The Writing Life

The writing life, combined with graduate school life, can get a bit maddening and discouraging at times. I think this line from David Foster Wallace sums it up best: “He has…an expression of deep and intractable unhappiness, as unhappy a face I’ve seen outside a graduate creative-writing program.” Unlike other people, as in non-writers, I think the best way to deal with the stress and setbacks is to bottle it all up and lie to yourself: I will have one more draft to do for this piece before I can place it in a literary magazine. I will get this book published someday to critical acclaim and commercial success. I will get a fantastic and lucrative job related to writing, where my talents will be appreciated on a daily basis. Thus, the hard part is not the writing itself, for which we have plenty of resources in learning how to improve, but the lying part. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary—the scores of rejection slips from literary magazines, the silence from the gatekeepers of publishing, the dearth of any jobs remotely related to a creative writing degree—you have to believe in whatever delusions will keep you writing and rewriting. To date, I have had great success at the lying part. The other part need not ever come, just provide me a reason to keep going.