35. How people become writers

Even bad advice can put you on your path

I was living in snowy Denver. I had just bought a motorcycle.

I’d spent months writing, riding the curvy mountain roads, and thinking about the future. How had I ended up here? What’s next?

I had graduated with a degree, and I was writing, but not as a profession. I had only been able to get entry-level jobs in Denver, which left me feeling very disappointed that I had followed the terrible advice of my college advisor, Jules. Jules was the sort of person who always had classical music softly playing—music like wallpaper, like perfume—a sonic garland to wear around one's environment to keep away the working class.

In my first year in college, I told him I wanted to go to New York City and pursue an internship as an editor at a publishing company. He said that I shouldn’t bother, not to worry, to just keep plugging forward with coursework.

I took his advice. As a result, I wasn’t able to land a job in NYC after graduation.

I had started college with a journalism scholarship but promptly changed course after my first day sitting in a journalism class and loathing it. It was a continuation of the 'red ink' style of English class I wanted nothing to do with.

I decided I would probably be an engineer in a music studio. Either that or in publishing. I wanted to be in NYC.

I had grown up in a very small town, and I yearned for a place in the big city.

I wanted to be like the writers and artists I looked up to and live the lives I had encountered in books: Lew Welch, Robert Creely, William Burroughs, Cy Twombly.

My high-art role models were those who had been assembled by scholars into groups that centered around places: the Black Mountain School, the Beats, and the New York School.

I knew for certain I wasn't in such a place. I hadn't a shred of today's sense that I can actually evoke such spaces within myself no matter where I go.

How can a person earn a living as an artist? I wanted to travel to the land where better options lived.

Prior to Denver, I had spent my summer after college graduation in Italy at an intensive painting course and generally drinking deep of that exalted expansive landscape steeped in weighty tradition, a land where everything was made of marble, terra cotta, plaster, concrete -- none of the hollow walls of American stick-built homes. American construction is a thing all too similar to what I had built working in set construction for the theatre -- something made to go up quickly and resemble a house. But not be one in substance.

Modern career structures are built similarly. You do the thing not because it needs to be done or because it is related to who you are but because it pays the bills.

I believed it would take a guru to bring reconciliation between art and making a living.

I hoped I would find such a guru in a creative writing MFA program.

I had one writing teacher, Kevin Mcilvoy, who was the closest thing to the guru I thought I'd find in school. He didn’t advise me on practical life, but he came from a more enlightened path when it came to how he lived as a creative person. It permeated throughout what he did. I worked with him in my brief role as the managing editor for the literary magazine Puerto del Sol, a magazine that could never match the sublime beauty of its own name, and as a student for a class or two, and we became friends.

He made the distinction between two different “distances” in writing, the erotic and aesthetic distance, and their associated modes, enacting and imparting.

I don't remember now where he got these concepts. He was exceptionally well-read. He was a bonafide insomniac—there were spans of time he barely slept, which gave him extra time to read.

He would also do other things. He was an advocate of transcendental meditation. There was a rumor that he'd, one morning, in the very early hours, decided to walk through his own neighborhood stark naked. He knew by years of familarity no one would be awake, no one would see him. It would be an experience—as open to the world as Walt Whitman—unto himself. He did so, and he came back home and went on with his day.

“Show don’t tell” on steroids

Enacting means being the thing. Bringing it by the way you are. The manner of the telling carries a feeling. It is a performance, an emanation of that state.

Imparting is like telling. It would be easy to say that imparting is like describing, but description can be done evocatively or dully. Imparting means to take a greater distance.

It can be helpful to show how these two modes relate to the erotic and aesthetic distance to better understand.

Erotic writing, true to its name, gets you to feel something. From within the erotic experience, you wouldn't expect to get the complete and literal story. In the erotic moment, you are there in the experience, there is no sense your viewpoint is the literal truth. It's subjective in an abundant way.

Aesthetic writing takes a separation between subject and object. Viewing the vase at a distance, you perceive it, take it in, and are able to be affected, but primarily your aim is to impart the sense of it.

What I love about these is that they're a step deeper than the 'show' don’t 'tell' advice.

Over the years, I've noticed that writers who feel themselves fresh to the endeavor appreciate these distinctions most.

Why?

A professor went to visit Nan-in, a Zen master, to ask him about Zen. Nan-in kindly welcomed him and began to make tea. He filled the professor’s teacup full and then continued pouring the tea, overflowing the cup.

The professor exclaimed — “Stop! The cup is already full, no more will go in!”

Nan-in responded: “Like this cup, your mind is already full of ideas and opinions. There is no room for anything new. To understand Zen, you must first empty your cup — open your mind and free it from preconceived notions.”

- from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones

The outsider often has the most valuable perspective.

When you truly belong to something, you don't see it. The fish doesn't know about water. A loved one's absence gets you to feel more acutely what their presence brings.

How people end up writers

There's not really one right system that supports becoming a writer or artist. I think it just has to be something that you choose to do regularly and with sincerity. This makes it remain when other things cook away.

Initially, I wanted to pursue writing through a professional path -- as a journalist or editor. After I took the academic path and became a professor, I continued to pursue it as a business owner, and now I’m pursuing it as an endeavor that puts me in a position to contribute. To live creatively and use writing to do different things: teach and entertain others, and to discover for myself.