The Honest Pursuit of a Literary Writer

It isn’t a hobby, it is a lifelong pursuit requiring isolation and selfishness that will cost finances, relationships and happiness.

A literary writer will learn to write, even when they do not want to or have little to say.

They will miss and avoid social events and birthdays.

Lovers will leave because they chose to spend more time with words than with them.

Writers must survive their own internal critic and reject their own work first.

Then face rejection from editors, publishers and literary magazines countless times over — beyond the point of reason. Beyond sanity, at times.

This cycle will continue for years and happen beyond the point of fairness.

Logic would suggest a writer give it all up, but they won’t. Because they can’t and understand there is beauty in the cruel nature of rejection.

Instead, the literary writer will move on with lessons and acceptance that it is not their time. Read and write for hours every single day until they understand it is the ritual act of process that wills them forward.

The literary writer will put down far more creative words that end up in the bin than on the page.

They do this for nothing and accept it as an apprenticeship, even when frustration threatens sanity.

A writer will learn to be with quiet. They observe from distance and keep secrets.

To reimagine the mundanity of daily life and question the status quo becomes a game they play with themselves.

A literary writer can move through the world like an uninvited guest at a party.

And accept that no one will care to notice them at times, but will also on occasion, consider why they are there in the first place.

Those who do notice will often view a literary writer as alien or uncommon to what they understand within a social convention the writer cares little about.

A literary writer will learn to rarely, if ever, consider why or if they exist in these places.

They live instinctively on the edges of society even when among maddened crowds.

Writers have little judgment of the world, but too much for their own work.

They seek to extract from their surroundings only what helps express the human condition more honestly when with the page.

They turn truth into fiction and mundane prose into poignant verse.

This process requires excruciating levels of focus, expression and editing. The cost is often countless torn up pages and petty addictions.

One day a rogue line may fall into the mind of a writer perfectly formed.

But a writer understands this was earnt from countless hours with the work of greats and then their own work.

A writer can watch a draft of a book become a piece of flash fiction, a collection turn into a lone poem. And then smile, knowing it is the life the writer chose.

Without thorough edits, fresh eyes, ample distance — a writer can never truly become a writer.

A writer never writes for the reader but will long for an audience.

Their discipline is to keep any readership as an abstraction, indirectly found somewhere else in the mind.

A literary writer must serve only the story or poem.

A literary writer, despite the cost of endeavour, must not lie to themselves about the work, no matter how long they endured.

They will always choose a knife over rubber when it comes time for a final edit.

They allow writing to become a ritual or a compulsion. This will not change through years of hardship empty of praise, respect or recognition.

A literary writer can absorb, imitate and consume a range of literature in mass volume as a learning and for pleasure.

Or must accept their creativity is no longer as boundless as the imagination.

A writer may never rival another writer they admire.

But they enter their craft knowing that destitution, isolation, and alienation are the common final acts in the stage play of a writer’s life anyway.

A literary writer continues to write in spite of this truth.

Because they are in fact a writer.

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Originally published on Tumbleweed Words →