There is only one requirement

On what it takes to be a writer, what it takes to write, and how that whole mess makes us feel.

Somewhere in Texas. Listen while you read: Moth by Burial x Four Tet on Spotify/YouTube.

I sat on a Wanderthief for two months because I didn’t think it was good enough. I revisited it during my writing sessions; I played the song, I read it through. I changed a word or two, I let it sit for a few more days. But it was finished, mostly, long before I let it live.

The word that drives my panic about this specific type of writing is “sophomoric”: overconfident and immature. If the act of publishing betrays the belief that a thing has value, surely it is possible that I will find out later, when I least expect it, when it’s too late, that it, in fact, had none. Sophomoric. Even if the writing isn’t immature, the overconfidence of publishing it surely is. What if I’m wrong? What if it’s wrong? Am I doing it right?

I was convinced that over-incubated piece was sub-par even after I published it. I know better than to assess the absolute value of writing like an act of creation is a math equation with an answer, but I was out of the habit. I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like. I’ve been thinking about writing a lot. I’ve been thinking about how I haven’t been writing even more than that. So I forgot, briefly, that I needed only to assess this thing against its own potential — is it completely what it wants to be? — and then I needed to move on.

Of course, I got more responses about the thing I was sure was shit than anything else I’ve written here this year. Within hours of hitting “publish,” people were writing to say they were moved by the work. A. said she needed it. Q. said it was the best I’d done; she sent me passages as she read and re-read. I had believed in it only enough to push the button, and no more than that. It’s part of the practice, I told myself, to have a few duds. But look what happened. What is value anyway? What is good? What the fuck is art?

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There are a million reasons to stop writing. A few years ago, I stopped writing because I was sick of my own voice. I couldn’t trust it so I hated to hear it; as hard as I tried, I couldn’t get at the truth. Even when some honest idea slipped out, I wouldn’t listen to it. Then instead of opening my own ears, I raged that no one else was listening.

I stopped writing because I hated what I had to say. I stopped writing because I didn’t want anybody else to hear it.

At a bar in Brooklyn last summer, I made small talk with a woman in her 20s who had not yet decided whether she wanted to be my friend, my lover, or my replacement. Until she decided what it was she wanted from me, she definitely wanted to talk about how we were alike. She was a writer too, she said, but she hadn’t been writing much lately.

She didn’t know we had that second part in common most of all. So I gave her the only piece of advice I give myself: Babe, you’ve got one job.

I once told my writer friend C. that the only thing is to write. Everything else is a distraction. We were talking about systems, routines. I’d been looking to grease the wheels of the machine, thinking I might get myself writing again if I could remove some of the friction that irritates the hours between my brain and the page and the world. He had his frictions too.

All of that is nice. But it isn’t writing. I love my pen, but if I wear it instead of writing with it, it’s just a piece of jewelry. The systems and the routines mean nothing unless I write. The kind of writing I want to do also requires me to live the hell out of my life, to take big swings not knowing where they’ll lead and to drown myself in other people’s art. But even the living isn’t writing.

C. sends me memes sometimes, hustle culture stuff teasing my black-and-white approach to this very colorful thing we love to do. I get it, there’s a lot of overlap between a soulless #JustDoIt and my song called Just Write. One is a commercial transaction imploring us to sacrifice our own humanity to churn out more shit, no matter what, no matter how it feels, no matter the cost. The other, I hope, is an anchor. Solid. Reliable. Emotionless. Buried deep.

A writer is someone who writes. That’s it. It’s the best gem I’ve got. When I offered it to that not-writing “writer” woman, I felt a little guilty. It’s hard enough to hear when I’m cracking the whip on myself. To receive that indictment from the object of your libido while you’re flirting at the local dive bar? Yikes.

Knowing I’d said one honest thing was a salve for my mild guilt. Maybe she didn’t really want to talk about writing, maybe she didn’t really want to write. I’m glad I proceeded like she did.

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I’ve stopped writing because I was worried about who was reading me. I’ve stopped writing because I was worried no one was reading me. I’ve stopped writing because there were some people on the list I didn’t trust, then I stopped trusting most people.

It never lasts, the stopping. Something always gets me going again, even if evidence of those triumphant returns never makes it out of the desk drawer. Sometimes it’s a surge of defiance that gets me back to writing. But I can’t sustain defiance. And writing for revenge is almost always ugly.

It’s better when I mush around in the having stopped. If I slow down and do nothing for a while, get bored, get lost, some long-forgotten half-full pot in the back of my brain begins to simmer from the ambient heat of creativity unspent, collecting, gathering mass, vibrating against the walls of my self, waiting to be used, wanting to be used, desperate.

Another part of the formula for return is self-flagellation, but the truth is that pain rises unbidden. I really do believe that a writer is a person who writes. Not writing feels bad. Easy.

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People get weird when they find out I’m a writer. Sometimes they start using big words that they don’t understand in a misguided attempt to impress. Sometimes they ask me if I’ll write their memoir for them. They ask me what my days are like, how I do it, and I have to decide on the spot whether or not to confess that my “writing process” consists mainly of binge eating and deep cleaning the apartment.

If they find out I’m a writer while we’re texting, they’re prone to becoming hyper-aware of their own grammar. Suddenly every message in the thread is edited. Asterisks abound. They blame autocorrect. It all starts to feel like a test.

I find this particularly amusing because every writer I know is absolutely unhinged in informal communications. The rules go out the window. We play. How is? Where go? What be? We text run-on sentences with lots of all-caps exclamations to make clear what’s really IMPORTANT and make sure the emphasis we feel in our fucking uncontrollable little baby hearts makes it through both screens and into your eyeballs where it can burrow its way into your brain, an earwig, a worm, screaming the whole way at the top volume of its tiny body, REMEMBER ME.

We curse a lot.

Lots of women my age have been telling me lately that they always wanted to be writers. Still could be, I say. It’s not always appropriate, considering the topic of writing comes up during the job chat and we all ask what we do for work so soon after meeting, but I want to grab their hands in mine and look into their eyes the way that, apparently, I’ve been told, freaks people out. I want to brush their hair from their foreheads and tuck it behind their ears, where I will press my lips up close to that soft flesh and whisper the best advice I have ever known: There is only one requirement.