We all have times when we wonder why we write. Twenty-three years ago, when I added fiction to my career as a nonfiction journalist, I read advice often about sticking to the path. Don’t be a writer, if you can do anything else. It reminded me of what we heard as young actors in school and in auditions. Art is hard to live with as a calling, the kind of enterprise where you expect complete strangers to care about your creations. Journalism and nonfiction have art within them, too. It’s easier to make them a career when you’re on a publication staff, or you arrange for stories to be published. Freelancing is a fearless creating life full of thrusts into the air of hope.
But I beg to differ on the do-anything-else advice for writing. For me, for you, and maybe for all of us, we only feel most alive when we express ourselves. Having your say means finding something to say. That’s the act of making meaning. It also means living beyond your years.
Articles are fine writing, and even short stories will make your existence brighter. A book, though, is something big enough to be found years after you’re gone. Nobody is going to get out of this alive, and a book will outlive you every time you publish one.
Ernest Hemingway liked to say that his choice to become a writer wasn’t anything less than severe. To him, it was either write or die. That big newspaper in New York said “his work demonstrates that the making of art is a matter of life and death, no less.”
Hemingway said that for him, it was write or die — but he really meant it was write and die, and then live again in your writing. I talk to authors who are unsure if they should write a book at all, or what difference another book will make. I say to them it depends on whether you have something to say, told through fiction as a story or in fact with nonfiction.
The hidden payment for writing during this life is being known after you go. A student someplace looks your book up and you get to breathe life into their aspirations. A descendant who wonders about the family finds your art or your reporting. Someone who needs a story of despair that leads to hope finds your writing, because it was collected in a book. Not a TikTok or a YouTube video, or even in the podcasts we listen to while we scrub our stovetop. The find a book, something that would outlast us. For me, the books outlast the onstage performances I gave in my twenties, thirties, and forties. I retired from stagework to make stories of my own.
I had a day job when I moved into literature as a career, and you probably have a day job, too. Someday you’ll be retired, or certainly retired from being alive. Be alive now and keep writing a book, if you have something to say. You might not live forever from making your pages, but your work on them will carry you beyond the day of your death.
