I love being a writer. It’s quite possibly the only job in the world where one can be poor enough to qualify for welfare and still able to respond to the question what do you do with an answer that genuinely impresses people. If I weren’t engaged, and didn’t believe in the whole Christian chastity thing, being an author might even get me laid.
One of the only things I don’t love about being a writer is, well, writing. Because writing’s hard. Somehow, every night, when I’m pondering what I will write the next day, my imagination brims with endless possibilities. It’s amazing how great a writer I am at night when I’m not near a computer. At night, I’m Dostoevsky. Then I sit at the computer the next morning and an eerie depression comes over me, one laden with self-doubt and self-hatred and self-stupidity. I never feel so unqualified to be a writer as when I open my computer each day to begin writing. I spend the next half hour fantasizing about being a fireman or a farmer.
It’s at this point when I generally break for coffee.
When I finally get back to my desk— which varies from day-to-day, depending on how bored the baristas at Starbucks are of my idle conversation— I force myself to get a little work done. At this point, I remember anew what I dislike second most about being a writer: acknowledging who I really am. You see, I desperately want my life to read something like a Kristofferson ballad even though it has, for the most part, played out like a Britney Spears song. For instance, as a Christian writer, I find myself wishing that I’d found God over a bottle of Jack Daniels, or aboard a southbound freight to Nowheresville, Georgia, or something literary like that. But the truth is, I came to faith one night as a five-year-old when my mommy tucked me into bed. This is both highly depressing and highly problematic for me. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to make a story like that sound sexy?
Meanwhile, I’m supposed to know what my “style” is. Which is such nonsense, because artists are constantly evolving and constantly being influenced by (read: “borrowing from”) one another, but you have to pretend like you’re so confident in your own voice. So the dilemma becomes: what voice do I pretend to be confident in? If I’m reading Anne Lamott, I want to be Anne Lamott. If I’m reading David Sedaris, I want to be David Sedaris. I recently went through a kick where I read and loved both of the actor Ethan Hawke’s novels and suddenly, I wanted to be Ethan Hawke (which, as far as I could tell, meant I wanted to be J.D. Salinger). Now, the root of this particular dilemma, of course, is that I want to be liked by everyone, so I want everyone to think I’m smart, which means I want Anne Lamott’s fans to think I’m deep and I want David Sedaris’s fans to think I’m funny and I want Ethan Hawke’s fans to think that, were she to meet me, Uma Thurman may be interested in popping out my kiddies, too. But you can’t please everyone all the time, which is depressing, because that’s what we writers are ultimately seeking: approval.
Finally, once I’ve had my coffee and remembered who I am and settled on the proper writing style and realized I can’t please everyone (a routine that generally comes together sometime around 11AM or so), I’m ultimately reminded of what I dislike most about being a writer, namely, a Christian writer: how sure I’m supposed to be about everything. And by that I mean how Christians expect their writers to subscribe to very specific ideas and doctrines and theologies, and to then back them up dogmatically. To me, this need for absolute certainty is the single most dangerous problem facing the Christian religion (or, any religion) today.
I guess what I’m getting at is this: each day, after several hours in front of the computer, as my screen finally begins filling with words, I remember something: deep down, when I get past the fear, when I push past the nagging self-doubt, I’m creative. I know who I am. I know what styles work best for me. And I know its okay to write about God without pretending to have all the answers.
The whole thing is an ugly, vicious cycle, and it usually takes me the better part of the day to get beyond my own fear and cynicism, but when I finally do, I remember why I do this in the first place: because I love to write, because I’m pretty good at it, because I want very much to be among those rising voices of compassion in today’s increasingly polemic religious conversation.
And then, of course, there’s also that whole part about having a good answer when people ask me what I do for a living.
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