What If You Just Love to Write?

Writing is the only one of the arts I know where people tend to assume that the only reason to do it is to be a professional. If you play the piano, no one asks when you were last on a concert stage. If you paint, no one asks what galleries or museums carry your work. But if you write, people inevitably will say, “Are you published?”Why? Is it because folks think that getting published is so easy that, if you are writing at all, surely you have met that goal? Are they hoping to buy your work? Or are they suggesting—kindly? snidely?—that you might be wasting your time? I’m not sure, but it’s a disheartening question for those who write purely for the joy of gathering words and laying them out on a page, one after another.Now, if you are a writer already being published or one writing with the hope of a professional career, more power to you. These thoughts are not meant for you. Publishing is a worthy goal and an achievable one for many, as anyone can see by walking into any bookstore or library or picking up a magazine. A lot of folks publish. They may even get paid for their work. (We won’t—at the moment, anyway—go into how much.)But what if you just like writing? What if you love it even, but don’t want to put in the 10,000 hours required to become an expert? Yet you enjoy creating poems for your friends or keeping a journal or playing with a novel? What if you just want to do it?Then, my friend, congratulations. You have chosen the best part.When something you love doing becomes a way of making a living, you are both blessed and cursed. Blessed because you have work you love, cursed because the process you love is changed, sometimes profoundly, by being turned into work, by being attached to contracts and sales figures, success and failure.When I write anything at all, I always ask first what’s in my heart. If an idea doesn’t reside there I’ll never succeed with it. But I also have to ask, what does the market want? What can I succeed in selling? It is rare for me to write anything just because my heart called it out, just because I thought it might be fun to see on the page. When I sit down at my desk, I am no longer playing.I can’t remember when I last wrote something completely private, a journal entry or a recorded dream or a wisp of poem. Even when I was working with a therapist surrounding my son’s death, I resisted the journaling she—very astutely—asked me to do. “That would be too much like work,” I told her. It isn’t that I have to be paid for everything I write, but I find I do need to be reaching beyond myself to justify the effort. I need an audience.I solved that one by writing my thoughts surrounding Peter’s death in long e-mails to my dear friend Norma Fox Mazer. She read them and returned them to me online with her comments inserted. It worked.But all this is to say one thing: if you love to write, write. Enjoy the process of gathering your thoughts, of seeing them bloom on the page. And don’t apologize to yourself or to anyone else if you aren’t seeking—or if you seek and don’t achieve—publication. Writing is for the writer first. It’s a way of amusing ourselves, soothing ourselves, informing ourselves, even discovering ourselves.Think of all the pianists you know who love to share their gift with family and friends, the artists who have never sold a picture but go on painting, the sculptors who create a world in sand on the beach and then watch the waves come in to wash it away.Write. Write your heart out. And then share your heart with people you care about. And never apologize for not being published.