Nice post, ARX, but I don't quite agree with your characterizations here. One can suffer plenty and still work a job; furthermore, the time compression involved in working a real job often forces brevity and economy in writing - no procrastination, one becomes better with one's time. For example, one relative of mine has responsibilities piled to the sky, and throwing another one on the pile is no big deal; another relative has almost no responsibilities, and getting this person to do the simplest thing is like climbing Mount Everest. I'll quote Librarian of Celaeno here:
“It is also important to bear in mind as well that Boccaccio, a writer of the highest caliber, had a day job. Like the Gen-Xers to come, he sold out and went into working world, taking up the family mantle of civic responsibility. He went on important missions for Florence and performed a number of government jobs, including welcoming Petrarch to the city, beginning a great and influential friendship. But he was never fully free to pursue his art, a fact true of nearly every artist then and up to the present. Consider that greats like Brunelleschi and Michelangelo were businessmen working on commissions; their time spent managing staff and studios must have far outweighed their time with brush and chisel. Even profoundly prolific writers like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were employed full-time as professors and had all the demands of family life (weirdly in Lewis’s case) as well. Let this be a lesson to those of us who would be artists if we had more time; we always have time to do the things that are important to us. The habits of industry and discipline mean as much as imagination and creativity.” From here: https://librarianofcelaeno.substack.com/p/the-retvrn-of-giovanni-boccaccio
Regarding the nature of suffering itself, yes, one can tell a writer or speaker who's suffered versus one who hasn't, and the difference is stark. I attended a talk last night where the speaker said all the right things, but said it in a smooth and confident way (like a Stephen Colbert) that betrayed a lack of suffering - and for that reason I didn't like the guy on first impression, and felt somatically a desire to stay away from discussion from him after.
Lastly, if you don't mind me saying so, I quite enjoyed your "Incel", but it seems to me that the only direction to go after exploring the ubiquitous nihilism of modern society is to think about and work out a solution to it that works for you. That, to me, is *much, much, muchhhhhhhhh* harder than simply writing another novel.
Great piece. Funny how there's a Romantic movement on Substack when nothing is less Romantic than Substack. Imagine: "Cormac McCarthy struggled for years at magazine launch parties, getting rejected by It Girls like Madeline Cash until his newsletter, Grey Matters, was ranked #3 in literature."
Is community the missing part of the equation that would make the suffering part more sustainable? Sounds like each time you tried it, you did it alone. But couldn't a community of people with similar values and lifestyle choices solve some of the problems, e.g., you create your own subculture in which you are actually high status for your dedication to your art...
I relate to this so much. I used to watch Christopher Nolan's The Prestige and chide myself for not being more like Christian Bale's character, willing to orient my entire life around my art and materially suffer as a result of it.
But then I came to realize that the normie artist grind is its own type of struggle. A more comfortable struggle for sure, but a struggle nonetheless. Writing on nights and weekends after long hours of PMC nonsense is incredibly difficult and requires a discipline and strength of spirit others don't have. It is a lifestyle choice of its own kind, in the same vein as McCarthy choosing to live out of motel rooms.
A while back, I was laid off from a fantastic job, and so I began shooting out as many applications as possible. After a few months, I got one call back; custodian at local college. I was desperate and had to take it, so I tried to convince myself it’d be a good thing, and would give me more mental processing power to put into writing. It did, but I was so consistently miserable in other areas of life that it wasn’t worth it.
"The failure-mode of the aging man is his attempt to recapitulate something that belongs only to youth, without realizing that this earlier phase has definitively passed him by."
Thank you for this, ARX. I felt its pains acutely.
I think the history of literature has shown us that great work is not only a function of hours spent and asceticism / discipline adhered to. There have been plenty of bangers written on lunch breaks, in slow seasons, in the interstices across many years. What is required more than time is *faith*: faith in your abilities as an artist, and faith in the goodness and necessity of the project at hand. E.g.: the best thing I've written took ten years and three totally different drafts while working various jobs, being severely ill, and being a student; it took me nine years to figure out the final sentence (lol, lmao even). On the one hand: obnoxious! On the other hand: for whom exactly should I have rushed? Regardless, it was my faith in the project that got the thing done.
"What do I need to make *this thing* great?" is a more productive question, in my experience, than "What do I need to make great things?" A fact that got hammered into my dumb recalcitrant brain when I began to fall down the chronic illness staircase: *We only ever have what's at hand.* Get something in front of you, shape it up, share it, and make peace. If you're lucky, you'll get to do that at least a handful of times before it's all over. I encourage you not to worry about the context for your art's production as much. It's quite easy to fall into the pit of comparison with the available biographies / hagiographies.
And please contextualize all of this advice with: My only "advantage" here is having gotten a lot of books out into the world, but ultimately I'm just a guy. Take or leave whatever's helpful & season to taste.
Here's me: 49, wrote two novels in my 20s that were not published, wrote one in my 30s that I self-published at 39, countless odd jobs, journalist gigs, agency copywriter for over ten years, now unemployed thanks to the industry, the economy, my age, and AI (not necessarily in that order). And here's the upside: I'm am now writing full time. I've messed with a new book for the past 6 years and it was becoming even more fragmented than the last: you spend a 10 hour day writing stuff for other people, it's not easy to then write for yourself. I am now writing 8 hours a day - and don't get me wrong, sometimes you only get a page out of that! But I have NEVER in my near-half-century on this planet had this kind of uninteruppted time (forgot to mention the kids grew up and moved out!). And there is nothing like it. NOTHING. I don't think you can write the best novel you can write without this kind of time. I kind of wish I realized that 20 years ago. But I'm 20 years of writing the better writer now, so it's all gravy.
Here's the way I think about it, regarding the whole job thing: think of it as your own startup business. What is it, 25 percent of them fail in the first year? More? Think of it like that, you took this mega loan, you aren't even going to be paying yourself for the first two years anyway. You're writing every day: you're WORKING, you actually do have a job! You just aren't getting paid yet. In my case I'm just burning down savings to survive at the bare minimum while doing this. If it doesn't get published? Oh well I'm in the 25 percent that didn't make it, I'll get a another job (knocks on wood). If it works and I get a book deal? Hell yeah I just achieved the only dream I've ever had.
Do I suggest this course of action for everyone? If you can do it, you should. Your writing doesn't require your full attention, but your best writing does.
For the past year I've been trying to create some kind of ascetic life for myself. It's a pleasant exercise in living but so far it hasn't helped my writing.
You mention buying new clothes, eating at restaurants as the comforts you miss. I don't miss those things very much. The main problem for me is lack of community, lack of interaction & connection with people who have shared values. When you are living a life based around work & hobbies, it is easy to find people with shared values.
Since I started writing I've met many other amateur writers, including people with shared aesthetic values. But everyone I've met is pursuing a standard, white-collar career plus hobby lifestyle. And don't get me wrong, that's a good life, I'm just trying to do something different.
There have been many essays about the decline of bohemianism. Rising material expectations are part of it. But I tend to think bohemianism requires in-person community to sustain itself. Alternative culture has long since moved online, but the simulacrum of human interaction the internet provides turns out to be pretty thin gruel.
Paglia didnt get SP published until her 40s and then went on an elite 20 year run. Many such cases. You’re too talented not to give us a solid two or three decades of work
Bukowski was 50 or so. I think ARX's main problem isn't finding time to write but not having a solution to the problem of nihilism. If he finds the (or a) solution, the writing will flow. But any other topic will just be either a retread or sideways motion.
As a fellow middle-aged dude trying to balance making enough to support a family and trying to build a writing "career," this is extremely relatable. Hang in there, brother.
A lot of writers had mundane jobs before making it big. Fir some it us critical, as more freectime just increases the amount of dicking around thry do. One important part is said job not being too mentally taxing so you can think about your writing.
Nice post, ARX, but I don't quite agree with your characterizations here. One can suffer plenty and still work a job; furthermore, the time compression involved in working a real job often forces brevity and economy in writing - no procrastination, one becomes better with one's time. For example, one relative of mine has responsibilities piled to the sky, and throwing another one on the pile is no big deal; another relative has almost no responsibilities, and getting this person to do the simplest thing is like climbing Mount Everest. I'll quote Librarian of Celaeno here:
“It is also important to bear in mind as well that Boccaccio, a writer of the highest caliber, had a day job. Like the Gen-Xers to come, he sold out and went into working world, taking up the family mantle of civic responsibility. He went on important missions for Florence and performed a number of government jobs, including welcoming Petrarch to the city, beginning a great and influential friendship. But he was never fully free to pursue his art, a fact true of nearly every artist then and up to the present. Consider that greats like Brunelleschi and Michelangelo were businessmen working on commissions; their time spent managing staff and studios must have far outweighed their time with brush and chisel. Even profoundly prolific writers like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were employed full-time as professors and had all the demands of family life (weirdly in Lewis’s case) as well. Let this be a lesson to those of us who would be artists if we had more time; we always have time to do the things that are important to us. The habits of industry and discipline mean as much as imagination and creativity.” From here: https://librarianofcelaeno.substack.com/p/the-retvrn-of-giovanni-boccaccio
Regarding the nature of suffering itself, yes, one can tell a writer or speaker who's suffered versus one who hasn't, and the difference is stark. I attended a talk last night where the speaker said all the right things, but said it in a smooth and confident way (like a Stephen Colbert) that betrayed a lack of suffering - and for that reason I didn't like the guy on first impression, and felt somatically a desire to stay away from discussion from him after.
(Comment cut off)
Regarding cooping up in order to grow, you may appreciate the teenage-aimed sci-fi book Singularity by William Sleator: https://www.amazon.com/Singularity-William-Sleator/dp/0140375988
Lastly, if you don't mind me saying so, I quite enjoyed your "Incel", but it seems to me that the only direction to go after exploring the ubiquitous nihilism of modern society is to think about and work out a solution to it that works for you. That, to me, is *much, much, muchhhhhhhhh* harder than simply writing another novel.
Great piece. Funny how there's a Romantic movement on Substack when nothing is less Romantic than Substack. Imagine: "Cormac McCarthy struggled for years at magazine launch parties, getting rejected by It Girls like Madeline Cash until his newsletter, Grey Matters, was ranked #3 in literature."
Is community the missing part of the equation that would make the suffering part more sustainable? Sounds like each time you tried it, you did it alone. But couldn't a community of people with similar values and lifestyle choices solve some of the problems, e.g., you create your own subculture in which you are actually high status for your dedication to your art...
I relate to this so much. I used to watch Christopher Nolan's The Prestige and chide myself for not being more like Christian Bale's character, willing to orient my entire life around my art and materially suffer as a result of it.
But then I came to realize that the normie artist grind is its own type of struggle. A more comfortable struggle for sure, but a struggle nonetheless. Writing on nights and weekends after long hours of PMC nonsense is incredibly difficult and requires a discipline and strength of spirit others don't have. It is a lifestyle choice of its own kind, in the same vein as McCarthy choosing to live out of motel rooms.
A while back, I was laid off from a fantastic job, and so I began shooting out as many applications as possible. After a few months, I got one call back; custodian at local college. I was desperate and had to take it, so I tried to convince myself it’d be a good thing, and would give me more mental processing power to put into writing. It did, but I was so consistently miserable in other areas of life that it wasn’t worth it.
"The failure-mode of the aging man is his attempt to recapitulate something that belongs only to youth, without realizing that this earlier phase has definitively passed him by."
Fuck man, good writing.
Thank you for this, ARX. I felt its pains acutely.
I think the history of literature has shown us that great work is not only a function of hours spent and asceticism / discipline adhered to. There have been plenty of bangers written on lunch breaks, in slow seasons, in the interstices across many years. What is required more than time is *faith*: faith in your abilities as an artist, and faith in the goodness and necessity of the project at hand. E.g.: the best thing I've written took ten years and three totally different drafts while working various jobs, being severely ill, and being a student; it took me nine years to figure out the final sentence (lol, lmao even). On the one hand: obnoxious! On the other hand: for whom exactly should I have rushed? Regardless, it was my faith in the project that got the thing done.
"What do I need to make *this thing* great?" is a more productive question, in my experience, than "What do I need to make great things?" A fact that got hammered into my dumb recalcitrant brain when I began to fall down the chronic illness staircase: *We only ever have what's at hand.* Get something in front of you, shape it up, share it, and make peace. If you're lucky, you'll get to do that at least a handful of times before it's all over. I encourage you not to worry about the context for your art's production as much. It's quite easy to fall into the pit of comparison with the available biographies / hagiographies.
And please contextualize all of this advice with: My only "advantage" here is having gotten a lot of books out into the world, but ultimately I'm just a guy. Take or leave whatever's helpful & season to taste.
Here's me: 49, wrote two novels in my 20s that were not published, wrote one in my 30s that I self-published at 39, countless odd jobs, journalist gigs, agency copywriter for over ten years, now unemployed thanks to the industry, the economy, my age, and AI (not necessarily in that order). And here's the upside: I'm am now writing full time. I've messed with a new book for the past 6 years and it was becoming even more fragmented than the last: you spend a 10 hour day writing stuff for other people, it's not easy to then write for yourself. I am now writing 8 hours a day - and don't get me wrong, sometimes you only get a page out of that! But I have NEVER in my near-half-century on this planet had this kind of uninteruppted time (forgot to mention the kids grew up and moved out!). And there is nothing like it. NOTHING. I don't think you can write the best novel you can write without this kind of time. I kind of wish I realized that 20 years ago. But I'm 20 years of writing the better writer now, so it's all gravy.
Here's the way I think about it, regarding the whole job thing: think of it as your own startup business. What is it, 25 percent of them fail in the first year? More? Think of it like that, you took this mega loan, you aren't even going to be paying yourself for the first two years anyway. You're writing every day: you're WORKING, you actually do have a job! You just aren't getting paid yet. In my case I'm just burning down savings to survive at the bare minimum while doing this. If it doesn't get published? Oh well I'm in the 25 percent that didn't make it, I'll get a another job (knocks on wood). If it works and I get a book deal? Hell yeah I just achieved the only dream I've ever had.
Do I suggest this course of action for everyone? If you can do it, you should. Your writing doesn't require your full attention, but your best writing does.
For the past year I've been trying to create some kind of ascetic life for myself. It's a pleasant exercise in living but so far it hasn't helped my writing.
You mention buying new clothes, eating at restaurants as the comforts you miss. I don't miss those things very much. The main problem for me is lack of community, lack of interaction & connection with people who have shared values. When you are living a life based around work & hobbies, it is easy to find people with shared values.
Since I started writing I've met many other amateur writers, including people with shared aesthetic values. But everyone I've met is pursuing a standard, white-collar career plus hobby lifestyle. And don't get me wrong, that's a good life, I'm just trying to do something different.
There have been many essays about the decline of bohemianism. Rising material expectations are part of it. But I tend to think bohemianism requires in-person community to sustain itself. Alternative culture has long since moved online, but the simulacrum of human interaction the internet provides turns out to be pretty thin gruel.
Paglia didnt get SP published until her 40s and then went on an elite 20 year run. Many such cases. You’re too talented not to give us a solid two or three decades of work
Bukowski was 50 or so. I think ARX's main problem isn't finding time to write but not having a solution to the problem of nihilism. If he finds the (or a) solution, the writing will flow. But any other topic will just be either a retread or sideways motion.
As a fellow middle-aged dude trying to balance making enough to support a family and trying to build a writing "career," this is extremely relatable. Hang in there, brother.
Loved Child of God.
Don't give up. Sometimes time, sheer bloody mindedness and grit will get you the results you need.
A lot of writers had mundane jobs before making it big. Fir some it us critical, as more freectime just increases the amount of dicking around thry do. One important part is said job not being too mentally taxing so you can think about your writing.