'How Can I Become a Writer?'

Make writing your top priority, but build a balanced, sustainable life around that dream.

Les Belles Vacances (1964), Jane Graverol

Hey Heater, how are things?

It’s me again, the Italian guy. Not sure if you accept a second letter but writing to you feels good so I’ll do it anyway. Ironically, it’s now 9 am and I was supposed to start writing two hours ago but I couldn’t find a North Star. So this letter is an attempt to find it.

I hope you had a great Sunday.

I certainly did. Out of town there’s a garden right beside an old church I always go to when I want to stop talking and start listening, I know the caretaker and we had a small chat while the setting sun offered us a red sky. When I told him I’m planning to leave (again) he kindly replied before leaving: “Remember one thing... the best place is always inside yourself.”

That phrase stuck in me since then.

It made me cry how uplifting and deep a “tiny” conversation could get and how sensitive people can turn a simple phrase into the meaning of life. Because that’s what it meant for me. That’s why I cried, for the beauty of all of it: For the love I felt for myself, for him, for all the people I’ve met in my life, for nature, and for you too (yes you Heater!) You helped me a lot just by reading your words and I’m eternally grateful. Like, I will remember you for ALL MY LIFE. That’s crazy right? Our eyes never met and yet a lot is happening. Mind blowing.

You previously said it feels like to you that “Lifting others out of despair and share my ability to recognize the magic and joy underneath the mundane surface of life” were some of my values, and you were spot on. But I don’t know how to do that on the page like you do.

Or maybe I do but I don’t know the format to use. An essay? A tweet? A column?

Two years ago, after the most depressing period of my life I realized my purpose in life was helping other people cultivate emotional awareness. And since meditation is a core aspect of my life, I “randomly” found a training program that I happily finished (but quickly realized that specific method wasn’t my way to mix “purpose and money.”) I want to write. And even if I had a few ghostwriting clients before right now I have 0. And I feel like a lost hungry ghost.

But I love my life. I love myself. And to be honest, I feel like I already won in life just because I have my meditation practice and for the collection of all these “tiny but deep conversations.”

The thing is... as a 29 year-old, I feel it’s time to focus on my career to build something I want to do for life. And if I don’t do it now, I will regret it forever.

My old father and younger girlfriend say to get a job (fair enough from their POV), but the moment I made $4,000 writing for someone else it all clicked and I thought, “That’s what I want to do.” I don’t want to be an employee (which is the reason why I started learning all of this in the first place!). And this is where I’m at after a year and a half, making money as a writer and bringing joy to my work to make it satisfying.

If this is foolish and childish please forgive me.

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, I jus tdon’t know how to get out of it with a clear structure to follow.

Can you help me find a way out, please?

Much love,

Trying Very Hard

Dear TVH.

A heater is an appliance that keeps people warm. I am not a heater.

I say this not because I take your misspelling of my name personally (I don’t) or even because I prefer to be addressed as Polly here (I do). I loved your last letter and I love this one, too. So I say this because many people take my words so personally that they imagine me as a kind of useful appliance, or as a mother or an older sister or an agony aunt. I’m not a big fan of that term. I don’t see myself as playing that kind of a role. I don’t think my writing is very motherly or sisterly. Being associated with AGONY and being treated like someone’s elderly AUNT? That’s not how I see myself.

That said, I get called a wise older sister or aunt or mom all the time. But I don’t let other people’s experiences of me or the role I play in their lives change the way I see my work or myself.

Likewise, when I tell a stranger that I write an advice column, I know that they’re likely to imagine something very different from what I actually do. They might think of Dear Abby or Dear Prudence or Ask Amy or Dear Sugar. They might think of Elizabeth Gilbert, Brené Brown, or Glennon Doyle. They might picture someone giving a TED talk, or writing a book about how you need to buy yourself some flowers.

I’m not better or worse than any of these things, I just don’t feel like I exist in that universe. In order to value my work as Polly, I simply have to do the work. I read letters and reply to them honestly. I relish the time I spend connecting with strangers. I don’t see myself as making a product. I just show up and write words that make sense to me, and each time I write, Ask Polly changes ever so slightly. My understanding of the world evolves and so does this column. I offer up everything I have, everything I know, and everything that still perplexes me.

I’m not that wise. I’m a work in progress. I’m mostly just available and honest. My belief is that when we show up and work hard to reach out to each other, magic happens.

I’m telling you all of this because I want you to understand how personal and unique each writer’s path forward needs to be. You feel comforted by me, so you imagine that I also know the exact route you should take to becoming a writer. But that’s as fantastical as imagining me as an aunt or as an appliance that keeps you warm.

No one else can tell you how to do this. No one knows if you should be writing essays, tweets, columns, or anything else. It depends on how you feel when you write an essay. It depends on what you want to express in a column.

Even if I knew the right steps to becoming a writer and I told them to you, you’d feel like someone else’s employee as you took those steps. You’d feel alienated from the process of deciding what you want to write. You’d start to feel like a functioning appliance and nothing more.

The central job of writing is to figure out what you love. You write until you please yourself. You write until you feel proud. That can take a while. You have to be patient, experiment, look at your own work, and decide what to improve. You have to return to the site of your failures over and over again.

This is where your values come into play. You remember why you’re doing it. You remember what you love. You feel your connection to that church caretaker. You feel your connection to the people you love, to your life, to this moment, to the letter I wrote to you last week, to me, and you resolve to keep believing in who you are no matter what.

If, instead, you follow someone else’s instructions, you don’t develop the same relationship to your writing. And then on days when you don’t have anything to write? You see yourself as broken, useless, malfunctioning.

One of the most difficult dimensions of becoming a writer and staying a writer is understanding what you want to write and why you want to write it. To be honest, this sense of purpose and direction is more complicated than mere values and principles. At times you have to recognize what the process of writing does for you. You have to bow down to other people’s work that you admire, and you have to study it closely. You have to notice what makes you treasure some writing and dislike other writing.

Experimenting with essays, tweets, and columns alike is a good first step. But the main purpose of these experiments is to see what’s inside of you. What kinds of formats inspire you? Which genres feel too restrictive? What do you write that makes you feel proud? What makes you feel pure despair? Sticking around and feeling that despair is part of the process.

Right now I’m working on a novel. I feel committed to it. But I don’t know what I’m doing. Even once I’m done, I won’t know much. My job right now is to notice which parts of what I’m writing are working and which parts feel inadequate. So part of my daily work requires reckoning with my negative reactions.

If I don’t tolerate (and also anticipate!) the pain of feeling that my work isn’t good enough, I won’t shape my novel into something I feel good about, proud of, and excited to share with others.

A helpful and wise stranger might say to me, “Shut up and trust that your book is great! Finish it and don’t worry about it!” These are extremely nice words to hear at the right time. But overall, my goal isn’t to vomit words and then resolve to see them as brilliant. (THIS HAS BEEN MY GOAL IN THE PAST, FOR SURE!) My goal right now is to write a novel that I’d want to read. My standards are high. If I lower my standards, I’ll just stop writing.

I know this about myself. And I don’t want to stop. I want to dare to believe that I can create fiction that meets my standards.

I know that writing a shitty novel isn’t worth the effort to me. I can either write something good or I can quit. I’m not saying I’m aiming to get good reviews and win prizes, either. I’m saying that my only aim right now is to please myself. I know that it’s going to take some time to do the job right.

One of the big challenges of being 29 years old is that you tend to feel impatient to become a successful adult. You want to speed through whatever obstacles it takes to get there. But if you’re going to write, you’re going to need to slow down and study and observe and follow your instincts.

It sounds like you can get work as a ghostwriter, but you’re going to need a steady job in order to pay the rent. And you told me in your last letter that you want to move out from living with your father. I think you need to stop seeing this time as a testing ground for the rest of your life and start looking for ways to make writing and living and supporting yourself feel sane and sustainable over the long haul.

Getting a non-writing-related job doesn’t mean you’re not a writer. Believing that doing paid work will prevent you from writing is like thinking that someone called me a heater so I must be an appliance that warms people up. You define who you are for yourself. You show yourself what you love by doing that work every day..

You have a lot of slow work to do. If your ghostwriting work dries up, it makes sense to get a paid job doing other things. I wouldn’t have written books if I hadn’t kept full-time writing jobs at the same time. And as my life has become easier, it’s been more challenging to write books. You need a lot of rigid structure to get writing done.

The crucial thing is to prioritize your writing and your dreams. You put your writing first. You do it when you have the most energy and focus. You insist on jobs that you can fit around that priority. As long as you’re putting writing first and putting in the hours there, you won’t feel as bad about having to make a living from something else at times. You’ll see it as a way to sustain your writing practice and balance your life.

When you find yourself wanting clear, precise answers from someone who seems to know everything, that tells you that you’re feeding a fantasy where you get everything you want very quickly just by doing the right things in the right order. I used to think that way when I was younger. I got caught up in the idea that someone successful could share their secrets with me and everything would be easy and magical from that moment forward.

But what the church caretaker told you is so true: The most important thing you need to honor, protect, nurture, and defend right now is what’s inside you. You need to make sure to set up a life that cultivates that joy and sense of peace you describe in your letter. You don’t have to feel anxious about solving every dimension of your life at this moment. You don’t have to become a successful writer overnight. What you seem to want right now is to blend your love of writing with a sense of independence and a feeling of deep peace and trust in who you are.

Focus on cultivating those things together. This means you have to find ways to tap into the pure love and optimism you feel when you’re out in the world, when you meditate, when you remember what matters to you, and you have to bring that energy to this challenge of becoming a writer and also supporting yourself. You have to set your path based on what you already know about what you love and what you don’t like at all. You have to patiently construct a life that never feels like there’s an alarm going off, like you have to beat the clock in order to succeed. You need to make peace and calm and patience a top priority.

We all believe, at different times in our lives, that there’s some shortcut we can take to avoid hard, slow work. But there’s no shortcut, now or ever. That’s okay. That’s what makes all of the work so satisfying, so gratifying: You feel your way in the dark. That’s actually what’s so amazing about writing as a way of life. You have to trust yourself in order to do it. You have to believe. You have to take a leap, every single day, and hope that some magic happens eventually.

It’s not for everyone. But it seems clear that it is for you. So find ways to take leaps, big and small, every single day. Make it a priority. Don’t be afraid of real jobs and paid work along the way. This is a lifetime we’re talking about. You’re learning how to live well, to balance your life, to do a wide range of things in order to feel good and strong.

Most of all remember that you aren’t just good enough or strong enough. You were born to do this. You love to do hard things, you love to leap, you love to invent and discover and connect. Follow what you love. Throw your heart into everything you do. You will discover joy, not in the distant future, but right now. Find another garden. Talk to another curious stranger. You’re more than an aspiring appliance. Relish all of the places inside of you.

Polly

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