Revise

I had a writing professor—arguably my best—who once told us, “It is never too late to give up on your dreams.” He then thrummed his fingers on his notebook, checked his watch, and dismissed us from class. His little truism kept me up that night, and it would prove to do so—off and on—for the next ten years.

         So much of this life is rejection. And by ‘this life’ I do not mean the writer life; I mean the mortal life. The returned passport application, noting some microscopic error; the shrill beep of the debit machine not accepting your card; is not every note of hold music a melodic way of saying, “You do not matter”? And every time I would feel the barb of failure in regard to writing (an activity for which failure is as common and vital as water is to the human body), I would be reminded of the professor’s platitude. “It is never too late to give up on your dreams.”

          I think what grated me the most was how goddamn nonchalant he was when he’d said it. Perhaps if he had told us with solemnity, sobriety, something to indicate he was aware of the malignancy being communicated to us, I wouldn’t have been so bothered. Indeed, I may have even felt it a rite of passage, that I had been called to glimpse the covenant. But there was no weight in his voice, no ceremony. Gluten intolerances are disclosed with more gravitas.

          I don’t even remember what we’d been discussing before his declaration; truthfully, I had zoned out. The class was a workshop, but the concluding hour was reserved not for discussing our writing but writing from the greats. We would go over a canonical text and talk about how it demonstrated some fundamental tenet of writing—stuff like: show don’t tell; use imagery; include conflict—tenants we all secretly thought we were above (I certainly did). We were, after all, destined to break the rules, to upend the tradition, to be unblemished by the smog of literary history. Our professor must have known this about us. I didn’t know how old he was (at that time in my life, it was easier for me to imagine myself as dead than middle-aged, and so his seniority seemed other-worldly), but he must have seen such ignorance a thousand times before, in every September he had taught. What was his response to our blindness? “It is never too late to give up on your dreams.”

          And once he said it, it could not be unsaid. Through the next decade, I thought about the sentence so much, I stopped thinking of it entirely, like how David Foster Wallace conceived of how fish think of water. In this way, the sentence was no longer the lens through which I viewed the world but was my world itself: the thing from which all else grows.

          But then one day in winter (I remember I was in the kitchen and it was snowing outside), I thought, “It’s not a curse but a release.” What had I been doing to solicit this epiphany? I don’t remember. Again, I had zoned out.

As a general rule, I abhor waxing heroic about the craft of writing. It’s a job, a calling, a burden, a blah blah blah, just like everything else in the world. (Perhaps it’s also a bit embarrassing of a lifestyle—so adolescent in both its self-obsession and self-suspicion—but that’s only more of a reason to keep a low profile.) But, maybe, here is the one area where being a writer is unique:

          Usually, we dream of things we cannot know: of becoming a professional baseball player, or seducing a supermodel, or (if you’re like me) enacting great, labyrinthine schemes of revenge. However, the dream of becoming a writer beguiles you with illusions of distance until you summon it and then it’s smotheringly close. That’s because it is, basically, the easiest dream out of everything. I’ve often thought that the worst part about being a writer is that virtually everybody can do it. The widespread practice of the craft places it only one rung above improv at the very bottom of art’s hierarchy (with, obviously, classical cello and daredevil juggling at the top).

          All you have to do is take pen to paper, and mission accomplished. Publishing certainly isn’t required to be a writer; neither is critical acclaim. Textbooks are filled with great writers unpublished or obscure in their lifetime. Emily Dickinson published ten poems during her life; she wrote more than 1800, meaning she had a success rate of just over half a percentage point. Franz Kafka has a similar story. Geoffrey Chaucer, the sire of English literature, never published a word during his lifetime, and many undergraduate students no doubt wished the same was true for after his lifetime as well. John Kennedy Toole’s novel was enthusiastically rejected everywhere, and once he died, his mother found the manuscript and—in a manner that only a mother can—unrelentingly submitted it until a publisher finally relented and A Confederacy of Dunces ascended into canon. Anne Frank wouldn’t even be allowed to apply for a Canada Council grant, let alone receive a letter that doesn’t include the word ‘unfortunately.’

          There’s even the argument that you don’t need to write anything at all to be a writer. I’m sure we can all agree that the writeriest writer at the writing party is always the fucker who won’t stop telling you about his novel that’s perennially in the “percolation” phase.

          The dream of becoming a writer grabs you, holds you, and you feel so fortunate to have been chosen that you convince yourself into maintaining desire, because it feels that to betray the dream would be a betrayal of yourself.

          How easy it is to get trapped in a life we once wanted but do no longer. But if we admit to ourselves that we could walk away at any time, the act of sticking with it becomes a decision, a choice, an act of empowerment. The upshot of the professor’s bromide was not, “Give up.” Rather, the upshot was, “Remember that you can.”

Technically speaking, every piece of writing should be abandoned. No one will mind. If anything, most people will be unwittingly thankful: one less manuscript for the publisher to read; one less submission for the award juries to mull; one less book for the public to call “beloved.” And because this escape hatch is so immediately available—so constant that you forget that it’s there—you have total freedom.

          The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (who in my opinion, is the greatest poet ever who doesn’t have the first name of William) once wrote in a letter to a new writer: “You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you — no one.”

          Rilke then goes on to encourage the young poet to ask himself, “Must I write?” (The boy’s answer was presumably “Yes” because he went on to write seven novels, none of which anyone read, then or now.) But compare Rilke’s question with the professor’s assertion: “It is never to late to give up on your dreams.” It’s different words for the same thing:

          Do I want this? And if the answer is yes, you have the opportunity to revise and rework, to become better, to sharpen and to lathe what you have into what you want. What a gift to act out of choice and affirmation rather than obligation and compunction. What a rarity to labour on something and see it grow as you do alongside it. Why would you ever abandon such a jewel?