Writers write because we must, but why we must is always a story in itself.

I started writing when I was eighteen—mostly poetry, mostly about unrequited love for a dark-haired girl who danced ballet and never did properly break my heart (sorry for the cliché; it’s just the truth). Years prior, my mother left me, which has plenty to do with unrequited love and unresolved emotions finding their way onto paper. Feeling unloved and misunderstood are recurring themes in my writing because those things have been my life. I reckon that if you’re serious about writing, you draw from your own well of recurring themes.

I was good at poetry. I liked what I wrote and so did other people. Some of these people were terribly encouraging and I’m strengthened by their words to this day. The counsel of community was pivotal to my early growth, but the truly helpful critics were few and far between. These people were naturally talented and disciplined about their crafts and thus worth listening to. It’s generally unprofitable to listen to sycophants, who are often more serious about giving and receiving praise than giving and receiving insight. It is difficult yet essential for those young to writing to learn to make this distinction.

I write now because I’ve learned some lessons I believe are worth sharing. I’ve learned them over nineteen years of concerted, serious writing, consistent involvement in both sides of critiquing, the composition of somewhere between two and five novels depending on how you slice it, several years writing for a geek culture website, and a long stint reading and editing doctoral dissertations, master’s theses, and college freshmen’s papers—which I liken to a form of torture in one of the lower rings of Dante’s inferno. My academic disciplines are religion and history, but I write and edit because I’ve yet to find an opening at the local religion and history factory…though I wrote the first draft of this essay while living in northern Utah and there are fewer places in the world where that might seriously be a thing.

This essay mostly deals with motivation—why we start and keep writing—though I touch on a couple areas of craft I find particularly salient for those young to writing. Regardless of your medium, genre, or aspirations, following are principles we all must learn and relearn as we grow into our roles as writers and as writing becomes more and more a part of who we are.

THE FOOL’S ERRAND

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.” —Anaïs Nin.

The starving artist is a trope for a reason. If you begin writing because you want to make money, Mr. T and I pity you.

It is the rare poet who earns a paycheck from their poetry rather than from their adjunct teaching and barista gigs or—fingers crossed—a suffusion from an arts grant.

For writers of fiction and nonfiction with professional aspirations, it will take much time and mettle to find agents and editors who believe your work is worthy of their efforts. Johnny Worthen said a few years ago that success in publishing is like success in roulette. You have to keep placing bets if your number will ever come up. And let’s remember that when it comes to any gambling metaphor, the house always wins.

Success in self-publishing is uniquely evasive and largely dependent upon mastery of SEO, reckoning with AI, and the social media flavor of the hour. It often demands a furious writing regimen many normal adults are unable to cultivate because algorithmics is next to godliness a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century.

If fast money is your creative North Star, go build an app, grow it, and sell it to one of the tech giants. Learning to code will cost you less time and frustration than learning writing. Our culture has little use for writing as art, a truism far more relevant in our YouTwitFace—to quote Conan O’Brien—era than when Anaïs Nin first warned us to consider why we would bother doing this at all.

If you write for a long time, with dogged insistence, and within marketable genres, you may possibly be able to make a paid career out of writing.

But why did you begin?

Both origin points and endpoints influence a line’s trajectory—the line, here, being your writing journey. I believe all realized writers’ ultimate motivation should be instinctive and that the “why” of writing is a question to be revisited regularly. The question’s answer, like a sculpture, gains clarity and form over time. That answer often looks quite different from how it once did because our lives and motivations change. This isn’t selling out. It’s buying in more fully and knowledgeably to discipline and craft.

Growing into a realized writer is too difficult and, often, too disappointing a venture for those who are unwilling to endure. Many won’t be able to stop themselves from quitting while they’re ahead. This is good because art is a support system for life, not life for art.

Michel de Montaigne wrote that if his mind could gain a firm footing, he wouldn’t make essays, he’d make decisions. Joan Didion said that she wrote because it was the only way she could understand herself.

Why would anyone sacrifice their sleep, relationships, and earning power to instead sit around exegeting themselves unless the absolutely had to?

Writers write because we must.

God help us.

EAT KITSCH AND DIE

“Develop taste.” —Ben Stahl.

I’m Italian-American and you may know some things about us. We’re loud. We gesticulate. We’re proud of our food.

Something about Italian cooking is that its quality is largely dependent on its ingredients. It’s about good tomatoes, good olive oil, good grain, good meat, good cheese. It’s an exercise in the mastery of quality fundamentals.

If writing is like cooking, then you are what you eat. To grow as a writer, you must gain a sense of what is healthy, what is unhealthy, and why.

Kitsch is corny, overly-sentimental art and literature. It is art that “tries too hard.” If excellent work can be likened to a healthy diet, then kitsch can be likened to an unhealthy, sugary one—that quick jolt of energy that burns fast and leaves you exhausted in its wake.

The essence of kitsch is not that elites have judged it to be lowbrow. The essence of kitsch is that it’s co-dependent, like a joke that doesn’t age well. It’s tethered to its immediate context, namely the original thing whose coattails it’s riding, and its relevance will diminish until it morphs into little more than an example of broader trends of its time.

For our purposes, the question of kitsch is really the question of motivation. What are your literary goals? Do you primarily want to sell writing and you’re not terribly concerned with having a literary legacy? You can write popular-level work, and that’s okay—if you define success this way. There’s nothing wrong with selling candy bars and ice cream. But if you want to be a healthy person, don’t eat them every day for breakfast.

However you define success, you must know why you define it this way and what you intend to do about it.

If success, to you, is about literary insight and building a lasting legacy as a writer and commentator, you must develop a taste for healthy writing. You do this by consuming good work. What are the best works in your genres from the past five years? Read a few of them. What are the classics? Familiarize yourself. What have the prolific authors of the past century said about the craft of writing? Read their essays, and if they have written a treatise on writing, pick it up. Practice poetry. Learn to economize words. Broaden your vocabulary.

Read working, professional journalists. Journalists must write quickly, efficiently, and enticingly. They work with live stories and must transform ordinary details into extraordinary ones. The realm of the journalist is the realm of making things interesting—fast! Writers of all stripes should study quality journalism.

Developing taste is not only a matter of ingesting what the more experienced tell us is good for us. Developing taste is also about learning to articulate for ourselves what moves us. It’s about determining why we like this book rather than that one. People who have taste know what they like and why, and they don’t just copy what they like; they learn how it works and fold its principles into their process. Taste is a fundament of developing your own style and literary voice—the inimitable qualities of the realized writer. Like anything in the arts, voice cannot be taught, only learned over time.

You must know what it is you’re trying to write and why. Your “diet” must fit your goals.

ON BEING READ

“Having someone to believe in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.” —Stephen King

Writers write because we must. Our interest may have been sparked by a school assignment or secret feelings for a person destined not to love us back, but that spark, one day, became a fire all its own. There are too many lonely, late nights, too many afternoons swaddled in silence, too much “real” work left undone, for anything else to be the case. Stephen King wrote that writing a novel is like crossing the ocean in a bathtub; no one in their right mind would do this lest they were compelled by something necessary or absurd. This absurd necessity is predicated on an internal, self-sustaining motivation to do artistic work despite any and all challenges—“instinct.”

All of this is true, yet words exist to communicate. Every writer must at some point bridge the gap between personal artistic fidelity and the meaningful engagement of a wider audience. We all have that first, terrifying moment when we begin building a bridge between the world of our heart and the world outside. Usually there is a trustworthy person we hand these nascent words to, fragile reflections of our deep selves that they are. We need the encouragement these confidants provide, but usually they don’t provide much more than an impetus to keep going. If we are to grow, we must eventually recognize our need for truth, not sentiment.

For me, this came from fellow poets who read my early work—the stuff that poured from me after coming home sore and filthy from the commercial kitchens I worked in—who laid the foundation for the bridge.

Later, it was two good friends, like sisters to me, who knew I had a book in me and watched it grow piece by piece, commenting faithfully on hot-off-the-press chapters for nearly two years; the frame of the bridge went up.

Then it was online critique platforms and a handful of fellow writers who read everything I shared, understood the depths of the story, pushed me back when I needed to sit down and shut up, and pushed me forward when I was exhausted by graduate school and the requisite malaise of being a Millennial during the Great Recession. The bridge was complete, and sharing my work became an integral part of my editorial process rather than the deep breath before the plunge.

Two extremes burden the novice writer: unhealthy fragility and unhealthy pride. You are not as bad as you think you are. You are not as good as you think you are. Work hard, refine your craft, and get over yourself.

Instinct is what we all must possess to write faithfully. It’s the invisible whip cracking behind us, the itch in our brain that can’t be scratched when we should be asleep because there’s work in the morning. The other side of the coin—the people who push us—are those who care about what we do. They’re the ones who see if we’re being honest and can call us out when we cheat on our instincts with what the business end of writing insists is really hot right now.

We all need people who will push us when our instinct falters. People helped us build the bridge, and they help mend it when it start to falter. Sometimes they are our spouses, family, and friends. Sometimes they come and go, and sometimes they are strangers chasing the same dream. Whoever they are, you must find them if you aspire to be a writer who is read.

All the arts presuppose a degree of solitude for the work to get done, but the work isn’t meant to live in silence. Words exist to speak and writers work in the realm of words. The only writers we remember, whose words have impacted us, are those whose words have reached us to be heard.

To become a realized writer, your words must do the same.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

If your work is to be misunderstood, let it not be for lack of clarity, but for lack of appreciation. Write boldly. Have integrity. Concern yourself with starting honestly and worry later about what the critique groups and the queries and editors and the decency police say must come and go. Recall the absurd abandon needed to bring yourself to bear in words and stories, and to hell with being misunderstood.

You may as well. You’ve already paid a high price to make it this far.