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Re: Writing My Goals

Making Changes

By Matthew DanielsPublished about a year ago 9 min read
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Re: Writing My Goals
Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

I'm starting over as a writer. With 40 just around the corner, that's no small thing. I first decided writing was for me in high school when I was 16. At the time, I had some absurdly high ambitions for fixing the world and saving humanity from itself because I was young and didn’t know any better. As I continued to succeed academically, these ambitions worked their way into the fabric of my being. This is a story I’ve mentioned elsewhere, so I bring it up again for only one point: my writing was part of that Atlas burden. So I’m starting over as a writer in order to move away from that obsession with the capital-I Important.

Some might think it odd that I'd share such a decision here. It would be different if I were a big name, like Stephen King or Brandon Sanderson. But little ol’ me? Why would anyone care? Fair question. If you’re still reading, I hope there’s something from my story, perspective, or situation that will help you as a fellow writer. As far as I can tell, everyone using Vocal is a fellow writer. This isn’t a hub for readers, so the only Likes and Reads we’re getting are from other writers. I’m open to correction on this.

Anyway: for those of you unfamiliar with Greek Mythology, Atlas was a Titan who held the world on his shoulders. Not a metaphorical weight of the world, but the actual world. That’s what it’s felt like all these years, hoping my writing would spark social change. I couldn’t just jam something out for fun. Everything I did had to be part of that big mission. Important. Capitalised.

Combine this with my undergraduate studies in English literature and I’m sure you’ll imagine where such thinking leads. My writing had to be something of which the pale stale males in universities would approve. Beret acquired. Combine that with the goal to move society in a better direction and you get work. Not storytelling. Not art. At best, an intellectual exercise. It didn’t involve relatable humanity. I’d internalised the idea that there was a “right way” to write. That there was a “right way” to live.

It was exhausting.

I had a great many plans for the things I’d accomplish and the way my life would go after graduation. I know, nothing special there: most people have had, have now, or will have that experience. Even the ones who stop with or drop out of high school have ideas about where their future might eventually lead. It’s hope. It’s human. Not a bad thing. Still, my plans included a fair number of novels, novellas, short story anthologies, poetry, and an epic fantasy series – among other things I won’t get into here.

That epic fantasy in particular was something I kept putting off. I wasn’t good enough as a writer, nor grown enough as a person, to craft the execution or the storytelling I hoped for in that project. I needed to be a full-time writer before I could justify the time and energy for it. It was going to be massive.

I flipped burgers after I graduated.

Yes, many of us are in or near subsistence living. Again, I’m not special. I put WAY too much pressure on the writing, especially as my academic plans fell through. I started submitting to calls with four-to-five-digit prize monies. Eventually, I was writing only for those. Or almost only.

The hope was to cobble together a few wins in the $10000-$20000 range and quit the day job so I could have the time and energy to work on my major projects. But everything I did had to be Important, so I wasn’t winning those contests. People want human stories, not ten pages of a guy in his driveway using a bunch of fancy words and elaborate thematic development. It should be well-crafted, yes, but the winners of those contests generally have done well with the craft. I’m not saying that I’m better than their work and they just manipulated the feelings of the judges. I’m saying I made a really great mug based on big fancy ideas but forgot to give it a handle.

Steaming hot coffee will go cold if you don’t have a way to pick it up.

I burned out. Writing is painful for me now. It’s hard to get your word count up if everything has to be perfect right now. It’s hard to motivate yourself to even sit at your desk if you know you’re not going to be working on any of the exciting stuff you started writing for in the first place. I don’t revel anymore in my favourite scenes or envision my own rich, fully-developed characters. I envision elaborate delivery structures like eschewing the three acts or using the Fichtean curve. I plan grammatical nuances and apply critical theoretical frameworks such as Derrida’s concepts of deconstruction to stories I haven’t actually written yet.

I’ve begun a paradigm shift. Going back to basics, learning to write for fun. I’m letting go of all the things the story might do, because I can’t control how readers take in my stories. They might have looked at the first sentence of this post and said, “So? Who are you?” Then they’d have moved on. Anyone who disagrees with my ideas for how the world could be better is going to put down what I’m writing. They’re not going to change.

So: what now?

Finding a new paradigm is like choosing to become a different person. How will the new me succeed? If success isn’t getting others to do better or society going in a different direction, then what is it? Sales? Those are just numbers. Critical reception? Sure, having snobs in berets tell me my story was good is nice. Having anyone like your stuff is nice. But there have been lots of movies with poor critical reception that I loved to pieces. For that matter, there have been award-winning and critic-celebrated books which I found boring and/ or pointless.

That’s the thing about art.

It’s about love. Maybe you love the pew-pew wum-wum of blasters and lightsabers in Star Wars. Maybe you love The Notebook. Westerns. Biography. The Expanse (the show was awesome!). Downton Abbey. The Mike Flanagan stuff on Netflix (I recommend The Haunting of Hill House). Those books where nothing happens. The ones that won a bunch of awards but seven people have read them, and while they’re touted as “literary,” everyone has a different idea of what that word means.

The audience who love the ensemble cast and rich historical trappings of Downton Abbey will find the violence and flat characterisation of traditional westerns to be unrewarding. I could go on with other examples and other statements that seem universal, but those broad-stroke statements often split off pretty quickly. Take the idea that some readers are excited about what humanity can do. Obviously, that means science fiction, right? Because SF is about taking the next step with a particular set of knowledge that we already have, such as space travel, robotics, or biology.

Yet people excited about what humanity can do might scoff at that stuff as make-believe and point to media or political texts. Others might be all about history, talking less about plans for the future or something in the works now and more about actual extraordinary things that actual people actually did. Still others read sports books and talk about training, remembering titans, records and stats, incredible pain tolerance, and fancy puck stuff (I don’t know sports).

How can it be about success if so many people like so many different things, and even people who say they like the same thing mean something different by the same word? Even love isn’t as obvious as it sounds. Do you mean the romance genre, or at least touching on the loves of characters and readers? Do you mean loving what you do? Most of us can likely agree that editing is tedious. Except for the ones who love it. But they’re weird, don’t mind them.

I joke, I joke.

In all seriousness, though, what am I here for? Is it about goals? What kind of goals? Am I writing just to be able to say I got in such-and-such a word count? Maybe trying to place high on some leaderboard – real or imagined – for prizes, awards, sales, copies, publications, or some other metric? Sounds like a numbers game, and writers are famous for losing interest in math class.

Every writer, I assume, feels that their work is important – if only to them. Lower case. Regular important. They don’t put any less of themselves into it, though. They’re still heartbroken or disappointed by rejections. They’re sad when they can’t get anybody to read their stuff. They invest their emotions, put in significant time and work. Even for trunk stories: the writing they specifically plan to hide away. It still costs them something. A piece of themselves. A real giving.

All this time, I’ve felt that there had to be something worth that giving. Some accomplishment, something built on the other side of all that work. I couldn’t bear putting my heart into it “for nothing.” But how do you write for something? You can’t control who decides to pick up your stuff. I can’t hack the computers of every English-speaking person on the Internet to compel them to read my Vocal posts before they can move on with their lives. So it can’t be about results.

It has to be the art. Whatever that means to me. If I craft a novel no one reads, that can be a disappointment, but I still need to be happy with what I’ve done. Even if the story doesn’t “do” anything. Art is full of such paradoxes and conundrums. It can hurt. It’s scary. But I love it too much to stop. Even with all the weight I’ve put on it. I’m not saying I need to be 16 again – I don’t think anybody needs that. But the goal, if there is a goal, has to be more human. Something like joy, maybe. Hope. Love has to be in there somewhere.

Instead of telling the writing what it has to be, I’m going to let it tell me what’s up.

I don’t usually ask for things on Vocal posts. Sometimes it just feels gauche. Like the writing should elicit the responses I want without having to ask. Nevertheless, I invite any of you who made it this far to drop a comment. Or craft a post of your own, if you’re finding your comment getting ahead of you. I’d love to hear how other writers are contending with the costs of being a writer and caring about what they do. Thanks for reading! ^_^

literature
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About the Creator

Matthew Daniels

Merry meet!

I'm here to explore the natures of stories and the people who tell them.

My latest book is Interstitches: Worlds Sewn Together. Check it out: https://www.engenbooks.com/product-page/interstitches-worlds-sewn-together

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Comments (2)

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  • Madoka Moriabout a year ago

    Great article. I've dealt with the same thing; I imagine most writers have. That idea that your writing must be a society-changing work of genius. I always make a conscious effort to try out different styles when writing, in large part to remind myself that both I and my writing are a work in progress. Best of luck with your new path! Looking forward to reading what comes out of it. ps: "stale pale males" had me ROLLING

  • Michele Hardyabout a year ago

    Very powerful thoughts here. I hope you share more about your writing journey and creating your art.

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