September 29, 2004

A Sense of Vocation

I’ve been thinking a lot about vocation lately. What is it that makes me—that makes you—a writer? Is it some accident of genetics, a longing to reform the world, an overzealous love affair with language, that has committed us to this path? And where will following this path take you? Take us? What is the ultimate goal?

It may be that there are individual answers to this question. I suspect, though, that some more collective and deep-seated response drives us all. If you’re a religious person, this impulse might be religious. In any event, there is something spiritual about it, something holy—do you agree?

Storytelling itself is a way to uncover the sacred in everyday acts.

A year ago I lived in Lincoln, Nebraska. Lincoln is a strange and unprepossessing place, geographically, for a writer to reside. First, there are the fields. Endlessly flat, monotonously incessant, stretching from horizon point to horizon point. Willa Cather, whom Nebraska seizes upon with the avidity of the poor, the dispossessed, as “one of its own,” terrified Cather in this regard. She felt agoraphobic before all that space. Was frightened that it might swallow her up. Cather preferred rock cliffs, segregated spaces, arranged, aesthetically beautified.

But—though I lived in Nebraska—I certainly believed that I could accomplish the same thing that Cather did, at least in my own mind. Seize my acres of mental space, arrange them to my own intense aesthetic satisfaction. Inhabit the mental spaces I claim at least as avidly as I dwell in the everyday world…the one other people prefer to call “real.”

I suspect that you’re exactly like me in this regard.

Beginning writers in my fiction classes are pleased to discover the ramifications of craft issues because they truly believe, some of them, that becoming a great writer is more a matter of talent than of vocation, and they’re relieved to discover that there are eminently clear principles that can help make the entire process easier for them, not to mention less mysterious. But we who dwell in this world know better. If we do, truly, have what might be described as a “religious sense of vocation,” then craft issues are the tenets, the principles, of our religion. I confess that I wake up thinking about odd points of view, for example. I had a dream the other night that I was writing a story in the first-person plural. The voice rose in my head during the night: I could see the collective cast of players, those who would become my characters in this as-yet-unrealized story. I woke up smiling, I confess. But—like you—I’m the sort of person who becomes dreamy-eyed, standing in line at the bank, because I’m so immersed in this universe of my own creation that even the most ordinary transactions (“Hello. How may I help you today?”) become infused with this tremendous sense of significance.

It’s the best way to live one’s life, I’ve concluded.

If you’re at all like me (and it appears that you are), a day filled with writing is a day that shimmers from morning till dusk. Writing days are the ones in which all of the errands progress smoothly, the tedium of the nine-to-five job doesn’t seem quite so tedious (oh, those snatched moments on the computer during an extra-long lunch), and the boss’s harsh words evaporate, mid-air, before they ever reach our ears.

I’ve always wondered if some people are genetically hard-wired to experience certain emotional states. We know, for example, that the brains of the clinically depressed feature some sort of a chemical imbalance. Is there a different sort of chemical imbalance at play in the brain of a writer? What is it that makes us crave language itself so fervently? The process, the work? I do know that I feel anxious, sad, a little cruel, maybe, when I’ve been deprived of writing for too long. I’d have to be emotionally numb not to notice that the writing process itself affects me like a kind of a drug, elevating me to new heights of rapture when the work is going well. But is writing always a positive drug? You hear about Alcoholics Anonymous. Sex Addicts Anonymous. Is writing ever a drug that could be abused? I believe that it can, that it can be used to avoid the real world, to push people away. But I’ve never felt that having one foot planted in this ethereal realm has been anything but beneficial to me. Do you have the same response?

And does this mean that we’re both profoundly addicted to the process?

I know that—deprived of solitude for too long, which I crave—my sense of self starts to erode.

The same thing happens when I’m deprived of my ability to write.

But I prefer to believe that I’m not simply addicted…but blessed. There isn’t a day that goes by in my life that I don’t thank God (or someone!) that I‘m a writer. I don’t know if all of you keep a gratitude journal, as I do. But if you do, write this down:

“Today, I wrote.”

You’ll see what a powerful—and profound—statement this can be.

Why?

If you’re a writer, you live in the real world and in the world of the imagination. Truly, you possess a magical dual existence. You experience things the rest of the world doesn’t. And if you’re profoundly lucky, you experience these thoughts, these feelings, these wild and “out-there" ideas, on a moment-to-moment basis.

When I lived in Nebraska, I lived in the midst of a type of conformist culture. There’s a God in Lincoln, and it isn’t Jesus, and it isn’t Buddha. It’s football. I’m tolerant of other “religions” (or try to be) beyond the artistically centered variety, so I tended to ignore the prevailing tide of “single-speak/single-thought” that swept past me then daily. On any Saturday during football season, venturing downtown, I could become lost in the infamous “Sea of Red”—the masses of Lincolnites and out-of-towners supporting the Huskers with a show of team colors. And one day before I left Nebraska for the pure-sky country and glimmering red dirt of New Mexico, I was wandering, near-lost, inside the crush of Crimson People, and I became excited by a thought—a thought that I was positive no one else in those thousands of teeming people was experiencing right then:

I was writing a story in third-person!

No, how could this be interesting to anyone? Well, it was doubly exciting to me because I‘d discovered, for myself, a near-forgotten POV: I hadn’t written in third person for at least two years. Better yet, the story was about Diane Arbus, and this single story represented the beginning of a novel about Arbus that I’m still, currently, writing. There I was, walking down those rubbled 1950’s sidewalks in Lincoln, the sound of “Go, Huskers” swelling insistently around me, the chatter that revolved around plays and statistics becoming louder and louder as people squeezed into bars, set up laughing for tailgate parties at Memorial Stadium. And I was thinking about Diane Arbus. Hell (thanks to my method acting), I was Diane Arbus, preparing to photograph the insititution/asylum where she took what some people consider her most damning photos, the unbearably explicit photos of the retarded grinning, cartwheeling, or looking sadly blank. And I was driving a truck. And I was smoking (and I don’t even smoke!). And I was so worked up that I nearly knocked up against the gut of a stout Husker fan who’d wandered unwittingly into my path. This is what I was thinking about (projecting myself into third):

There was the building, elongated, white, with its eggshell-fragile facade. And the girls never congregated there at the exact moment she expected them. It wasn’t ever at dawn, because she marked the hour driving up to Redfern in her truck, the green, beat-up Chevy jerking forward, back, on balding tires. She mouthed her cigarette as she drove, clenched it between two fingers with their exaggeratedly bitten nails, mouthed it and swallowed, coughing, the smoke, and she rarely looked at the road but at the sunrise, a bright crimson burst, like a bloodied chick exploding into birth, balled up and red-drenched, sopping.

And all I could think was: thank you, Somebody, for allowing me to inhabit this dual universe. Maybe it’s a matter of genetics. Maybe it’s a matter of a chemical brain imbalance. But most of the world simply doesn’t long for what we crave. Yet, our hunger is both our blessing and our vocation. And—in the end—what we do day-to-day has little to do with the more external rewards attached to our pursuit: the “fame,” the journal pubs, the tangible recognition. It comes from inside us, this process. It’s what drives us inevitably forward, day-by-day, so, at the end of our lives, we’ll know that—unlike the Husker fans who proclaim “I could live and die for football, YEAH”—we’ve been both individual and heroic on some level because we’ve sought something of the spirit, something of the beautiful, something that we’ve carried inside us all along, just waiting for us to discover it.

My book

Hope & Other Dangerous Pursuits

In hardcover

Buy a Signed Copy!

In Morocco

De l’espoir et autres quêtes dangereuses

In Italian

La speranza e altri sogni pericolosi

In Portuguese

A Esperança È Uma Travessia

In french

De l’espoir et autres quêtes dangereuses

In dutch

Hoop en andere gevaarlijke verlangens

Hoop en andere gevaarlijke verlangens (paperpack)

In spanish

Esperanza y Otros Sueños

Monthly Archives

April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
July 2007
June 2007
May 2007
April 2007
March 2007
February 2007
January 2007
December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006
June 2006
May 2006
April 2006
March 2006
February 2006
January 2006
December 2005
November 2005
October 2005
September 2005
August 2005
July 2005
June 2005
May 2005
April 2005
March 2005
February 2005
January 2005
December 2004
November 2004
October 2004
September 2004
August 2004
July 2004
June 2004
May 2004
April 2004
March 2004
February 2004
January 2004
December 2003
November 2003
October 2003
September 2003
August 2003
July 2003
June 2003
May 2003
April 2003
March 2003
February 2003
January 2003
December 2002
November 2002
October 2002
September 2002
August 2002
July 2002
June 2002
May 2002
April 2002
March 2002
February 2002
January 2002
December 2001
November 2001
October 2001