“If you can possibly become anything else, don’t become a writer.” I read this line in an article a couple weeks ago (or something close to it), but of course, I’ve been hearing it my entire life. If you are also a writer, you’ve heard it, too: it’s the opening line to the speech that goes on to tell you how very difficult it is to be a writer—how arduous the practice, how impossible the act of publishing, how you will be misunderstood and maligned by all who claim to know and love you. And so, dear heart, if there is anything else you are remotely inclined to do—anything at all that might earn you some money or be easier to explain at a dinner party when asked, “What do you do?”—for the love of all that is good and holy, do that thing instead.
But of course, if you can possibly become anything else, then you are not really a writer. That may sound harsh, and it’s not entirely accurate. I’m sure there are scores of people who write and write well, but for whom the act of writing is not a matter of life and death. I have no quarrel with those people, but I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about the ones who write in their classmates’ yearbooks, “Be sure to look for my novels in Barnes & Noble!” and who view this declaration as nothing short of a prophecy. I’m talking about the ones who spurn the good intentions of their college professors, when they suggest that a life of academia (a veritable goldmine, that) might be more sensible than that of a derelict author. I’m talking about the ones who so arrange their lives, day in and day out, so they can write, even when decades have passed with little to no outward signs of success.
I am, of course, talking about myself. I’m talking about a bullheaded and naïve eighteen-year-old who never knew how to do anything but declare what she wanted and steamroll anyone who tried to get in her way. I’ve heard the “if you can possibly become anything else” speech many times, but perhaps not as much as some, for I was fortunate to have had both teachers and parents who believed, if not in the mercies of the publishing world, then in the bullheaded naivete of me. From the moment my parents took me to pick out my first big girl bed, and I flung myself like a swan in a rage upon the only blue bed with gold thread in the store, I was never going to become anything other than impractical and insistent. And so, I did not, and so, I never shall.
If you can possibly become anything else, don’t become a writer. Why do people say this? They say it because they’re trying to help. They say it because they have watched too many bright and shiny shooting stars go sailing down to the earth in a flap of flames, when they find the path they’ve chosen didn’t land where they’d hoped. They say it because they were once those shiny shooting stars themselves, and now, flame-licked and ash-riddled, they are trying to spare you their same fate. Or they say it because they know—or think they know—that giving your heart to anything worthwhile is bound to make it break, and so the safer thing to do—the more sensible thing to do—is give it to something you don’t really love, something that will bring you the contentment of an arranged marriage between economical equals and not the impassioned torment of a merging of souls that tears your world in two.
But of course, if you can possibly give your heart to something you love less than writing, then you are not really a writer—not the kind I’m talking about, anyway. I said I was once naïve (my heart aches for the child who is not), and I’m glad I was naïve. If I had not been naïve, I wouldn’t have studied what I wanted to in both college and grad school. I wouldn’t have made writing an essential part of my adulthood, and I wouldn’t have worked a myriad of dumb and seemingly pointless jobs just to keep a roof over my head and thereby learned there are other things I enjoy doing (but of course, “like” is not the same as “love”). While I hacked away at book after book I couldn’t manage to get published, I wouldn’t have grown to hate this thing I loved and tried to give it up, and I wouldn’t have come hobbling back to it and figured out, through deeper and more arduous hacking away, how to put myself and my love back together.
I am a better person because I am a writer. Not because I was born with a gift, but because I have spent the last thirty years working at something that has had to become its own reward. Because I have learned that the “if you can possibly become anything else” speech is not untrue—being a writer is hard, but so is everything worth doing—and I have continued to be a writer nonetheless. And so, if we insist on making speeches at bullheaded and naïve young people, who come to us with their far-flung dreams, perhaps it would be better, instead of blithely attempting to steer them away from their passions, to tell them what Mary Ruefle writes in “Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World”: “Like Thomas Merton said, one day, you wake up and realize religion is ridiculous and that you will stick with it anyway. What love is ever any different?”
Jessica Lynne Henkle 