Measure of Success

Exercise Your InkTank

Many of the writers I know measure their own worth by the quality and quantity of the writing they’re doing. No matter what else they may accomplish in the week, if they don’t get good pages, they don’t feel good about themselves. (Somehow, it usually doesn’t work the other way around, perhaps because, when the writing is going well, all of the other fucked up things about life seem to come into plain view.)

If you think of yourself as a writer, your sense of self will inevitably be influenced by the success of your work, whatever that may mean for you, but judging your life by your performance in one small area is an almost certain recipe for depression and anxiety, which can wear on you until it becomes what Coleridge called “an indefinite indescribable Terror.” Coleridge considered himself a paralytic writer once he reached his thirties and he wasted much of the rest of his life on opium addiction. That’s probably a fate most of us would like to avoid, but how do we maintain a commitment to our craft if we don’t invest and invest fully? Where do we draw the line between ambition and masochism? Gertrude Stein said, “You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result.” In my darkest moments, I think that’s easier said than done, but I’ve also got a few tricks up my sleeve:

1. I try to have a few different kinds of projects in the works at all times. When the novel overwhelms me, I turn to one of the three or four short stories I’ve got in the works. And if those don’t appeal to me, I work on an essay or some prose poems. Or, I just focus on reading. I consider the time I spend with books, time I’m spending on my own work.

2. I let people make fun of me for my self-important writerly drama. No amount of earnest pleading with me will convince me to lighten up about the amount of work I’ve been getting done lately, but call me an asshole and I’ll probably drop it.

3. If I can’t get over that ten page hump (the obstacle that stalls most of my stories, even those that I finish quickly) I look for fragments of stories that might juxtapose nicely with the work I’ve already done.

Give It A Shot
Here are a few items that I’ve been keeping in reserve. Select one and begin writing on it, with a piece of your own work in mind. Don’t worry about the connective tissue between the two. Let the language itself lead you from word to word.

1. While having lunch at a neighbor’s house, a woman hears her own husband’s description on the news. When she sees his photo on the television, she has no doubt that it’s him.

2. Since the early 1990s, trillions of discarded plastic items have converged, held together by swirling currents, to form the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch that now covers an area twice the size of the United States and weighs about 100 million tons.

3. A 25-year-old woman was arrested for assault after fighting with her boyfriend in the shower over whether the his dog could join them. The boyfriend said that he hoped his next girlfriend would appreciate the dog more.