What it means to be a writer

When I made my visit to Chicago, one night I found myself sitting on a bench in Wicker Park wondering what I’d meant when years ago I’d subconsciously decided somewhere along the way to commit myself only to writing “important” stories, “important” poems. I was in transit to adulthood now that I was out of school, and it was becoming increasingly clear that “important” only meant “self-important.”

The problem was that, in our heads, we’re all geniuses. We are all the stars of our own lives, as David Foster Wallace had once noted; the most important person to ever exist. We’re all cologned with some slight expectation of greatness.

The problem was also that, when you listened to someone like David Foster Wallace speak, you realized that you were not a genius, and that you were doomed to a lesser level of recognition that was inevitable for writers in this culture anyway. Regardless of your talent, you’re not going to be writing the Great American novel; as you’d long suspected, there are too many Americas, and too many brilliant Americans already writing about each of them.

So I sat on my little bench in Chicago penning the obituary for my own glory. Good. Nice to get that out of the way.

Let’s talk about writing as a tool for survival.

Those of us not in grad school will likely have to adjust to the eight or more hours of day that we will spend at an entry-level job doing little tasks for nominal pay. We have to confront that, four these eight (or more) hours, our brains are sedentary. Fielding calls for customer service means few synapses need to be fired. Less connections need to be made. Your brain becomes maximally efficient at doing menial work that had required very little effort to begin with.

This is your brain on the twenty-first century.

Writing will help keep you in intellectual shape, like jogging for a few miles a week. If you maintain any standard of quality for your work, fiction should force you to maintain a sense of clarity over long distances of plot and characterization, helping to combat the ADHD tendency of your Google-adapted thought process. On the opposite side of the spectrum, poetry will encourage you to reach different parts of your brain not normally accessible and smash them together to create something unexpected.

Reading, naturally, is also encouraged, so that you encounter minds other than your customers’.

Now, what does it mean to be literary if you’re not a professional, or a career academic?

In many regards, it’s about being a repository of culture, thoughtfulness, and idiosyncrasy. Contrary to hipsterism—which is being subjected to increasingly aggressive marketing these days—it’s about being interesting not through the clothes you wear or the quality of your sarcasm but by the depth and breadth of the ideas you hold. People may think reading is dying—it is—84% of Americans want to write a book, yet only a fraction have read one this year—but YouTube notwithstanding, writing will at least be around for as long as people don’t want to embarrass themselves. Writing is the final defense against a culture of instantaneity that values sound-bites and missteps more than thoughtful presentation.

And in a society of rampant consumerism, where sadness is inefficient, and unprofitable (except to sell antidepressants) writing reminds us that it’s still okay to try and be the heroes of our own lives even when things aren’t going so hot. No matter how bad things get, your day, your life still has value; art can still at least be made, no matter how pedestrian.

When David Foster Wallace died, his friend and public radio literary critic Michael Silverblatt commented on his show that “The death of David Foster Wallace seems to speak to the difficulty of life itself; depressed or not, brilliant or not, are we living in a time that makes it hard for us to find the things that allow us to want to stay alive?”

Perhaps. Writing and art can’t heal everything. But it’s still worth trying to leave a testament to the desire we’d once had to be so much greater than ourselves.

And I think that’s something.