Do I Have Any Business Writing?

A Reader Question, Jessica Abel, Creation and Communication, Cooking, Knitting, Drawing, Carl Phillips, Adam Gopnik, Scrambled Egg Tacos

Hi Friends,

Greetings from the Vancouver Seattle airport, where I may or may not depart in time to make my connection [update: I did not. A red eye it shall be].

Do I Have Any Business Writing?

After my post last month on ways to deal with a loud inner editor, reader

dangie

wrote with a query:

My writing question is, I’m assuming, a common one but one that I have been pondering since I decided that I wanted to pursue life as a writer: not too long ago. 

Do I have any business writing? 

Who hasn’t asked this question or one like it at some point or another?

The short answer is YES! If you want to write, write.

If writing pulls you, do it. You don’t need anyone’s permission. As Carl Phillips puts it in My Trade is Mystery¹, “I believe anyone who chooses to make art has the right to do so, and has the right to define art for themselves.”

But in asking “Do I have any business writing?” I think you might also be asking questions like: Am I any good at writing? How can I know? How do I get better at writing? Do I want to share my writing with other people? Does my writing deserve other people’s attention?

And then from those questions, other questions can soon rise up: Should I take a writing class? Should I submit my work to magazines? If so, which magazines? What does it mean if my work gets rejected? Do I want to be part of a writing group?

To answer these questions², it helps to get some clarity on the place writing has (or could have) in your life.

I’ve found Jessica Abel’s Creation-Communication Matrix from Growing Gills super useful for this purpose. Along the y-axis is the question “How important is the act of creation?” [I remembered this axis as “How much do you care about getting better / developing skills?”], and along the x-axis is the question “Who do you want to communicate with?”

From Jessica Abel’s Growing Gills: How to Find Creative Focus When You’re Drowning in Your Daily Life

If you can answer these two questions and locate yourself on the matrix, then you can answer many of the other questions that might bubble up. Let me offer some examples from my own creative pursuits. Along with writing, I cook and knit (sometimes a lot), and sometimes friends say things like “You should write a cookbook!” or “You should sell your knitting on Etsy!” Should I? So far, the answer has been “nope.”

Here are my versions of the two key questions:

1. How much do I care about honing and developing skills in this practice? [Do I care a lot about getting better or do I just enjoy doing the thing?]

2. How much do I care about my work reaching other people? [And what am I willing to do to make that happen?]

How we respond to these questions depends not on some essential essence of our being but on the pragmatic facts of our lives. We only have so much available time (depending on work commitments, caregiving, etc.), so we’re obliged to make choices. Getting better at something and trying to share work with others both take time. Our priorities can change also over time. And there’s usually an element of chance: what doors open, where we happen to find ourselves.

Let me give a few examples from my own creative practices:

Writing (Professional)

I care a LOT about getting better at writing, and I also care quite a bit about reaching others through my writing. Writing and teaching writing (and writing about writing and writing about teaching writing, etc.) are at the core of my professional life as a writer and creative writing professor at UBC. I spent years completing an MFA and Ph.D. to hone my skills. I read constantly, prioritize my writing time, and pursue opportunities for developing my craft every chance I get. Writing this newsletter is one way I try to reach others. I also submit my work for publication, present at conferences, participate in readings, and so on. I’m preparing to query agents for the first time, and I’m a bit terrified,³ but I’ll do it because I’ve chosen to push my work as far as I can in this practice.

A shelf in my office where I keep work I’ve published and edited to encourage me.

Cooking (Passionate Amateur)

I care quite a bit about getting better at cooking. I check out new cookbooks from the library, go on deep dives with new techniques, and try cooking the same thing repeatedly until I get it just right. But I don’t care hugely about reaching others with my cooking. I’m happy to feed my family and friends, maybe share a photo of some pesto on Instagram stories, or share a recipe in this newsletter. If someone invited me to collaborate with a chef to develop a cookbook, I’d be tempted. But my schedule is pretty full. And I enjoy being an obsessive cook who isn’t trying to make any kind of career out of it. The tangible immediate results of cooking often feel like an escape from the long uncertain months of drafting and revising poems and essays without knowing for sure if anything will come of it.

I brought this pistachio cream apricot cherry galette to a potluck recently, and I didn’t have to care that it was a bit singed on the edges because, as a cook, I’m a passionate amateur.

Knitting, Music, Drawing, etc. (Hobbyist)

There are lots of other things I do that I enjoy but don’t have big aspirations for. At certain times in my life, my knitting has tipped up toward passionate amateur (like when I learned how to make a bunch of complicated lace), but these days I mostly make simple hats that keep my hands moving during Zoom calls and poetry readings. I love giving away my knitted items to friends, but I know that selling them would never be worth the time they take to make. I’m learning to play guitar, and I’d love to get better at it, but I also accept that I struggle to make time to practice between work and parenting. Sometimes I draw with my family (my husband has skills! my kids too!), and I’m pretty terrible at it. But I can laugh a lot and enjoy being terrible at it. I’m not trying to reach a large number of people with any of these things (though if we hang out enough, I’ll probably make you a hat at some point).

A few examples of my ambitious lace period.

Re: Communicator

I’m not sure if I have any practices that would fall into this category. Sometimes I think Jessica Abel was just trying to be nice here: wanting to share work widely but not caring about the act of creating the work and developing skills sounds like a bummer to me. I can imagine someone sharing work made by others and caring about reaching a lot of people but not about making the work (but even then, I’d tend to say that skills of selection and curation are being carefully honed).

A Few Final Thoughts

1. Think continuum rather than category. As a writer, for example, you might choose never to share poems with anyone, to share poems with friends or a writing group, to read poems at a local open mic, to send poems to magazines, to make hand-sewn chapbooks and give them away, to try to publish a book, to try to promote that book and get it in as many hands as possible. Any of those choices can be right.

2. We can grow skills in many different ways. By developing an individual sensibility, we can get decide what draws us and where we want to invest in growth.

3. Only some of the “reaching people” part is in our control. I’ve been around publishing enough to know that getting a book deal (or getting a book reviewed) might depend just as much on luck or connections as on how good the work is. We can’t just say “I want my work to reach everybody!” and magically make that happen. But we can decide how much energy we’re willing to invest here.

4. Time is limited, and we have to make choices. Often, the best way to get something done is to explicitly set other things aside. For now.

5. Answers can change over time. Maybe someday I’ll become a food writer or develop knitting patterns or take a drawing class or join a band. Who knows!

Thinking about how I can agonize over a writing problem and how much fun I can have making a terrible drawing of Batman puking reminded me of this insight from Adam Gopnik’s recent The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery:

This paradox of accomplishment and satisfaction is in its way restorative: it means that we can do some things badly and still feel good about having done them, and some things well and still feel badly about not doing them better. Equlibrium of the mind is achieved by doing both.

I think that’s true.

Friends, what balance of things done badly (with pleasure!) and things done well (with some frustration) contributes to your equilibrium of mind these days?

Scrambled Egg Tacos

This is less of a recipe and more of an “if you’re not eating these semi-regularly, you should really consider it.” This is a meal I could eat at pretty much any time of day or night. It has eggs, so it’s clearly a breakfast food. Not much in the fridge? I’m still five ingredients away from a dinner my whole family loves, and I probably have at least three of them already in the apartment.

Ingredients

eggs
tortillas (smallish, corn or flour)
sour cream
avocado
hot sauce

Optional Additions I Have Tried and Approved: fried potatoes and onions, pickled vegetables⁴, chopped cabbage with lime and cilantro, leftover grilled corn.

Instructions

• Heat the tortillas, scramble the eggs, and slice the avocados. Scoop scrambled eggs onto a warm tortilla, add a slice or two of avocado, and top with dollops of sour cream and hot sauce to taste.

Tips

• Heat tortillas directly on the burner. Let them get a bit scorchy.

• Scramble your eggs slowly at a low temperature for nice creamy eggs. You might whisk a bit of cream/half-and-half/milk in first.

• Salt the avocado, of course.⁵

• Tapatío or Cholula > Tabasco

Let’s keep making things,

Bronwen

PS: If you liked this post, please hit the heart to let me know! You can also support this newsletter by subscribing, sharing, or commenting. (I’ve turned off the pledge thing btw).

1. Future posts will go more deeply into this book (which packs so many insights into 94 pages).

2. If any of these questions is YOUR CURRENT QUESTION, send a message and let me know. I probably have thoughts on any of them, and (unsurprisingly) I enjoy the genuine rhetorical situation of responding to someone’s actual question.

3. Advice gladly accepted from folks who have done this already!

4. We constantly make these Curtidos from Nopalito, where my husband waited tables when we lived in San Francisco.

5. Every time my daughter (7) asks for avocado toast, she specifies “with salt.” I love this about her. Salt is too important to leave to chance.