On the Life of an Artist

Since 2004, I have been working hard with no remuneration. In that time I have produced four manuscripts of 50,000 words or more that need to be revised and edited. How often do I browbeat myself for not making more of myself? Why does all this labour seem pointless, unworthy, senseless? Browsing The Atlantic Monthly I came across something which helped both to define myself, and to give voice to people who live quiet, hermetic, and let's say it, poor, lives for their art. I quote this section from So You Want to Be a Writer in the hopes that it may help others who are dedicated to their art despite its lowly value in a society that measures success by financial standards:

"Wallace Stegner, an author who served as director of the Creative Writing Center at Stanford ... [wrote an] essay "To a Young Writer" (November 1959) [that] took the form of a letter addressed to a former student—a twenty-something young woman with literary aspirations, a graduate degree, and an unpublished novel. Stegner sought at once encourage her and to give her an honest picture of how difficult her career path would be.

He began by expressing empathy for the uncertainty she must now be feeling:

To date, from all your writing, you have made perhaps five hundred dollars for two short stories and a travel article. To finance school and to write your novel you have lived meagerly with little encouragement and have risked the disapproval of your family, who have understandably said, "Here is this girl nearly thirty years old now, unmarried, without a job or a profession, still mooning away at her writing as if life were forever. Here goes her life through her fingers while she sits in cold rooms and grows stoop-shouldered over a typewriter." So now, with your book finally in hand, you want desperately to have some harvest: a few good reviews, some critical attention, encouragement, royalties enough to let you live and go on writing...

You would like to be told that you are good and that all this difficulty and struggle and frustration will give way gradually or suddenly, preferably suddenly, to security, fame, confidence, the conviction of having worked well and faithfully to a good end and become someone important to the world.

Stegner warned, however, that fame, fortune, and accolades would most likely not be forthcoming. Not because her work was not good: "You write better than hundreds of people with established literary reputations.” The problem, he explained, was that her writing was aimed over the heads of the mass of readers, and would therefore only ever be appreciated by a small audience of "thoughtful readers." She would thus always find herself struggling—"pinched for money, for time, for a place to work."

So was all this worth it? "I would not blame you,” he wrote, “if you ... asked, Why spend ten years in an apprenticeship to fiction only to discover that this society so little values what you do that it won't pay you a living wage for it?"

But in the end, he argued, living to practice an art that one does well is its own reward:

For you ... it will have to be art. You have nothing to gain and nothing to give except as you distill and purify ephemeral experience into quiet, searching, touching little stories ... and so give your uncommon readers a chance to join you in the solidarity of pain and love and the vision of human possibility.

But isn't it enough? For lack of the full heart's desire, won't it serve?"

I think you have to just not care about what people think of you while you scribble away. Future fame or fortune are irrelevant. You do it while your family and friends shake their heads and wonder why with all that education and ability you seem to be doing nothing, and they pity you and shake their heads and you have to just let them. There is no teleology to it; simply, you have to release yourself of the books that want to be born. You labour alone, that's just the way it is. No point fighting it. Without "a product," a society based on capitalism, commercialism has no way to gage value. Until the book is written and published, there is no "product," and, therefore, no "value."

Though I don't know about you, personally I haven't found that giving up and walking away from one's muse is an option. Exigencies of the muse, though, is another topic.