretation will be the same as another.

This AWP, I think I’ll leave the sky to the stars, is what I’m getting at. I want to listen to some stories, marvel at the poets, and stare across Elliott Bay, through the inevitable mist, to the infinite horizon, where I know there is room for me and my work.

Collectivity & Connectivity

by Mike Cooper

Photo by S. Wild/Dolphin Innovation Project

The bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay of Western Australia chase fish into the empty shells of giant sea snails, bring the shells to the surface, and shake the fish into their mouths—the way we’d finish off the crumbs in the bottom of a bag of chips. And it’s not just one of them, it’s all of them.

Dolphins, like humans, are collaborative and cooperative. It’s how we not only survive, but learn and grow and evolve. One dolphin, let’s call them Terry, apparently came upon this tactic, and pretty soon everybody was doing it, and likely they improved upon the method as a group. Hey, try this. Check it out.

If you’re reading this, you’re not only a human, but you’re also probably a writer (even if you don’t admit it): one of those people for whom writing fills a void, provides a spark, or helps you to understand all of this. And hopefully you are fortunate enough to have the time and the wherewithal to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), even if it’s in the wee hours of the morning before the chickens wake up or late at night long after the cows have gone to bed. Not all of us are writers, which is not to imply that you are any better or worse than anyone else; it just happens to be your way.

There have been lots of writers, from the first of us to draw in the dirt to those who were forced to write in secret or under a different name to all the greats who have filled all our libraries and the internet itself. We have learned from each other. We have grown and evolved.

You can write alone—most of us do. You can fill journals or computer memory with millions of words. You can fill your void, find that spark, figure all of this out. And you can do it entirely on your own. But you might never figure out how to chase a fish into a snail shell for an easy dinner.

That’s where writing groups and classes and writing programs and writing buddies come in. Other writers help us with additional skills, feedback, perspective, ideas, motivation, accountability, encouragement, refinement, process, and accountability. Yes, I said accountability twice. So check out a writing program like The Forge. Go to classes at your library. Find online classes or readings or lectures. Join a Writers Guild. Find a buddy who likes to write. Find a bunch of buddies and make a writing group. And, even if you’re a groundbreaking innovator like Terry the dolphin, you can always learn and grow and evolve. You’ll be glad you did.