I’m sharing a powerful quote with you today from Paul Auster, born in Newark, New Jersey in 1947. He is the author of The New York Trilogy (1985–86),a set of idiosyncratic detective stories that deal with questions of identity and existential thought, as well as a memoir, The Invention of Solitude (1982), and several other books, including the novels Moon Palace (1989), Oracle Night (2004), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), and recently Man in the Dark (2008) and Invisible (2009).
He wrote:
Becoming a writer is not a ‘career decision’ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.
He also said:
I don’t know why I do what I do. If I did know, I probably wouldn’t feel the need to do it. … Surely it is an odd way to spend your life — sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist — except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.
“Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing?”
Good question. I am 200 pages into the writing of my new novel. If I’m really lucky, I’ll have a first draft ready by June. The process of building a story out of my imagination is intense and amazing, as well as exhausting. But building a story from the ground up is only the beginning of the process. To take a book (or work of art, or poem, or song) from inception to publication and beyond, is a journey of a thousand steps. It is the biggest mountain you will ever climb. And writing (or painting, sculpting, or singing) every day is only part of the training.
Would I choose to do this if I were a sane, reasonable person? That’s debatable. I would prefer to do something much easier. Something that didn’t involve rejection and criticism. Not to mention, marketing! Yet I keep doing it. Day after day. Year after year. Despite the hardships which the devotion to an art undoubtedly brings, I keep going. Why? Because if I didn’t, I feel like I would lose the best part of myself. The part that is creative, resilient, brave and a believer in imagination and artistic expression. The part that believes in soul.
What do you think? Does an artists’ and writers’ vocation somehow choose them or do they have a choice? I’d love to hear from you.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
A comment from one of my lovely email subscribers:
“Hi Susan,
I do think writing and the creative commitment is one that exists as a deep yearning within our souls…to respond to it is a choice….but I also believe that to be called and to choose otherwise leaves that yearning as an ever-present gniggling in one’s being….a recognition that there is something unfulfilled….
I love your blog…makes me think!!!”
Have you guys noticed that there are some really cool, thoughtful readers of this blog? Of course I’d love to have more comments. But hey, it’s quality not quantity, right?
> Becoming a writer is not a ‘career decision’ like becoming a doctor or a
> policeman.
Oh come on, that’s a silly thing to say. Ask any dedicated doctor or police officer and they’d really have an argument with you. I have friends who are doctors and they can’t do anything else, and have dreamed of being doctors since they were children. They do some of their work for free in other countries on their own time, so it was hardly a “career decision.”